Sakura crossed her arms over her chest and cocked her head to the side.

"Come on, Pinky." Genma squeezed her upper arms and shook her a little. "It's tradition!"

Sakura scoffed and glared at him until he took his hands off her. He smirked. Sakura's glower deepened. Cheeky bastard.

"I'm not going to a bar with you, pervert." She turned back to the genin behind the missions assignment desk and smiled a bit aggressively at him. "Are you sure you don't have any C-Ranks for me?"

"I'm sorry, Haruno-san, I can't give you any missions outside the village for another two days." The skinny man paled when he looked at her and Sakura took it as a cue to restrain her attitude.

"You make it sound like I'm asking you on a date," Genma reminded her of his presence. "It's tradition after an A-Rank for everybody to get shitfaced drunk."

"It's a jounin tradition," Sakura reminded him.

She turned around and started to walk out of the Tower, intent on finding something to do at the hospital. She was sure a lot of nightmares would plague her that night — it usually went like that after a mission — and she would only let herself rest if she was completely exhausted. It was better that way.

"Yeah, well." Genma easily kept up with her as they walked outside. "It was a jounin mission which you happened to be a part of. In that case, you absolutely can't break tradition."

Sakura shot him a deadpan look and his smirk only widened in reply. She sighed.

"I'm not dressing up — " Genma hooted in victory but she ignored him. "I'm not going until after I finish a shift at the hospital and you're paying."

She narrowed her eyes at him once more, just to make sure he knew how inconvenient he was being before walking away.

"See you at eight, Sweet Cheeks!" He called back to her and laughed when a pair of ninja leaving the Tower looked at him strangely.

Sakura hastened her stride and hoped they didn't think the comment was for her. Sometimes Konoha looked less like a village filled with serious shinobi and more like a gossip hub. And the ninja were the worst.

The last thing she needed was a rumor about her having something with a ninja twice her age.

Working at the hospital had become much more bearable after her confrontation with Momoe but a thousand times more difficult in some aspects. Most of the nurses were afraid of her now and, usually, she only went there when the more serious cases required it or if she was going to meet Shizune for some poison work.

When she got there, a harried looking genin medic-nin bowed low and said there weren't any cases in need of immediate attention even though Sakura could see the janitors cleaning the blood on the floor towards the ICU. That could only mean one thing.

"Are you sure they don't need any help in there?"

"Sakura-sensei, I'm terribly sorry," the girl bowed, "but I don't have any access to that case and… neither do you."

ANBU.

The only place that Sakura had been forbidden of going was the back of the ICU where the shadow corps took care of their more grievously wounded. They took their identity very seriously and only authorised medics were allowed to treat them even though most people knew who was in Anbu and who wasn't.

However, it made sense to bar all unnecessary staff from treating Anbu operatives. A good medic could tell a lot just from looking at injuries and it wouldn't do to have all types of classified information leaking around the village.

With a frown, Sakura pulled up the sleeves of her shirt and tidied her hair.

"I'll just have to do some rounds at the Emergency Unit, then."

The rest of the day was spent treating minor injuries and setting bones. It seemed like this was one of those days that literally everybody seemed to be out of the village, finishing up their missions and almost no one was due back. It didn't matter because all Sakura needed was to keep her hands busy.

She needed to feel her chakra being used for something other than destruction. It was kind of therapeutic to help cells multiply instead of strengthening her own so she could punch a hole through someone's chest. She hoped this tiny bit of balance she brought to the universe was enough to keep the worst of her nightmares away from her usual breakdown after a mission.

It didn't matter that the mission was a success or not, Sakura always needed a couple of days to go back to her intense training routine after a mission. While she had come to appreciate the thrill of being out in the field, actively doing something to help, she was self-aware enough to know it still was a sort of trigger for her.

The couple of days after a mission were always filled with flashbacks and periods of time in which she was either too riled up or in which she didn't see time passing at all.

That night she headed to the bar and had her first taste of alcohol.

She sat on a table with Anko, Genma, Raido, Aoba and Kaito and downed shot after shot with them. After a while, her belly was warm and her body felt light. She was pleasantly dizzy and everything made her want to laugh and it was only then that she got why it was tradition.

