Choice:

A Terrible Splendor

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Author's Note: Just had to say sorry for taking so long with this chapter. It was a bit hard, but I've got the general plot down now!

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III: Falling Angels

"The village of the sun is a major tourist attraction," Neji read out loud, "and one of the most beautiful places in the Fire Country. A definite must-see." He looked at the pamphlet he held with disgust. "This doesn't tell us anything."

"Neither have the past five, Neji," Sakura replied irritably, shoving said booklets into her pack. "Shikamaru-san, you couldn't find any better information?"

The lazy jounin sighed, scratching the back of his neck as they walked down the sunlit path to the city. "You didn't exactly tell me what you wanted, did you? 'Get brochures about our first stop at that store, Shikamaru-san' were your exact words." He stretched, squinting his dark eyes at the sun. "I can tell you the basics, if you want. I researched this place before we left."

Neji turned his lavender-tinted pearl eyes to the spiky-haired man with dull interest. "Go ahead."

"The Village of the Sun, at the border of Fire and Sound. Population: five thousand, six hundred and ninety-two. A moderately small city. Main income: tourism. Standard of living... eh, moderate, I'd say. No poverty, but no one's Hyuuga-or-Uchiha-rich." Ignoring Neji's glare and Sakura's giggle, he pressed on steadily. "Main god is, predictably, Ama-Terasu, the sun goddess. Big rice producing-city. Anything else you want to know?"

How the Nara boy had managed to both research and memorize all this information in the short period of time they'd had stupefied her, but Sakura brushed those musings away. She thought a moment, running a hand through rose locks of soft hair. "Mmm... life span in normal conditions?"

"Around seventy-eight years," Shikamaru answered, giving her a sideways glance. "Although since it's been hit by the disease, it's impossible to tell."

Neji clenched his jaw, the muscles in his face tightening as he paused. "We're here."

To their right, a small sign labeled the Village of the Sun. The banner in front of them stretched brightly above with shining red-and-yellow decorations, but beneath it laid a city. Just a city... normal buildings, normal homes with neat, trimmed gardens, and clean streets. There was a marketplace at the end of the main road. But it doesn't seem right somehow, Sakura thought with a frown.

Shikamaru stared, dark purple eyes wide. "Where is everybody?"

That's it, Sakura thought in agreement, wringing her hands anxiously. Nobody's outside... the stores are all closed. There's not any manmade noise at all. Heck, even the birds aren't chirping. Freaky, Inner Sakura said forcefully, and for once, Sakura agreed with her. "It's completely devoid of human life," she said, shivering slightly.

Neji frowned deeply, lines creasing his forehead. "Let's walk around and see if anyone's left," he said. "It doesn't seem like it was totally demolished... I mean, it'd be in ruins, right? Maybe it's just in quarantine."

The three elite ninja started walking down the city's main street, looking at the empty structures with a sort of detatched awe. Sakura peered into a window. Something moved its head... a dog? No, a person! "Guys, someone's in that house!" she cried, running to it. She pounded on the door with gloved fists, shouting. "Open up!"

The face at the window quickly moved away, but no one answered Sakura's knocks. The ANBU adjusted her mask and sighed, holding an explosive tag up to the window in threat. "Konohakagure ANBU! If you don't open the door, I'm opening it for you!"

There was a muffled shout and the sound of a couple footsteps before the door opened, revealing a woman wearing a dirty red yukata. Her dark hair fell in tangled, stringy clumps over her eyes, which had a more-than-half-crazed look in them. "What do you want?" she shrilled, looking from one blank mask to another. "Who are you?"

"We're-" Neji started, but was cut off by the woman's hysterical voice.

"You're here to infect me, too, aren't you?" she shrieked. "You're here to send me off like you did to everyone else. Keichi, my darli-- my sons! You-- it took my sons, too, oh, my boys... oh, my poor boys..."

Shikamaru gently pushed the woman back into the house and set her down on a comfortable-looking chair, leaving her to put her head in her hands. Sakura closed the door behind them, and the shinobi all sat down on a futon across from the devastated woman. "Ma'am, we're not here to infect you. We're here to stop the disease."

"To st-" The woman frowned. "You want to help us?"

Sakura nodded earnestly. "Will you tell us about how the epidemic started?"

The woman looked rather lost for a moment, but nodded. "H-hai. I can." She bit her lip. "About a week and a half ago, a bunch of travelers came through the town. Once had a thing on his neck that looked like three commas. I thought- we all thought- that it was a tattoo, like yours." She pointed to their red ANBU swirls, slightly calmer now.

"Hai? What next?" Shikamaru frowned at the obvious mention of the curse seal, lacing his fingers together in thought.

