Of Dunes and Venom

News of the kazekage's capture reached Konoha only a few minutes after Tsunade and Sakura's heart to heart, at the hands of the war hawk that came flying through the window at the exact moment Tsunade had uncorked the bottle. She and Sakura exchanged looks.

"The Akatsuki got Gaara. His brother's on death's door too… they want me to send my best to heal him." Tsunade's eyes bore into hers. "Sakura – can I count on you?"

Sakura straightened. "Yes, shishou. And this time for real: I won't let you down."

Tsunade took a heavy gulp, straight from the bottle. "You had better come back in one piece, Sakura." There was a heaviness in the air. "I don't care if Kakashi or the fucking kami are watching, you do what you gotta do and you do it right. Understood?"

"Yes, hokage-sama!"

"Good, because I'm sending Kakashi and Naruto with you. Jerk or not, Hatake's one of my very best and Naruto wouldn't let me live it down if he couldn't come with you." Sakura nodded, nervousness churning in her gut. "Now… before you go, one last thing," Tsunade added, pinning Sakura under her gaze. "Do you know what a jinchuriki is?"

The journey to Suna usually took four and a half days when running at a bearable pace (the heat made anything moderately strenuous into a nightmare) and six days walking. If they had any hope of saving the kazekage's brother, Sakura knew that they needed to get there in less than four days. She had told Naruto and Kakashi as much, and the pace set by the latter was grueling. If her pride, if Tsunade's faith in her, hadn't been on the line, Sakura wasn't sure she could have kept up. Thoughts consumed her with every step she took as she over-analyzed everything she'd ever learned about poisons, trying to think about anything at all that could help.

Sakura closed her eyes and sent more chakra to her burning lungs. She could do this. She could. (In the back of her mind, an insidious voice whispered: you can't and you won't. You will fail.)

Sakura ignored it and kept running. Up ahead, a trial by fire loomed.

It seemed to have escaped both of her teammates that unlike them, she would be needed for a high-profile surgery the moment they arrived at Suna, one that would likely be chakra-intensive… they were rushing through the freaking desert at a punishing pace without any rest… and Sakura's chakra poll was smaller than Naruto and Kakashi's… Asking for a break would be the logical thing to do, the obvious thing, really. What good would she do anybody if she got to Suna chakra exhausted? But she didn't want them to think she was weak… maybe if she took a few soldier pills?

(The trip to Suna was accomplished in less then three days. No breaks required.)

Finally, the desertic village came into sight, as well as the shape of Temari, who awaited them at the gates. If the kunoichi remembered Sakura from the time Gaara had nearly brutally chocked her to death three years ago, she didn't mention it. In fact, she didn't even glance over. This was a blessing in disguise, as it allowed Sakura to discretely catch her breath whilst Kakashi went through the protocol greeting. If she looked even close to how she felt, she must be quite a sight. Someone might confuse her face for an overripe, burned tomato. Once Kakashi was finished, Temari stonily asked him just one question:

"And the medic? We asked you for a medic, Copy Nin." The tone was borderline threatening. "I see no medic."

"Ah, that would be Sakura-chan over there," Kakashi said with a chuckle, artfully indifferent to the tense atmosphere. Temari shot him a dark look and turned to appraise her, cobalt eyes scanning Sakura up and down skeptically, likely recalling their only meeting at those infamous first chunin exams.

"That girl?" she questioned as if reading her thoughts, staring at Sakura with thinly-veiled disbelief. "Is this a joke? You expect me to believe that this is the best you have?"

Naruto bristled, shouting something along the lines of "now listen, you–" whereas Kakashi just scratched his neck and lifted the other hand in a placating gesture. "Maa, maa… no need to get angry, kunoichi-san. That's hokage-sama's apprentice you're pointing your finger at…" He didn't sound very convincing though (or convinced? a voice whispered insidiously in her ear).

Again Sakura gritted her teeth and ignored it. She was beginning to think that no matter what she did, no matter how hard she fought, people would always underestimate her. That this Temari bitch would dare to look at her like that , to embarrass her in front of Naruto and Kakashi–! Sakura wouldn't let her.

"For your information," she snapped, "I have made this little trip through your precious desert without pausing a single time for breath nor to drink, and I will go on to complete whatever surgery you require of me without rest either, because I am the hokage's apprentice and I am the best, and no one else in the damn hospital could have kept up with me on the way here. Now, if you want all this running to be worth something, you better show me to my patient so I can asses him, got it ."

Temari's eyebrow rose.

Sakura hid a nervous swallow and jutted her chin upward, channeling Tsunade into every fiber of her being. "Well? Are you going to show me to my patient any time this century? He's your brother, isn't he?"