They were all like her, she mused as Genma helped the hiccupping disaster that was her body into her bed, just before sunrise. Because while Sakura couldn't really focus much on anything, she did notice that Genma's senbon was bouncing more than usual, his grin wider or that Anko was loud and inappropriate or even that Raido couldn't keep still for longer than exactly thirty-three seconds.

They were feeling just like her and probably had the same troubles she did, only with almost a decade and a half more of experience and trauma to add on to that.

Sakura fell asleep that night feeling better. She understood what Genma was trying to say through his actions now. She wasn't alone, there were others just like her who had to grow up too fast and they all had each other's backs.

Sakura woke up the next day feeling like she was underwater. Her limbs were heavy and her eyes unfocused and a constant ache pounded behind her eyes. With a groan, she got up to make herself some tea.

The house was silent and from the lack of dirty dishes, Sakura knew Tsunade hadn't even come back last night. It wasn't an uncommon thing but it still worried her. If a wave of nausea hadn't hit her, she would definitely be considering searching for her shishou to help her out with whatever work she was buried under.

"Oh, shit." Sakura leaned her head against the fridge and tried to will her stomach's contents down. The chill was good on her head but it made the rest of her body shiver so she quickly gave up on that and forced herself to go through the process of making the strongest tea possible.

Swallowing anything down seemed like the last thing she should be doing but after draining her cup, she felt marginally better. Good enough to be able to walk in a straight line towards her bathroom.

Deciding if she sat on the tub, she would fall back asleep, Sakura discarded the idea of a bath and turned the knob to the fullest. After a while of staying under the strong stream of hot water, she managed to slip into a meditative state by focusing on the flow of the stream pushing against the back of her neck. Her chakra seemed to tune in to that frequency almost instinctively and when it did, Sakura had an easier time controlling it.

She focused her attention on her liver, activating the cells there and encouraging them with her chakra to work faster on filtering the alcohol in her system. It was a slow process, mostly because she wasn't in any hurry and also because while she was confident in her abilities, it was never a good idea to meddle with complex things on a cellular level when she could barely see straight.

After a while, she felt good enough to step out of the shower. Her headache was still present but it wasn't enough of a bother at the moment and she knew it was only going away after she drank enough water to replenish what she lost.

Sakura put on her uniform slowly, almost languidly, before heading out. It was only after a hearty breakfast on her favourite café that a harried Kotetsu found her.

"Sakura!" He panted. "Tsunade-sama needs you at the hospital. It's an emergency."

Sakura was already moving before he even stopped speaking. They both took to the rooftops, the civilians around them looking on annoyed.

"Do you know anything about it?" Sakura asked him, her tone serious.

"I know she's been in there with Shizune since last night." Kotetsu scowled. "They're in the Red Section."

Red Section was what almost everybody called the intensive care unit reserved for Anbu members. If Sakura was right, the trail of blood she'd seen leading to its doors may be from the same people Shizune and Tsunade have been treating for over twelve hours. The name had been given to how common it was to see the floors around it shining with blood.

Anbu operatives were as bad as the jounin in the village when it came to going to the hospital, specially because there was an infirmary on Headquarters, so if the Red Section was being used—specially by not only Shizune, but also Tsunade—then it was a sure thing that whoever was in there was fighting for their lives.

Sakura sped up.

Tsunade had made a point not to give her access to Anbu cases and if she was calling for Sakura like that, it was because something had gone terribly wrong. Not one for caring about etiquette during a crisis, she jumped through the open window at the top floor where her shishou's chakra pulsed angrily.

"Do you have the test results or not?" She heard her yell. "It's a simple fucking question!" Something made contact with the wall.

"They're inconclusive, Hokage-sama." A skinny man cowered before her, his robes shining with blood just like the head medic's.

"Shishou," Sakura interrupted before Tsunade could throttle the poor man. "Where do you need me?"

"Where the fuck have you been?" Tsunade glared at her. "Nevermind. Come with me." Then she turned around and went through a set of double doors that Sakura knew marked the entrance to the Red Section.

Four beds were occupied, each of the bodies laying there shaking so much it was a wonder they didn't fall off. Shizune was bent over one of them, another medic helping her hold down the woman on the table.