"Well, he... he suddenly bit my husband, my Keichi." Her lip trembled, and her eyes were suddenly downcast. "Then the tattoo appeared on his neck, too, and that day he started biting our children. One each day. By then, we'd locked ourselves in. Everyone had the disease. Men, women, children... my boys!" She burst out sobbing, clutching at her hair, her clothing. "My boys are gone!"

Neji put a hand on the arm of the futon, clenching it tightly. "Relax. Please, keep calm. We need you to tell us this. Why weren't you infected?"

"He died," she said hollowly, an echo in her voice. "Died before he could bite me, on the third day. Sunset. Screaming with fever, vomiting, shaking." She shook her head, shaking herself. "He wasted away. On the third day, he had absolutely no energy."

Sakura looked at the woman, at her filthy surroundings, and came to a descision. A medic's descision. "Guys, clean up this mess here. Please, ma'am, come with me. We'll get you cleaned up."

Sakura bathed the woman and dressed her in a clean white yukata. She brushed her hair tenderly and talked to her like she would a child, asking her name and age, her favorite color, and so on. "There we are," the pink-haired jounin cooed, heping Michiko walk down the stairs.

Halfway down, Michiko grabbed Sakura's arm, staring at her with amber, intense eyes. She had once been quite beautiful, Sakura realized with a pang of sadness. Gone to seed by madness and guilt and sorrow and rage.

"I know you think I'm mad," Michiko said wobbily, "and I probably am. But please, find who did this and avenge my husband and children." Suddenly weak, Michiko leaned against Sakura. "I may be mad, but I feel perfectly sane. It's just a mad world. May I see your face, please? Let me see your face. The face of my savior." Sakura trembled slightly before lifting her mask, watching as Michiko's eyes closed slowly with a smile. "You..." the woman slumped. "I trust you," was all she said before fainting.

Sakura caught her quickly and pushed her mask back down to hide the tears growing in her eyes. Downstairs, Neji and Shikamaru put Michiko down on the now-clean futon and looked at Sakura. "What did she say?"

Sakura smiled beneath her mask, tears pricking her eyelashes. "Nothing," she answered, walking out the door. "Girl talk."

---

Sakura pushed the doors open and strode briskly to the desk, a determined expression on her hidden face. The hospital clerk looked up in surprised fear at her hitai-ate. "May I help you, miss?"

The masked girl adjusted her gloves. "I'm a medic-nin."

The man looked nonplussed.

"A medic-nin. A medical ninja?" She sighed, shaking her head. "I'm here to research and treat the unnamed disease here in the name and respect of Konohakagure."

"Ah, the Hidden Village? We are honored." The man bowed. "Domo arigato. Please- the whole left wing is dedicated to disease victims."

Sakura thanked the man and walked down the white halls of the hospital, going over the symptoms in her head to try and calm down. But now matter how calm her masked face looked, inside she was quaking. Hundreds of patients, newborns and grandmothers, men and women, the poor and the rich, shouting and screaming and crammed into thirty large rooms. Vomiting, shaking violently with fever. The curse seal was on all of their necks, pulsing like a live thing.

Sakura washed her hands and got to work.

---

Five long hours later, Sakura staggered towards a bench occupied by Shikamaru and Neji- their designated meeting place. "Sakura?" Neji asked, looking at her with concern.

"No, the tooth fairy," Sakura snapped before falling. Shikamaru caught her gently and Neji got up, letting her take his place on the bench. "Rough day?" he asked.

"You have no idea," Sakura groaned, leaning back. She took off her mask, revealing tearstained cheeks. "It was horrible. Everyone was screaming or throwing up or calling for help or both or all three at once. It's so much worse than what Tsunade-shishou told us. It's like alh."

"What did you do for them?" Shikamaru asked, trying to ingore his rapidly-beating heart as she leaned agains him.

Sakura was quiet for a moment. "Everything I could," she answered finally, "which wasn't much." She shook her head on Shikamaru's shoulder, stretching her legs out. "I cooled the fever, but it came back. I calmed their stomachs, but they threw up anyway. And that genjutsu... it's terrible. It made me feel like I was dying, just hearing them and watching their faces. Kai didn't work. I even slapped them and bled them a little in hopes that pain would bring them out of it, like most with most genjutsu, but nothing worked." Sakura paused. "I did a general analasys on a couple patients. One in day one, one in day two, and one in day three. Something came up odd."

"Odd?" Neji looked at her. "In what way? What was it?"

"Their chakra levels." Sakura kneaded her forehead with the heels of her palms. "They were normal."