Temari's eyes bore into hers one more second, then she nodded. "Follow me." Her tone was almost hostile. She clearly did not have much faith in Sakura's capabilities at the operating table.

Sakura straightened her back and set her shoulders. She may be insecure in all else, but no one could beat her when it came to medicine, barring Tsunade herself. No one. She angled her head back slightly just in time to catch Naruto gaping at her.

"Woah, Sakura-chan!" he whispered. "You sure showed her, huh?"

Temari turned to give them an unamused look. "If you say that any louder, they might hear you back in your village."

Naruto blushed but shot her an unrepentant grin

If Sakura had been nervous upon their arrival at the village, it couldn't even compare to the twisting her stomach went through when they made it to the OR. Just outside of the operating room, an old woman had been waiting for them with her arms crossed and a thunderous expression on her face. She wasted no time at all to pounce upon Kakashi and shout something about 'the White Fang' and 'indignity' and 'you will pay, you piece of dog shit'. Kakashi, as usual, looked rather unruffled in the face of the old crone's fury, if a little awkward. Sakura later discovered that apparently the elderly woman, Chiyo, had suffered some kind of loss at the hands of Kakashi's father, and though the man was long dead, had decided that Kakashi must evidently be his resurrected ghost.

Bullshit, if you asked Sakura. She knew enough about hazing rituals to recognize an intimidation tactic when she saw it. She wondered if Kakashi's non-reaction had been calculated. Was he really that indifferent or was he just two steps ahead of everyone else?

She had little time to ponder on it as Suna's esteemed elder evidently decided to switch targets, this time focusing her attentions upon Sakura. Apparently she had some kind of bone to pick with Tsunade. However, Sakura had seen how easily Kakashi had brushed her off and this gave her the confidence to do the same. She politely assured the woman that she was there to help and that she knew a procedure to cure Kankuro, to which the woman replied that such a thing didn't exist.

'Watch me,' Sakura had thought.

"Well, you might want to let me operate on him in any case, since you went through all the trouble of summoning me across an entire desert in the first place," Sakura said sweetly. Then, without waiting for Chiyo's retort, she asked the other nurses that had been scurrying around the room for help in holding Kankuro down and to bring her a water basin and an empty bowl. They had looked at her as though she were about to perform some kind of demonic ritual.

"Well, what are you waiting for? Get to it!" She was surprised when Temari backed her up. Sakura gave the blonde a curt nod, which was returned. "This better work, Haruno."

"I can't make any promises," Sakura said. That was the first rule any medic had to live by. Even the easiest of surgeries could go wrong, but… "What I'm about to attempt is a very complex experimental treatment, but if we do this right, he's still got a chance… First I will proceed to drain as much of the toxic from his system as possible, especially from his heart. The real battle will be fought at the lab. Once I've got a sample, I will need to isolate the components to divine which poison this is."

"What if we don't have the antidote on hand?" Temari asked uncertainly.

"Then I'll just have to create it from scratch."

Behind her, Chiyo snorted with contempt. "D'you even realize what you're dealing with, girlie? The boy's a goner. Just because your teacher is that pompous slug queen–"

Sakura tuned her out. Her water basin had arrived. She was ready to begin the procedure. Like always, a sort of tunnel vision took over the moment the surgery began. Kankuro's body was fighting the toxin with everything it had, and had it not been for his previous experience with poisons, he would already be dead. Sakura made a mental note to take a page from his book. Having even partial immunity to certain reactants seemed like a great advantage, but even despite this, Kankuro was holding onto his life by a thread.
She worked relentlessly, pushing her chakra control to its very limits in order to isolate the toxin without damaging capillaries, organs or skin tissue in the process and without extracting vital red blood cells or mineral salts. The poor guy screamed his throat raw and trashed wildly with every extraction, but Sakura's hands stayed steady and her thoughts calm and clear. The medics holding Kankuro down were staring at her, then at him, then back at her, their eyes the size of dinner plates.

Sakura largely missed this, as she was much too busy with the surgery. She had not been strictly honest with the other medics about the difficulty of the procedure. The surgery she was now attempting was one whose methodology Tsunade had created only recently, in the aftermath of an especially bad case of poisoning in which many Konoha nin had died. Her shishou and Shizune had needed to combine all of their medical know-how (Shizune likely knew more about poisons than even Tsunade did at this point) in order to come up with the end result, but even then, the chakra-control requirements needed in order to successfully complete the toxin-extraction technique were so taxing that only Tsunade herself had ever performed it.
If Shizune hadn't dared to attempt it, then Sakura definitely shouldn't either… but there was no other option left now. If she didn't do it, then Kankuro would be done for anyway. However, she knew that if she went through with the surgery and failed the consequences would be dire. Judging by the attitudes of some of the nin outside, she might even be blamed for Kankuro's death… but – there was no going back now. Even so, the pressure was immense. In that moment, Sakura remembered one of the head surgeons back at Konoha's cardiovascular unit. The man, a medic she held in great esteem, had always told her that her chakra control was 'out of this world' – and that's what it would need to be if she had any hope of succeeding.