"What is going on?" Sakura stared in horror at Shizune plunging a yellow liquid into the woman's chest cavity with one hand and extracting it with another, this time the blob of chemicals holding a few drops of neon green liquid.

Poison. Sakura had studied enough of it with her senpai to know that this wasn't any they'd known before. There were a lot of things she realised while her body kicked into gear, instinct taking over and she was moving towards the woman to help hold her down.

The first thing she noticed was that while the shinobi on the tables had open, gaping wounds and torn clothes, there wasn't as much blood as expected. The second thing, and perhaps the most worrisome, was just how tired Shizune looked. While Tsunade's eyes had bags under them as she worked on one of the men, Shizune's hands positively shook and her eyelids drooped.

Sakura would have to step in any second now.

She mentally prepared herself for the procedure Shizune was administering on the woman and listened closely to what Tsunade was saying.

"They arrived from Kumo yesterday, their team captain and this one here," Tsunade pointed at the man whose chest she was inspecting with chakra filled hands, "carried the other two all the way here. Half the team went down from the poison immediately, we haven't been able to make an antidote yet. All we know about it is that it contains a blood coagulating agent that's highly effective, we're struggling to keep their organs functioning long enough to extract the poison."

"I didn't get to that point in my training, Shishou," Sakura's voice didn't shake but she felt cold all of a sudden. The realization of what was going to happen settling in her stomach making it churn. "What do I do?"

"You know the theory, girl. Watch Shizune and I and trust your gut. You can—Fuck." Tsunade furrowed her eyebrows, sweat gathering at her temples. "His lungs are failing. Sakura, take over for Shizune, I need her help on this."

Her body follows the command before she can properly analyse what it's doing. She scrubs her hands thoroughly and as fast as she can, accepts the cirurgical mask the nurse places on her face and moves to take Shizune's place.

The woman is so pale, she already looks half-dead. Sakura checks her vitals and orders someone to hold her down, her voice sounding far away as all her focus is suddenly zoomed in on the person in front of her. She reaches for the chemical concoction and tries to gather it to her right hand but some of it falls on the floor when she moves it to hover above the woman's exposed chest.

She breathes in, closes her eyes and plunges the liquid inside her.

The resistance she finds is expected but jarring all the same. She's so used to tuning her chakra so accutelly to her patient's that there is barely any resistance with the work she's trying to achieve. This is completely different.

It's like even though the woman is too out of it to scream, she can feel it. Like every cell in her body is screaming out and beging her to stop. Sakura takes longer than she hoped for to find the particles of poison but when she feels the first one, it's easy to find all of it.

She takes the liquid away with her left hand and dumps it in a bucket without looking. There's still a lot of poison stuck right into the kunoichi's right atrium, the organ itself beating so feebly, it's barely keeping her alive.

"I'm gonna lose her." It didn't sound like her voice but it was her mouth that spoke the words. The moment they're spoken, the machine monitoring her vitals flatlines.

There's a rush of movement where the few nurses allowed inside all work with her to start the resuscitating process and Sakura wouldn't be able to remember it if she tried. She knew it would be in vain the moment she took a look inside the woman's body. Logically, she knew it was a lost cause, but admitting defeat was never her style.

She pumped chakra into her system until she felt chakra burns on her hands and only stopped when one of the nurses shook her roughly by the shoulders. She was dead and the staff were already unhooking her from the machines.

Sakura stares at the woman on the table.

It's a corpse now, she reminds herself. The blood that should have been pumping through her veins is now staining the bedsheets beneath her just like Zabuza's did on the bridge. Just like Haku's. Her skin is losing what little colour and warmth it held fast and soon it will be completely cold.

She knows that because she had touched her fingers to Haku and Zabuza's neck that day. They were cold and clammy from all the water around them and sometimes she still had nightmares about the feeling of their skin beneath her fingertips. It's not something she will ever forget.

Sakura thinks she's fine with the memories the corpse on the table forces upon her. It's becoming easier and easier to push those kinds of thoughts back because Inner knows she'll get a chance to bring it back up during the field. So she knits them into the patchwork of a cloak she shrugs on when needed and paints them on the mask she wears. It's almost a habit now, an afterthought.

What she isn't ready for is the blood bringing flashes of Ino falling to the forest ground so viciously to the forefront of her mind.

