Sakura had returned to the hospital after her uncomfortable conversation with Sasuke. If she was to be working at the police station now, there were some things she needed from her office, namely resource books. Texts on genetic engineering, cellular biology, epigenetics, and transplants all sat in a brown cardboard moving box. Sakura studied the contents before turning to her bookshelf and grabbing a few more books on behavioral brain chemistry, poisons, and medical law and ethics.

This case was particularly upsetting to her. She had studied the crime scene photos and even from one look it was obvious that the one who did this had extensive medical knowledge and no regard for human life. Sakura valued life more than anything, and the Hippocratic Oath may as well have been her religion. Those who took on the task of learning the human body had the responsibility to use that knowledge to help others. She couldn't wait to get this guy behind bars.

She'd do the autopsy later, and it made her more nervous than she'd like. As a doctor who'd once been a violent crimes detective, she'd seen a lot. But those crime scene photos were grotesque beyond anything she'd seen before. Getting a close up three dimensional rendering of that body wasn't something she was particularly looking forward to.

She was disturbed from her thoughts by a knock on the door.

"Sakura-San?" Sakura looked up in surprise at the bespectacled silver haired man standing in the doorway.

"Kabuto-senpai!"

"Bit strange for you to keep calling me that. Yes, I'm older—but you outrank me." He laughed.

"Yes, but you still worked here longer than I have, so you've got seniority. So what brings you here?"

Kabuto eyed the cardboard box and her mostly empty desk. Usually her desk was covered in stacks of patient files and paperwork, the last time it had been that clean was when she had moved in. "Since you're going on leave, your patients needed to be reassigned. I've got a few or your cases and I need your sign off on the transfer."

"Right. Of course." She looked at the cases he handed her and hesitated. These were her patients. They placed their trust in her and she thought of them as her responsibility. "Something wrong, Sakura-san?"

"Hm? Oh no. Sorry…just…separation anxiety." She flashed him a placating smile before signing off on the patient transfer forms. "Take good care of them. Especially Ageha. She's just a little girl…" Kabuto gave her a curious look and opened up the girl's file. "Aren't doctors supposed to be emotionally removed from their cases?"

"We're also supposed to care and be sensitive towards our patients."

"Yes but…you're listed as the emergency contact."

"She's an orphan with no family. No one would take responsibility for her. As her doctor, it only makes sense that I be the emergency contact."

"I guess. You're incredibly kind and empathetic Sakura-san. I hope that doesn't end up getting you hurt."

Her eyes dropped to the picture on her desk. She let out a dry laugh, grabbing it and throwing it into the cardboard box with her books. "Too late."

Sakura set the cardboard box down on her old-new desk. It was amazing how little had changed in the KPD. Staring at her desk, across from Naruto's and Sasuke's, a warm nostalgia rushed through her. The bridge builder assassination threat, the gato crime syndicate, Gara's psychotic break, the Todoroki mob wars. There were so many cases that her team had closed. As much as she loved hospital work, there wasn't a team supporting her. And Kakashi, Naruto and Sasuke weren't just a team, they were her older brother, younger brother and…her…something. Even she didn't really know what they were. What they had been. As much as she had called him out on it earlier, she herself didn't have the answer. She knew what she always had wanted them to be since their days at the police academy, and while it had seemed like it sometimes in the past, she wasn't sure. She glanced over at Sasuke and Naruto's desks to see that both had the old Squad 7 picture proudly displayed. For Naruto that wasn't that surprising, but she was kind of shocked to see it on Sasuke's. They must of missed it as much as I did, she thought. They always had been an unusually tight knit team.

She hoped they would be able to close this case soon. The thought of doing the autopsy was filling her stomach with dread. "Oh come on Sakura" She muttered to herself, "Let's just get it over with." She turned, ready to head to the morgue and nearly jumped at the sight of Sasuke standing at his desk facing her.

"When'd you get here?"

Instead of answering his eyes fell on the one item she had unloaded, her picture of Squad 7. "You still have it…"

"So do you." She kept her face carefully blank, and was mildly annoyed at how easily Sasuke saw through it. Where anyone else would have seen a complete mask of apathy, she could tell that he saw the small sliver of hope in her eyes that she was terrified of losing.