Her teammates looked at her. "How is that odd?" Shikamaru asked. "Isn't that a good thing?"

Sakura scowled. "Normally, hai, it is. But the curse seal- the one Sasuke has and stuff- feeds off of chakra; that's why it's so dangerous, especially for a strong nin like Sasuke or someone. If you're extremely strong, you'll survive, but with only a minimal amount of chakra left. You'll go into chakra depletion."

"So..." Neji gestured for her to go on, ignoring the stray strand of sepia hair blowing in his eyes.

She rubbed her arms, not because of the cold, but because she was scared. "So, it's not a regular curse seal. It doens't feed off of chakra, obviously, but it's still getting stronger by the day, strong enough to create the most horrible genjutsu I've ever seen. So, it has to get its energy from somewhere. The problem is, nobody can tell where that somewhere is." She opened her pack and took out a rice ball.

Shikamaru tugged on an earring, a nervous habit. "How hard can it be to figure out?" he asked, frowning. "Just take a scan of the body. If something's wrong, you'll see it."

Sakura shook her head. "Tried that. It's outside of the body or something... I mean, except for the disease, nothing is wrong, and the illness thrives on." She bit into the rice and offered food to her companions. Swallowing, she continued. "At least we know how it's spread now. I mean, that's a start, right?"

"Yeah, I guess so." Neji accepted some dried fish and sat next to them on the arm of the bench. "After the victim is bitten, the seal appears, right?"

Shikamaru nodded in time with Sakura. "Hai. So it starts everything, that seal."

Sakura frowned at her dinner, rolling some sticky rice between her fingers. "It's the key to figuring this thing out, I know it. I just wish I knew how."

Neji chewed thoughfully for a moment before swallowing hard. "I think," he said, "we've found everything we can here. Time to move on."

"Move on? Where?" Sakura asked, startled. The rolled rice dropped from her fingers. "No, we can't! I haven't done a thorough enough analasys... and those people need me!"

"Sakura-san, please remember that our main goal is to stop the disease from spreading any further," Shikamaru said with a sigh. "The best way to do that is to trace its source... we have to leave the city to do that. Neji-san and I found out that the band of travelers came from a city a couple hours' journey from here, supposedly contaminated."

Sakura paused, looking at the half-eaten rice ball. "The source... you mean Orochimaru."

Shikamaru hesitated. "Hai."

She turned her head to him, chuckling wearily. "Talk about going out of the frying pan and into the fire."

Neji tilted his head to the sliver of moon in the sky, breathing in deeply. "Hai. But it's our only tactic at the moment. The only way to get this done."

"So we're just going to burst into Orochimaru's hideout and ask him to stop the disease from spreading?" Sakura asked incredulously, frustration edging into her voice.

"Sakura, you're not thinking," Neji frowned. "We're going to wander around the border, looking for the source of infection. Orochimaru most likely wouldn't infect himself, would he?"

"But the infected would be dead already," Sakura persisted, swallowing the rest of her rice ball.

"Hai. But that would give you a chance to examine the post-death body... anything you find could be our key to a cure, and even Orochimaru."

Sakura didn't say anything anymore, but turned her own head to the silver light of the moon, trying to calm herself down.

Neji looked at her from the corner of his eye and let out a slow breath. "Set up camp there," he instructed, pointing to a gathering of trees not too far away. "We'll leave early tomorrow."

---

Shikamaru looked silently at the sleeping female next to him, blinking slightly. He'd been on watch for the past hour, letting a reluctant Neji go to sleep next to their pink-haired female, who hand't done a watch. After seeing and sensing her obvious exhaustion, the two had insisted that she get a full night's sleep for the day ahead.

It was for her health that he was staring at her, really. He was merely making sure she was sleeping soundly. Right.

Her pastel hair swept over her cheeks like it was blown by a light breeze, and her lids were closed, hiding those jade-and-gold eyes that had seen so much. Without those eyes open, she looked angelic. Pure. Innocent. But Shikamaru knew that those eyes, when open, expressed that she'd seen more than in innocent would have. They showed her fire, her spirit greater than any angel's. They were out of place, but at the same time made her seem more real.

A fallen angel, he thought absently, reaching out to brush her hair away from her eyes. He stopped his eyes widened. What am I doing? He retracted his hand a bit, but then tucked the spray of pink hair behind her ear anyway, ignoring the nagging voice at the back of his head that was uttering things he most certainly didn't want to hear. Sighing at his lack of will power and self-restraint, he put his chin on his hand in the typical 'Shikamaru-thinking-pose'.

"You've certainly fallen hard," a voice sounded out from behind him.