She couldn't save the woman. It was logical to think that it wasn't exactly her fault but it didn't matter because she had taken her last breath under Sakura's chakra filled hands and that wasn't a fact that would change anytime soon. All the people she had killed before couldn't possibly have prepared her for the feeling of having someone die on her operating table.

Because while those deaths she could justify—it was for the village, she was completing the mission, it was her duty—this one hit close to home.

That woman had two teammates who would wake up happy to be back home only to realize she never will. She had a captain that was sitting on the hallway outside, hearing about the news from the Hokage herself. It was all a reminder of how that day had went. Ino's blood on her, Hinata falling to the hospital floor when they arrived.

Sakura raised a shaky hand to her head and pushed the loose strands back, counting her breaths and willing the darkness on the corner of her eyes away. Nausea made her exhale sharply and her next breath stuttered in her chest.

"Sakura."

She didn't know how long her shishou had been calling for her but when she finally came back to herself, Tsunade was looking at her like she might either pass out or attack her. Sakura's awareness of her surroundings came back slowly and she noticed that Shizune was almost asleep on the only chair in the room, her head resting on the wall behind her. The two nurses there were writing something on the patient's charts and attaching them to fluids.

The body was covered by a white sheet.

"You did good today," Tsunade said. "Go home and rest. I'll see you for dinner, okay?"

Sakura wanted to bare her teeth at her. She did good? What a fucking joke. She wanted to claw at her shishou's face and demand her to actually look at her and tell the truth about how much of a fuck up she was she couldn't even save a woman that had survived all the way from Kumo.

As soon as the violent thoughts entered her mind, though, they left leaving only a hollow feeling behind. Shame and regret welled deep inside her and Sakura lowered her head.

"I'll take Shizune-senpai home." Her voice was barely above a whisper but she knew Tsunade heard her when she squeezed her shoulder.

"Take Hatake with you, he's outside waiting for news of the other two and he still needs some healing." Tsunade scoffed. "The brat refused any, but I trust you to guilt trip him into it."

Sakura ignored the pang in her belly when Tsunade said she trusted her and focused on the other part of the sentence. Hatake Kakashi was the captain outside. The hair on her arms raised when she realised that he had just been told that a teammate—his subordinate, the kunoichi technically under his command—wasn't going to make it.

She may have thought that she had been done with him but just the idea that he was going through what she did with Ino and Hinata made her shudder. There was no time for resentment when he was feeling exactly like she had. It didn't matter that his last dismissal of her had made her give up on rekindling their teacher-student relationship.

Nothing really mattered at that moment because in the end Kakashi was still Team Seven and she couldn't bear the thought of not being there for him at that moment.

She wanted to hold on to the anger and near indifference she had managed to feel towards him. She wanted to stomp her foot and childishly tell her shishou that she could heal the big idiot by herself, turn her back on him like he did her.

She couldn't, of course. When she came back to herself, her feet were already guiding her towards the door and her hands were pushing them open. No matter what happened between them, the need to protect him—just like the need to protect Sasuke-kun and Naruto—was still there.

"They'll make a full recovery," she said, the doors swinging shut behind her. Her eyes immediately fell on the figure leaning heavily against the wall. His mask was covered in blood and his Anbu uniform was so dirty, it was hard to say if he had any injuries at all. "Hound-taichou," she added belatedly, his mask glaring at her like it had on her first chunin mission and the codename coming back to her.

"Sakura." His voice was scratchy and deep, like he hadn't used it in a while and the hollowness in it sent a shiver down her spine.

Sakura took a deep breath, her lungs shaking with the effort. She didn't really know how to proceed, she realised. He looked like he was ready to bolt and she instinctively knew that if she mentioned his teammates anymore he would be gone. No matter what Tsunade-shishou had said, she wasn't in any state of mind to actually convince him of anything.

The only thing she could use at the moment was the truth. She was a medic-nin, he needed healing and they needed to get Shizune home.

"I need your help," she said when he took the tiniest of steps away from her. "Shizune is barely conscious and Tsunade is still busy. I need help getting her home."