"No matter how blinded I was by rage, I couldn't throw you away…either of you." He tacked the last part on hurriedly, looking uncomfortable, but Sakura felt that small sliver of hope grow a little. It was the first time in a very long time that she saw Sasuke look so vulnerable. It reminded her of the first time he had opened up to her about the night his family had been massacred.

"No matter how emotionally wounded I was, neither could I."

There was a long silence, neither of them breaking eye contact. The air around her felt charged, like standing in a thunder cloud.

"Sakura—"

She suddenly felt her stomach drop into her feet. She wasn't sure what he was about to say but she was too nervous to hear it. She needed to get out of there.

"I need to go do the autopsy." It was the first thing her mind supplied. Who knew all the motivation she needed to get the autopsy started was Sasuke attempting to converse with her.

"I'll come with you."

"You can't!" She said quickly. At his questioning eyes, she swallowed uncomfortably. "It's against regulation…"

"I meant I'm walking you there…"

Oh. shit. The last thing she needed was for Sasuke to see her discomfort about the autopsy. She didn't want him to still think of her as weak. But it was clear there'd be no dissuading him. So she simply sighed, and began to walk, feeling his presence fall into step next to her.

Sasuke walking her to the morgue was…weird. She had assumed that he would have tried to start talking to her again. To say whatever she had stopped him from saying before. But he didn't. He just walked quietly in step with her. She kept trying to ignore the way her heart felt like it would break her rib cage from the inside out. It helped that she knew for a fact as a medical professional that it would be impossible for the human heart to do that in the first place. How was just his presence able to do this to her? She felt it incredibly unfair, given that she didn't have the same effect on him. It also annoyed her that something about having him there was comforting, the way it had been once before. Now, that she thought about it, he used to do this all the time. It was another aspect of their relationship that always made her feel there was more going on then just "friends."

Whenever she had reports to drop off, copies to make, coffee to get, he'd always walk with her. Most of those walks were in silence but they had always been comfortable. Of course they'd go to crime scenes together or to take statements, talk to witnesses and what not—that had all been done as a team so of course they'd go together. But he'd accompany her on the small individual in-office tasks that could be done alone.

She shook her head in an attempt to clear it. She didn't have time for these kinds of thoughts. She had to mentally prep herself for the most disturbing autopsy she'd hopefully ever have to do—that is, if they caught this guy before another body dropped. Apparently Sasuke had noticed the movement and her rising anxiety because he was now staring down at her intently.

"What?"

"Something about this autopsy is bothering you. What is it? I know it's not because you're…squeamish."

She blinked up at him in surprise. Last time he knew her, she never wanted to get too close to corpses when they went to examine crime scenes. "How do you know that?"

"You're a doctor."

"Means nothing. I know plenty of doctors who are squeamish. Lady Tsunade used to be haemophobic. She still get's occasional flair ups."

"I saw you."

"Yeah, you're gonna need to elaborate on that." This conversation was so oddly blank, from their expressions to their tone. They may as well have been stating random facts. But the rhythm of it was the same as the banter they used to have with each other. A quick, sharp, playful rhythm, like knocking over dominos.

"I visited the hospital two weeks after I came back and had yet to see you. I was about to ask for you when an emergency patient was wheeled in. You were straddling him, holding his intestines inside his body while issuing orders to the other doctors and nurses around you."

She remembered that patient. He'd slept with the wrong wealthy elite's daughter from Kirigakure, and they'd sent an assassin after him. The guy had sliced deep right across his stomach and left him to die. He would have if it hadn't been for the fifty-two hour surgery, gallons of blood, and Sakura. Tsunade had told her afterwards that if anyone else had been his doctor, he wouldn't have made it.

"You saw that?"

"You're not squeamish. What's bothering you?"

"For a body to get like this…this man was tortured, brutally. Worse than that…He was an experiment…and…" She shook her head. The rest was speculation. As a professional, she shouldn't say anything until she confirmed it. But in her gut she knew for a fact whoever did this had extensive medical knowledge, and was probably fully trained as a doctor.

"You're still too soft."

"What was that?" Sakura growled. But when she looked in Sasuke's eyes, there wasn't any sign of judgment, superiority or condescension. In fact, they seemed…warm. It caught her so off guard that she almost tripped. They had reached the morgue and almost immediately, thoughts of the body chased this strange and distracting interaction with Sasuke out of her mind.

"How long will it take?"

"2 or 3 hours. Probably."