Here's to hoping Ueda-san is right, Sakura though as her hands hovered over Kankuro's erratically-pulsing heart.

Of course, nothing in life was easy, and this applied doubly for the discipline of challenging death.

From start to finish, Sakura encountered more than one obstacle as she slogged her way through the procedure, such as not being sure exactly on what chakra frequency certain steps of the extraction should be performed, or whether to deal with the extensive damage that had already been dealt to the heart before or after extraction, and in the latter case, how should she go about it?

In the end she went with the choices that seemed most logical to her. She settled for a compromise, creating a protective chakra film over the heart walls as she extracted as much of the toxic as she could without damaging the muscle tissue, then set to healing it, then repeated the extraction for the peskier parts that clung to the muscle walls. Once the heart was clean, she turned her attentions to the other parts of the cardiovascular system, being extremely careful of her handling with the organs.

What made the procedure so dangerous was that the user had to pass a liquid bubble (the matrix in this case was simple water) through the outer layers of the different organs. This meant that there was a not insignificant risk that the outer tissue would be contaminated in the process, thus making the situation much worse than it already was. Anything less than perfect chakra control would result in organ failure and death.

But Sakura's chakra control was just that good and all of her guesses regarding the unknowns of the procedure turned out to have been correct. An outsider likely would have never even known that she had winged it, that this was her first time performing it…

Everything after she stepped back from Kankuro's probe form was a blur. Sakura hazily remembered her own exhaustion and how much her feet had hurt after the grueling surgery. She remembered cheers and clapping and people swarming her; everywhere she looked there were Suna medics vigorously shaking her hand as they peppered her with questions. She'd been so immersed in it all that she'd forgotten to check Naruto and Kakashi's reaction at all. The elder lady from before had drastically changed her behavior in the wake of her success and was kind enough to rescue Sakura from the other medics and their relentless questions. She led Sakura through to a steep hallway and down some stairs, into, as she explained, Suna's best lab so that they could get to work on the antidote. Sakura was careful to dice the next soldier pill in two before swallowing it. Heart attacks were a common risk of overindulging.

In her time at the Suna lab, she quickly found out two things: one, the poisoner was in fact Sand's most dangerous missing nin – Sasori of the red sand, a nickname coined because of the desert's color after he was finished fighting in the infamous shinobi war's battlefield – and two, the old crackpot lady was actually brilliant. Sakura had seriously thought she was all bite and no bark but was quickly forced to revise her opinion once the woman opened her mouth to actually say something other than criticism. Rarely had Sakura met anyone with such a deep knowledge of medicine, especially the physiological interactions of the system with toxins. Sakura would even be inclined to say that the old woman might have more knowledge on the topic than Shizune – she was that good.

Sakura almost felt intimidated now, like she now stood before a legend of the medical field; one she'd never heard of yet instinctively recognized. Konoha was so widely known as the village with the best medics and most advanced healthcare that she'd never spared a second thought to healers anywhere else, and less so for a place as undeveloped as Suna… but a few hours of working with Chiyo-baasama had more than proven otherwise. The lab couldn't even compare to the quality of Konoha's research facilities, wasn't even in the same league, and yet Chiyo, with her antiquated instruments and lacking greenery, could still have ran circles around Sakura's colleagues back at Konoha.

In the end, it was Sakura who first stumbled upon the antidote, but she hadn't felt like it was such a great accomplishment with how much of it was thanks to what Chiyo had taught her in the over ten hours that they had spent shut in the lab. She hated to admit it, but the old lady was definitely better at toxicology than Tsunade-shishou… even if the mere thought felt like hearsay. But it was the truth. Sakura had only found the antidote as quickly because she'd been following a hunch that was based on the old woman's instructions. Even if she was the one who technically stumbled upon the cure, who had or hadn't created the antidote was of little relevance to anyone outside of the medical community. All Naruto, Kakashi, Temari and the shinobi cared about was that the cure did its job properly, which it did. Kankuro was, after a very close brush with death, well and truly on the road to recovery.