Admitting any type of weakness seemed so contradictional to every effort she had put into not being helpless ever again, but she knew it would work on him. At that moment, the man in front of her didn't resemble Kakashi-sensei at all. He was just an Anbu captain who had seen too much, done too much and that had survived another teammate. He would only respond to two things—orders and someone in need of help.

A tiny part of her rejoiced when he followed her back to the operating room, his steps as silent as hers, but mostly she just felt numb. Seeing him freeze at the sight of the covered body when she went to help Shizune up, however, made her snap out of it. Tsunade barely payed them any mind as she barked orders to the other medics to take the samples to the laboratory while she finished up.

"Sen—" Sakura took a deep breath. "Senpai."

Kakashi didn't move.

"Hound-taichou." Her voice was sharp and commanding, the same one she used during missions while she lead her team of genin or chunin into dangerous situations. It was a voice that demanded to be heard, she had learned, and hear he did.

He shunshined to her side so fast, she could barely see him moving at all as he took her senpai into his arms, one behind her knees and the other supporting her back. Kakashi barely looked at her as he moved to the hallway and Sakura had to jog to catch up to him. Tsunade-shishou sent them a piercing look that Sakura couldn't decipher before going back to her patients.

She felt like she should ask him to slow down, take it easy, he was still injured but she held the urge. She doubted he would listen even if she managed to speak up.

Kakashi moved to the window at the end of the hall and opened it with his elbow, his movements graceful even in their stiffness as he climbed out leaving only a trail of mud and blood in his wake. Sakura scowled, her breath shortening as she followed him through the village.

Shizune's apartment complex was close to the Hokage Tower and it was late enough at night that no one was around but Sakura almost lost him twice if it hadn't been for her tracking his chakra signature. She actually had to shunshin to catch up to him. He was standing on a balcony's edge, Shizune still in his arms.

It took Sakura a moment to realise he was waiting for her to actually open the balcony door. She couldn't help the glower she sent his way before she crouched and fished two lockpicks from her thigh pouch. It took a few minutes for her to get it right, but she managed not to break the lock in annoyance so she was counting it as a win.

Sakura opened the door cautiously, checking for any traps, and pushed the curtain aside when she didn't find any. She felt more than heard Kakashi walking behind her and it was only because his arm accidentally brushed hers that she felt when it happened.

The skin of his bare upper arm slid against her shoulder briefly but instead of him moving past her, she felt him sliding down the length of her arm. She caught him just before he tumbled to the ground with Shizune but she didn't expect how heavy their combined weight would be and almost got dragged down before instinct took over and chakra gathered at her muscles to help.

"Shit," she mumbled, taking Shizune from his arms with one hand and helping his nearly unconscious body slid to the floor. She glanced at him long enough to establish he was still breathing before stepping over his form to find the bedroom.

She may have been feeling a bit vindictive that the stupid man had made her move so fast when she had spent the day at the hospital.

By the time she put Shizune to bed, the woman was waking up.

"Sakura-chan?" Her voice was weak and slurred.

"Yo, senpai," Sakura gave her the closest thing to a smile she could muster. "You wouldn't happen to know where Kakashi lives, would you?"

"Floor above mine," Shizune blinked rapidly trying to wake herself up but it didn't really help, her eyelids were still heavy and her speech slurred, "one window to the left."

"Roger." Sakura straightened herself up. "You rest now, senpai, before you get yourself into a chakra comma."

And with that, she moved back to the living room only to find Kakashi halfway through the window. Sakura scowled but let him climb out by himself, only moving to grab him when he balanced precariously on the ledge. He pushed her half-heartedly away but she already had chakra on her muscles and his strength was almost laughable.

"'m fine," he mumbled as she tightened her grip on the back of his vest.

"Uh huh," Sakura replied as she channelled chakra to her feet to help them jump to the next level.

Kakashi's apartment didn't have a balcony but it did have an empty flowerbox in which they balanced precariously for a moment as he removed his traps, most of his weight being supported by her. Sakura payed careful attention to the several defence mechanisms he put and moved to put him inside.

Kakashi tried to push her back again and block her way into his apartment but he only managed to unbalance them both, making their entry even clumsier than necessary.

"Boss?" A rough voice called from the bed she had almost fallen into and Sakura recognized Pakkun through the moonlit room.

"Pakkun," Kakashi sighed, leaning his weigh on her when Sakura righted themselves. "You're not supposed to let strange people inside the apartment."

