The first step to understanding a person, the Jushisai had told her, was to understand what made them happy.

Sakura's inner thoughts were tongue in cheek as she considered Orochimaru. The bastard's probably at his happiest when he's drowning puppies.

The Jushisai claimed that there was value in all life, in every experience, and that it was through experiencing the points of view of all life that one could truly understand life.

Onoki had impressed upon her that an ambassador must be willing to throw aside bias for the sake of cooperation, and that she would naturally come across people she disliked and would have to work with them despite.

Her own inner thoughts believed, without a shadow of a doubt, that Orochimaru would be better off dead. That there wasn't a single bit of benefit to trying to understand him. That there wouldn't be any way of convincing him to join a peaceful treatise. The man had invaded Konoha on a whim. The man tortured living beings in his attempt to 'further science'. He was a sadist. A narcissist that thought only of himself and of his own power.

He's only here now because you have something he wants.

He's only here now because killing Sasori would be pleasurable to him.

"It's not like he was always a prick." Tsunade said thoughtfully, mulling over a piece of barbecue. "Well, okay, maybe he was, but in the way that Sai of yours is a prick. He was blunt. He thought he was doing us a favor by pointing out the obvious. If anything, he was a biggest proponent of the greater good over the wellbeing of an individual. If someone was weak, what good were they for the village?"

"But he must have thought well of you and Jiraiya, his teammates?"

"Maybe." Tsunade admitted. "He didn't like Jiraiya at all, at first. I think if he'd been given the chance, he would have taken me and left Jiraiya in the dirt. He didn't think it was worth the effort of teaching him."

"And now that Jiraiya's become stronger?"

"I think he doesn't like Jiraiya now because he proved him wrong."

The Jushisai said the second step to understanding someone was to understand what caused them pain.

Pain was born of fear, born of suffering and tribulation. Pain showed what a person's heart truly latched onto. If you did not care for someone, you felt no pain when they suffered, if they died. Feeling pain meant that there was some bond that you clung to, be it to yourself and your own wellbeing, or the wellbeing of another.

To truly know someone, you must know what they loved and what they feared. What they were willing or unwilling to endure.

Orochimaru is willing to endure pain and death for my knowledge. For Sasori's destruction. For chaos, for war and violence upon the Hidden Leaf. For the sake of power, Sasuke's power, Kaguya's power.

What did Orochimaru want? What was he willing to endure anything for? Was there anything he wouldn't do to reach that goal?

If Sakura kept him alive here and now, would his drive and endurance serve to undo everything she hoped to accomplish?

It should have been easy. Let him die. Let him die and wait for Juugo and Sai to arrive, let Sasori be overwhelmed with numbers and let Orochimaru simply be a battle casualty. They could mourn the loss of a brilliant mind and move Otogakure forward into an era of peace. Karin would be with her. Karin would work with her.

Orochimaru's breathing hitched and he lurched forward, stopped only by Sakura reaching out to steady him. The poison was moving. From what information Chiyo had sent them, the poison likely wouldn't be immediately lethal. Sasori liked to play with his prey. Liked to drag information out of them with the promise of an antidote, letting them die only when they chose to defy him, or as his whim suited him.

But that didn't mean the poison wouldn't make a person suffer.

"Get a move on, Haruno." Orochimaru hissed. "This sand dome won't keep him out forever."

Move on with the battle, Orochimaru was insisting. Leave him to handle his own fate. Even he wanted her to let him go. Not that Sakura thought the man would go down without a fight; he'd simply try to find Sasuke before the poison overtook him.

But they could kill him here and now before he had a chance, weakened by poison, all her problems solved…

"It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. He's going to have to die."

Sakura's breathing steadied as she rested. Dodging Tsunade's furious strikes was difficult enough when she wasn't being interrogated, and she'd take every break the woman allowed her. Even with her steadiness returning, she couldn't find it in her heart to disagree with the Hokage.

"You don't think there's even remotely a chance of him agreeing?"

"Oh, he might agree. And he'll bide his time, get whatever he wants out of the arrangement, and then go his own way when it benefits him most. That's just the kind of person he is now."

"But how?" Sakura asked, desperate. "How does someone grow up in a village like Konoha and just...give up on everyone who ever cared about him? Everything he worked hard to protect and build?"

"You could ask the same about Sasuke Uchiha."

Sakura bit her lip. "That's different. Sasuke underwent major trauma at the hand of his brother."

"And you think Orochimaru had a picturesque life? His parents died in combat before he hit puberty. He was thrust into two of the most bloody wars in shinobi history and saw comrades and civilians slaughtered in front of him. He barely ever knew peacetime. At least half of his existence within Konoha was within times of war."

"But that's true for you as well! And Jiraiya!"

"I was so stricken by a fear of blood that I left the village for decades and refused to return to active duty. Jiraiya was so haunted by the war-torn villages of Rain that he stayed behind and trained orphans, enemy orphans, to become shinobi, so that his conscience could be cleared. We all suffered under war. We all coped differently."