Sasuke nodded. "Naruto and I will be checking with missing persons to see if they have any record of this guy. We'll check the crime scene after your report."

She nodded and pushed open the doors, not looking back at him as it swung shut behind her.

Sakura got to work immediately after tying her hair up. She wanted to finish this as quickly as possible. The body lay on the table before her, and if the pictures had made her nauseated, the sight of the actual body in front of her made bile burn the back of her throat. Its skin was grey and leathery—undoubtedly human skin but at the same time not entirely. The eyes were cloudy grey but the sclera were yellow. Under normal circumstances, between the skin discoloration and the yellow eyes she would have determined liver failure, but given the amount of severe experimentation done, she wasn't sure that was the right call. Where there should have been human hands, there were something closer to claws. The fingers were disproportionately long, and the nails longer, stronger, and far shaper than any human nails. Patches of scraggily brown hair protruded from the backs of the hands and at the finger joints. She opened its mouth and noted that the canine teeth were abnormally long, more like fangs. In fact, all of the teeth were unnaturally sharp. The arches of the feet were abnormally high and the balls and toes abnormally long. Even in death, the legs wouldn't fully straighten, still maintaining a slight bend to the knee, and the thighs were densely muscled. Worst of all was the small, uneven papery bat-like wings that were protruding from the back of the shoulder blades. The skin was drawn so tight across them that she could see every small, fine bone that served as the wing frame. Sakura wondered if the right wing was larger than the left because the right was the dominant side. Regardless, wings like that would have never been able to work on a body this size. What was most unnerving about them was that they weren't sewn on, these wings had sprouted from this body on their own, which should have been impossible.

Swallowing hard, she immediately began looking for the cause of death. Blunt force trauma to the head and blood under the claws indicated that there had been some sort of struggle, but that wasn't the cause of death. Ligature marks around the wrists proved that the body had been tied up, although they weren't consistent with rope marks. They were more like bruises left by manacles, with heavier bruising at the back of the wrists. He must have been bound to a wall for the markings to be left that way. She took its finger prints, clipped samples of the nails, hair, teeth, skin and blood for DNA screening, as well as the blood from under its nails. During her careful look through of the body, she also found a purple fibers along its waist line and under its nail, and iron powder in-between its toes.

When she opened the cadaver up was when she was able to find the cause of death. The lungs were so enlarged that they had not only crushed the heart but also ruptured themselves from pushing against the ribcage too hard.

The results from all of the blood tests she was running were staggering. The amount of cortisol present in his blood stream had been four times higher than the amount that would trigger a heart attack in a normal human. Its white blood cell count was incredibly low, but its antibody count was obscenely high. Most disturbing of all however, was its DNA. The human genome should have presented its self in a double helix—two stands of DNA. But this genome wasn't human. There was a third strand present and all three strands were a messy splice of animal and human genes. The experiments done to this body had been done on a genetic level. Someone was messing with the laws of basic evolution. And it shook her, viscerally. The nausea she'd fought against for the past 2 hours attacked in a vengeful wave and she barely made it to the bathroom in time.

Once her stomach was empty, she found that she couldn't be in the same room as the body any longer. Grabbing her full report, she ran out of the morgue, pressed herself against the cool hallway wall and slid down, pulling her knees to her chest and burying her face in her arms. The monster responsible for this was breaking the laws of evolution and hugely abusing their knowledge. It terrified her. But more than that, it royally pissed her off.

She could feel her blood boiling with rage, the twitching in her forearms as they were flooded with the desire to punch the bastard's face in. She had always been fairly quick to anger, but training under Tsunade had increased that by ten. In the recent years, whenever Sakura felt afraid, she'd gotten angry instead. Fear was the bodies braking system, and it was necessary. But Sakura had been held back by fear for too long. Now when faced with a terrifying situation, Sakura used anger, which she had an easier time controlling and working with, to power through. Which is exactly what she was doing now. Having acknowledged how terrifying this case was, she was now overrun by pure rage, which she was taking steadying breaths to get under control.

That was the state Sasuke found her in.

Author's note: Originally I ended this before their walk to the morgue but when I went to post it I realized that was waaaay shorter than I thought. So I went through the autopsy, which I dreaded writing. It's disgusting to think about and I don't know if I was too graphic or not graphic enough in my writing but it was plenty disturbing in my head.