Sakura narrowed her eyes at him but decided against saying anything about how she wasn't a stranger. By the looks and sounds of it, Kakashi was even worse than she expected.

"Where's the bathroom?" Sakura asked sharply, the question aimed at the ninken that immediately jumped to attention. "And the first aid kit, while you're at it."

"Floral Green?" The pug cocked his head to the side. "What's going on?"

"Pakkun!" Sakura frowned at him. "Kakashi is delirious and he's starting to feel really cold. I need to treat him so. Where. Is. The. Bathroom."

"Over here," Pakkun guided her in the dark towards a door to their left and turned the light on himself before opening a cabinet with his mouth and pointing at a white box. "The first-aid kit."

"Thank you," Sakura mumbled, her eyes already roving Kakashi's figure trying to locate the source of his bleeding.

His Anbu uniform was cacked in so much dirt and mud she could barely recognize it. Finding an injury like that was practically impossible and even if she did, she wouldn't be able to treat it when it was that dirty. The medic-nin in her knew the obvious course of action would be to get him into the shower and Sakura had squashed the part of her that cared about decency long ago.

"What are we doin' in my bathroom?" Kakashi mumbled confusedly.

Sakura guided him to the shower and turned the knob on before bending to help him in. She took of his chest guard while his hands pawed uselessly at her arms to push her away. He only succeeded in pushing himself under the spray of hot water. Sakura tutted as he gasped for breath.

"Stupid man," she mumbled under her breath and continued to help him out of his outer layers in search for his wounds. A part of her still balked at the thought that holy shit, she was undressing Kakashi-sensei, but she shut it down pretty quickly. She was helping an Anbu taichou out of his uniform to treat his injuries.

She had him down to his undershirt and was on the process of taking his pants down when she realized he was still gasping.

"Taichou?"

His body was shaking and his arms were locked on his sides as he let her hands work on his clothes. His head was turned to the side and slightly up, away from her and his chest stuttered on each harsh, uncontrolled breath he took. From her position at his feet, it looked like he was sobbing.

Sakura quickly got rid of the rest of his uniform, leaving him in only his boxers and undershirt before she moved to take his wrists in her hands.

"Kakashi," she said more urgently when she realised he was working himself up in a frenzy. At this rate, he would hyperventilate.

The force in which he tore himself out of her grip was enough to startle her as he fell back to the wall. His head connected with the tiles with a sickening crack before he slowly slid to the floor, his hands ripping the hound mask out of his face.

Sakura saw his eyes fixate on his gloved hands, the Sharingan tomoe spinning wildly in his socket and his single charcoal eye with its pupil so tiny it was barely a pinprick. He looked like a wild animal, ready to attack at any sign of danger to his injured form.

With a strangled sound, Kakashi tore the gloves from his fingers and frantically began to scrub his hands under the heavy shower. His breath was faster now and Sakura knew she had to act. By then she could identify the source of all the blood—a large mark on his torso and a gash on his thigh—so she focused on that.

"Kakashi," she said, her voice low but firm, "I'm going to heal you now."

With hands glowing a soft green, she approached him, the water drenching her as much as him now. He was mumbling something as she set about coaching the cells in his torso into reproducing faster. His breath had slowed some, but his hands were still rubbing each other raw. She noted with relief his wounds weren't poisoned.

The sight of him made her stomach drop. She knew very intimately what he was going through if only because it was a common occurrence for her too. Get back from a mission, establish everything she needed to do was over and proceed to break down quietly in her not so comforting room by herself.

Only Kakashi wasn't by himself this time and Sakura was assaulted by a mix of emotions at that thought. She was glad she could be there to heal him but she couldn't imagine how he'd feel once he actually came back to himself and realised she had witnessed him in his weakness.

A great shudder racked his body and it was only then that she realised he hadn't been mumbling nonsense.

"Rin," his voice was just above a whisper, so desperate and filled with hurt that her chest ached in response. "Obito, I'm sorry." He gasped lowly. "Rin."

She needed to bring him back. She didn't know where he was stuck at the moment, what kind of horrific memory could make his voice sound like that, but she needed to bring him back.