After Sakura had explained this to all of the waiting bystanders, she was yet again bombarded with thanks on all sides and people wanting to shake her hand and of Kankuro himself, who'd woken up and had sat up from the bed (even though he must be in great pain) in order to thank her. The previously stern Temari even went as far as to grasp her hand like a lifeline, eyes misty and nails bitten raw as she stared at Sakura without saying anything. She didn't need to, because Sakura understood.

She too, was relieved beyond belief, but she wished she'd be left alone already so she could go to sleep. Of course, this meant that the guys just had to find a chunk of cloth from Sasori's puppet hidden inside Kankuro's own puppet but a few minutes later, which in other words meant that Kakashi would be able to track Sasori. There was still a chance of finding Gaara so they had to get a move on immediately.

On her part, all Sakura wanted to do was rest, but she'd be damned if Naruto and Kakashi went after the akatsuki without her. So she bid the two to wait just a minute and rushed to the lab, grabbing the last remaining dose of the antidote, and hurriedly prepping it to be field-ready, placing it within a special syringe which she stuck into her thigh pouch. From what she'd seen of Sasori's neurotoxin, it was an extremely painful one. One of its key components was deathstalker venom, also known as venom from the most dangerous scorpion known to mankind. A single sting from the animal could be likened to being pierced by a chidori or a wind katana in one localized point, a 10/10 bone-deep, piercing pain, followed by terrible nausea, muscle spasms and then death. Antidote doses for deathstalker tended to be double the amount than the antidote for any other kind of scorpion out there, which was already saying something, so if those were just the symptoms produced by one of the venom's components, Sakura didn't even want to begin to imagine what the combined might of Sasori's actual reactant would feel like. Judging by Kankuro's blood-curdling screams, likely worse than a chidori.

On the one hand, Sakura dearly hoped that Sasori, should they encounter him, would be using the same venom as he had on Kankuro because she had the antidote on hand, but on the other? Not so much. She decided it'd be much better if they could stay out of Sasori's way altogether.

"Sakura-chan?" Naruto's impatient voice drifted over from the hallway. "Are you ready or what?"

She bit back a cranky, sleep-deprived reply (the blonde had not been the one who had stayed up all night looking for the antidote after an intensive surgery) but she found she hadn't enough energy even for that.

"Coming, Naruto."

A few minutes later, they once more set off into the sweltering heat of the desert.

As it soon turned out, Akatsuki's hideout was somewhere in River Country. Team seven encountered various obstacles on the way there, ranging from false trails to Uchiha Itachi in the flesh waiting for them as a distraction (though it later turned out that this was not, in fact, his flesh but rather a fancy ranged-possession jutsu). Thankfully, Sakura barely had to contribute to the fighting throughout all of this, something she was glad for as it gave her time to replenish some of her drained chakra reserves. She had nothing against Temari, but having another medic with her instead (Chiyo-baasama had replaced the blonde at the last second) was a relief. Sakura wasn't sure whether she'd have enough chakra to heal everybody, especially if she was forced to engage the enemy.

At long last they made it to the end of the trail Kakashi had been following. They now found themselves in front of a large stone wall, taller than Sakura's entire house and almost as wide.

"Shit, how do we get in?" Naruto complained.

"Don't worry," Sakura adjusted her gloves. "This isn't anything a little whack can't solve."

The blonde stared at her closed fist and gulped. "R-right, Sakura-chan."

"Hm," Kakashi cut in. "You sure you can take it down, Sakura?"

Sakura crossed her arms. Don't snarl at him, don't snarl at him, don't snarl at him…

"Yes, sensei ."

"Uhh… okay." Kakashi scratched his head. "Then if you're sure… I'm going to lift the seal on the door on the count of three. We need to time this right so that your punch hits that very second, got it?"

Sakura nodded. "Let's do this."

It was said and done. Kakashi climbed up the cave door wall and carefully began to peel off the edge of the seal upon it. "Ready?"

"Ready!"

"Alright then," the grey-haired man said. "I'll take it down in three, two –" Sakura began to run " – one – go!"

He peeled the tag off only an instant before her punch collided, one of her strongest yet, downing the entire cave wall within seconds. Behind Sakura debris crumbled on all sides, before her a great cave stretched out into the darkness. Within, Deidara and Sasori awaited.

Shit, he's here.

The two Akatsuki members were staring at her still outstretched fist, as if in slight disbelief that she had been the one to breach the entrance.

"Remind me to never get on Sakura-chan's bad side," Sakura heard Naruto mumble quietly from behind her.

"I think she can do a fine job at that herself," was Kakashi's answering quip.

"Damn straight," Sakura growled, adjusting her gloves. The fight was on.