"Orochimaru?"

"Maybe you should ask him why he's really so obsessed with the idea of immortality."

Her amulet burned hot against her skin, and her chakra stilled, integrating itself with the natural energy around her.

It's really not a question at all what the right thing to do is.

He needs to die sooner or later.

Nobody I love is safe as long as he's alive.

She saw black markings begin to wind across her skin, the surest sign that she'd pulled nature energy into her body. She saw Gaara's disbelief out of the corner of her eye, and saw, with some amusement, the awestruck, yet still curious gaze that came onto Orochimaru's face.

It's not about living forever, is it? It's about not dying.

Every being was capable of love, and every being could be torn from that capability by will or circumstance. Another preaching of the Jushisai. An ideology that Sakura had seen in Gaara, a boy who'd had love wrested from him and thought himself incapable of it, thought it a pathetic emotion not worth the trouble it caused...and yet…

Orochimaru saw his parents die young. Saw his comrades fall in war. Saw his teammates lose themselves to the grief of battle.

All this misery and death was the cause.

"So tell me, after you've gotten all of that, then what?"

"You know, Haruno, I actually have no idea."

It would be easy to let this man die.

So, so easy.

"You listen up, you idiotic, sadistic bastard."

Sakura placed one hand upon Orochimaru's forehead, and touched the other to her amulet. She felt energy well up within her, and knew, with just a push, that she could connect.

"I don't think you're worth saving. I don't think you're worth the effort or the chakra. I think I'd find joy in watching Sasori tear you to pieces, only overshadowed by the joy of letting me do it myself. You've hurt people precious to me, and many more than just that. You've killed because it served your purpose and haven't given a single thought about the people you were killing. People call you monster. I don't think that term's good enough. I think you're a worm that's lost sight of what it means to be human. You've retreated so far away from your own self that I wonder if there's anything left to what you used to be at all. No body. Not even an entire soul. You're pathetic."

She pushed, feeling the flow of chakra within her sync with Orochimaru's, and then she felt pain. Blistering pain over every inch of her body, like sharp needle points had stabbed into every part of her skin. The poison, she realized, and it was somehow nothing compared to what she felt within her arms.

They felt hollow, like a piece of her had been ripped out. Like an itch that could never be scratched, intensifying over time until she could barely think of anything else, could only think of what was missing and how she needed it back.

This was what Orochimaru was feeling right now. The pain of the poison, yes, but the pain of the curse the Third Hokage had wrought upon him, that he might never be able to heal.

That she could heal, if she chose it.

"I'm not doing this because you're worth saving." She insisted, each word a struggle to produce as her body's synchronized pain threatened to throw her into unconsciousness. "I'm doing this because I want what you wanted. A world where people don't have to needlessly die. A united world. No more war, no more suffering, no more death. And I need Otogakure to do it."

Sakura pushed again, letting her chakra flow into the man. Poison control, that was the first part, the easiest. Separate the poison from the body and break it down, then heal the damage done to the veins, to the brain, to the organs.

"I could do it if you died here. I could do it with Karin's help. She's only too happy to sign my treaty. But I have to think bigger than that. I have to think of the ones I have yet to convert. The ones still doubting that I can do the impossible. That I can unite the shinobi countries."

Sakura felt the pain of the poison begin to ebb from her body, and she knew that she had found success. The poison was clearing. Orochimaru would live, this body would live. And yet…

And yet there was more.

"I'm doing this because if I can get Orochi-fucking-maru's signature on that scroll, the entire world is going to see that there isn't anything I can't do! I'm doing this to show the world that I'm Sakura Haruno and that I will protect every person in this world that allies themselves with me, even pathetic bastards like you! So you pay attention, Orochimaru, because even if I come to regret this, even if you get everything you want at the cost of everyone I love…"

Sakura's vision began to flash white, and she was uncertain if it was from the pain or, somehow, from the connection. Still, she forced herself to speak, to say what she so desperately needed to say.

"You're never going to be able to live it down that it was all because of me."

Sakura pushed, pushed harder than she'd ever pushed before, and all the white around her went black.

"Could you fix it? The damage to his soul?"

Tsunade shook her head. "Not in the way he would like. That's impossible. The pieces of his soul that were severed by the Shinigami lie within its stomach now. You would have to face the Shinigami itself to get it back...and that would require a sacrifice of your own."

"But you still could help him."

"It would be a trade." Tsunade explained. "Relocating the damage elsewhere. Like a skin graft of sorts, only what you take cannot grow back. I would have given him back his arms, but he would have lost something else in turn. It was an irony that I neglected to mention to him at the time. He's grown so used to being above consequence. To being so good at what he is that he can weather any retaliation."

"You wanted to punish him?"

"I think I did. I wanted to punish him for killing our sensei. For daring to think he could use my pain against me for his gain. I was angry. Angry that he'd failed me."

"Failed?"