"Kakashi," her voice was louder now, her hands insistent on his. "It's Sakura, we're in your apartment in Konoha. I need to heal your leg. Can you understand me?"

It took a few more moments of her calling his name and holding his hands before he stopped mumbling and gasping and a few more before he actually looked at her instead of through her.

"Sakura."

She didn't know what to do. The moment was more intimate than she had fooled herself into thinking it was and it had nothing to do with the fact he was half-naked and they were both so close to each other. She was there in his private space, seeing him in a state she wasn't sure anyone else had ever seen. She had never been in a situation where she felt so connected to someone.

It broke something between them, she realised. The way he was looking at her was not how he had ever looked at her before.

His eyes used to see right through her when she was a genin under his care. When he stopped being her teacher, he stopped even looking at her, it was like his eyes just couldn't bear the sight of her and now.

And now, he was looking at her like she had made a grave mistake and saved him all at the same time.

"Get out."

His voice was low and emotionless and it was with a start that she realised he must have been using his commander voice with her. It was a strange thought that he had the same defence mechanisms as she did, and that more than anything else was what made her step away from him.

It was like a spell had been broken and she could finally see what was happening.

Her uniform, previously speckled with blood and dirt was completely drenched through. Her hair was halfway out of her braid, matted against the side of her head from the water. Her hands holding his tightly. And, of course, Kakashi.

Half-naked Kakashi with a scowl on his face she had only ever seen him wear before in the middle of a battle.

"Get out." His voice took a dangerous undertone that made her suppress a shiver.

But she hadn't conditioned herself all throughout the last year to balk at his tone. With a scowl that rivalled his, she dropped his hands and tilted her chin to glare him down.

"I'm not done healing you." Her voice was the same one she used on the field, the same voice he used on her as an intimidating tactic. The voice of someone who was used to being a captain on the field.

She only looked at him long enough to see the flash of surprise on his face before she lowered her chin, her own face flushing slightly when she realised they were both still very much inside the shower together.

Get yourself together, Sakura, she told herself. It was the only thing she could have done to clean up his wound properly.

With tense muscles, she moved her hand towards his leg—slowly and deliberately. He seemed to have snapped out of the fight or flee mindset from before but she knew how these things went from personal experience and she wasn't taking any chances.

Her chakra tuned to his wavelengths effortlessly and worked on his cells efficiently. She didn't take any longer than necessary, finishing the job almost perfunctorily. It was still hard to miss the way he tensed when their chakra mingled.

"Pakkun." She turned and left the shower without another look at the man standing there. "He already passed out once tonight I don't need him hitting his head."

"I'll call the pack," Pakkun grumbled. "We'll make sure he's okay."

Sakura nodded at him and adjusted her flak jacket. Her back was still turned to Kakashi and he made no move to follow her or even to acknowledge her presence any longer. She would give him the same courtesy.

"Make sure he doesn't sleep in those clothes. If his temperature rises during the night or he isn't awake in the next fourteen hours, call for a medic immediately." Sakura looked seriously at the pug as his droopy eyes moved from her to the jounin behind her a few times.

She wanted to say more. She wanted to turn around and give him a piece of her mind. She wanted to comfort him and punch him in the face for pushing her away even when he knew she had helped. She wanted to reach inside his head and take out whatever memories had caused his breakdown. She wanted to never see him again.

Sakura wanted a lot of things and the need to do something was swirling in her gut so strongly, her whole body tensed for a second. It didn't really matter, though, because in the next moment she had disappeared, not leaving a single bit of smoke on her wake.

.

WHEW. This chapter was HARD to write, ngl. It's one of my favourites tho. Many important things happen in this one and I hope I captured all the emotional turmoil well enough haha Poor baby boio Kakashi, I love him so much and so does Sakura. I hope you guys enjoyed this one, I feel like I really need feedback at this point lol, I'm stressed.

We're living history, yo. What's happening out there is insane. My uni shut down completely and I teach English at a private school which also shut down so I've been working from home. I'm in the risk group so I've been staying inside my apartment, dutifully quarantine. Y'all, if you can, please do the same. I'm sooo tired but I'm pretty sure the next chapter is gonna come soon, I hope this update can give you guys a little bit of happiness during these though times.

Love you all, stay safe and take care of each other 3