Shikamaru jumped, turning to face a highly-amused-looking Neji. "I thought you were asleep."

"Hn." The white-eyed man shook his head. "I never knew, Nara." Neji smirked as he leaned against a tree, shaking his head. "Really, you hide it quite well."

"Hide what?" Shikamaru asked defensively. "I haven't fallen, hard or otherwise." He glared at the sepia-haired man. "Don't give me that smirk."

Neji rolled his eyes. "Whatever you say, Shikamaru-san. I-" He suddenly whirled around. "Byakugan!"

Shikamaru sprang to attention, grabbing a kunai from his pouch and preparing to throw.

"Wait!" Neji called. "It's- there's no heartbeat."

The lazy man next to him pushed back the bushes. His eyes widened. "It's a corpse," he whispered harshly.

Neji cast a glance at the sleeping Sakura and helped Shikamaru pull the dead body from the bushes. It was the body of a little girl, with pretty black hair and vacant hazel eyes, glazed over and unseeing. She was wearing a torn gray yukata and her fists were loosely clenched. Neji closed the girl's eyes with a low breath and looked on her neck.

The curse seal pulsed slowly, as if dying itself.

Shikamaru frowned. "Look," he said, pointing to the girl's hand. "She has something." He took a crumpled piece of paper from the girl's fist and smoothed it out.

And gasped.

It was a crudely-drawn picture of the curse seal. Next to it was a pressed cherry blossom flower, and a drawing of a kunai.

"It's for Sakura," Neji said hoarsely.

"What?" Sakura blearily opened her eyes at the sound of her name. "What is it?"

"N-nothing," Shikamaru said hastily.

Sakura got out of her blankets, stumbling towards them. She put a hand over her mouth in shock and horror at the girl, all weariness forgotten. "What's that?" she asked, pointing to the scrap of paper in Shikamaru's palm.

He quickly put it in his vest pocket, shooting a glace towards Neji. "Nothing," he repeated, this time with more conviction. "Nothing important."

Sakura looked him square in the eye. "You wouldn't lie to me." It was a statement, not a question.

Shikamaru was silent, and when Sakura looked at Neji, she got the same treatment.

Ignoring them, she picked up the girl. "Go to sleep," she said quietly. "I'll take care of her. She's only died recently, and I won't do an investigation on a child."

"You need your rest, Sak-" Neji started.

"No," Sakura interrupted fiercely, glaring at them. "I wouldn't be able to sleep after this, anyway." She waited for them to lie down before going a little farther in.

She dug in silence for a long time, using a bit of chakra to dig a deep hole. She gently set the child in it and covered it back in, kneeling before the makeshift grave and letting her hair fall over her face. Her eyes brimmed. No more tears, she insisted forcefully to herself, scrubbing her eyes. No more tears. I'm not free to cry yet. She looked at the small lump in the ground and exhaled through her teeth. "May your spirit rest in peace," she whispered. Looking around, she spotted a rather sturdy-looking dead tree. Shuffling towards it, she grabbed a thick slab of wood and pulled. With her 'monstrous strength', as Naruto liked to call it, pulling it off of the tree was easy. She took a kunai from her pouch and carved.

'Name unknown. Age unknown-- around 5-6. Disease victim.' On a sudden whim, she carved something else, feverishly, needily. 'Gomen nasai to the parents of this child, if they still live. Gomen. I couldn't help her.' Sticking the slab of wood at the top of the mound, Sakura still didn't let herself cry. Instead, there were hacking breaths, dry sobs that shook her whole body. Wasn't she supposed to be able to help people? Wasn't she supposed to be a medic?

That was what had always gotten her mad and depressed-- not being able to help. Not being able to do anything to assist the ones she loved. And now, when she had the power-- the ability-- she still couldn't do anything.

Crying won't do anything, idiot, Inner Sakura screamed, for once sounding slightly compassionate. Get up off your butt and do something. Look at the note Shikamaru hid from you. Get yourself up and going. While you're crying, ten more children are dying.

Sakura nodded to herself, standing up unevenly and ungracefully slumping back to the camp. Sighing silently, she knelt once more, this time over Shikamaru. Admiring his sleeping face (what the HELL am I doing that for?) for a moment, she leaned over and gently slid the piece of paper from his pocket. She opened it.

And nearly fell over.

There was no doubt that this little threatening note had been meant for her. She glanced at her two teammates. Why hadn't they given it to her? She was a jounin, after all. She could handle it. She was handling it, damn it.

There's going to be a long talk with them tomorrow morning, she thought furiously, stuffing the note in her pocket.

But for now, sighing, she tilted her head to the stars, taking comfort in their soft light.