"He was supposed to be the one that kept our heads on straight. That kept our minds on the goal and our hearts in line. That reminded us of what was at stake. He didn't just turn his back on Konoha, he turned his back on us."

"...you miss him."

"Yes."

Chakra was tied to the soul. Some said that chakra was recycled upon death, constantly being renewed and birthed upon new shinobi. It had to be tied to something beyond the body, or else Sasori couldn't have existed in his mechanical form, constantly generating new chakra despite the fact that he had left biology behind. And yet it wasn't the soul that generated chakra, for there were many born without any chakra at all, and clearly they must have souls nonetheless.

The Jushisai had never spoken of healing souls because damaging a soul was rare and near impossible, and reversing said damage was, perhaps, the realm of the gods.

(Tsunade was referred to as a god of medicine by some, and if she truly was capable of doing what Sakura was about to attempt, she understood why.)

She didn't have a template on which to try this. All she could do was let go and leave the process in the hands of something greater. As she'd done before for Sai, before she'd known the mechanics of healing and how it worked, she put herself in Jashin's hands.

She felt the patchwork of something overlaid on Orochimaru, within him, something that had been broken and would never again be whole. She felt something within her reach out to tear it apart once more, picking at the overlay piece by piece and placing it elsewhere. The itching, aching feeling left her arms and slowly, agonizingly, began to appear elsewhere. It was enough to almost make her let go, break the connection…

In the blackness, Sakura saw color. A single speck of color, slowly spiraling down, as pink as her own hair.

A petal?

She dared not move, but the distraction, as brief as it was, provided her mind with sweet, sweet relief from the task she'd been focused on. Like a breath of fresh air after holding her head underwater, enough to let her delve back down again for a second go.

She could finish this. She would finish what she started.

Sakura plunged in once again, and let the agony overtake her.

When she opened her eyes once again, the sand had fallen around them. Gaara was dueling with Sasori once again, frantically fighting off a legion of puppets alongside a few more summoned tanuki.

Next to her, Orochimaru took in a gasp of air, falling forward onto his hands and knees. Had she done it? No...what had she done?

She could see the skin on Orochimaru's hands start to lighten, no longer that bruised, purple state she had seen on them before. The effect spread out until his hands resembled the natural paleness of his flesh.

Orochimaru's head snapped towards her, no, looking behind her, and suddenly his hands flew through seals. Sakura ducked instinctively as fire spewed from Orochimaru's mouth, much hotter and fiercer than the fire he'd conjured earlier, and as she turned to see her assailant she realized that Sasori himself had charged her, only to be repelled by Orochimaru's ferocious attack.

"My arms…" She heard Orochimaru whisper, his voice full of glee. "You've given me back my arms."

He moved to push himself to his feet, but as he did so, his legs suddenly buckled, unable to hold his weight. He crashed back to the ground, sprawled, and his eyes widened as he realized what had happened. Sakura glanced over, catching a glimpse of the skin on the man's feet, now purpling and bruising instead.

"Looks like the girl has some healing talent." Sakura heard Sasori chuckle. The fire on his body had already begun to die down, leaving the puppet scorched but otherwise functional. "But if you can't even stand, what use will you be against me?"

A coiled metal rope unwound from within Sasori's stomach, lashing out towards her just as Gaara's sand began to pull him away. However, before Sakura could move to defend herself, something rushed out from behind her, grabbing at the rope before it could touch her. Orochimaru's arms had extended out, winding around the rope like snakes and rushing for Sasori's body. Gaara's sand held the body in place as Orochimaru grasped at the cylindrical container within Sasori's chest.

"You underestimated me, Sasori. I don't need legs to defeat you."

Orochimaru pulled, and Sakura saw the puppet slacken as the cylinder was removed from its chest. They'd done this before, but this time Sakura knew they couldn't stop here. She reached for the pouch at her hip, pulling out an empty sealing scroll, one Sai had bequeathed her to carry things that would usually be too heavy. She unfurled it just as Orochimaru finished pulling the cylinder towards them.

"On the scroll!" She cried out, and Orochimaru didn't need to be told twice. He thrust the cylinder onto the paper, and Sakura in turn channeled the last of her chakra into activating the seal.

With a small puff of smoke, the cylinder that contained Sasori was gone, with only a 'confirmation' seal left in its place on the scroll's surface.

There was a moment of silence, and then Sakura felt all of the tension leave her body at once.

"We did it."

Her eyes flickered up to Orochimaru, who was still looking down at his hands, examining them. Moving each finger and no doubt reveling in the ability to push chakra through them without difficulty. His revel ceased quickly, however, as he attempted to move his legs once more, and found himself unable.

"Sakura Haruno…" He said aloud. "I am genuinely not sure whether or not I should hate you right now."

Sakura let out a gasping chuckle, reaching up to wipe sweat from her brow. In her mind she had a witty retort, some banter that could make light of the difficult situation they'd just put themselves through.

She realized, seconds before she fell into Gaara's arms, that her body was out of chakra.

Harassing Orochimaru would just have to wait until she woke up.