A/N: Welcome to the first Sakura Interlude, aka the times when Sasuke is out of commission so Sakura's POV steps in.

She hurts. It's the first thing Sakura is aware of, the pain. It radiates through her entire body – like Naruto ran her over with an army of shadow clones. Especially her arm, which she's… lying on…? She's never, ever felt like this before. No matter how rough a spar was at the academy, not even when Kakashi nearly murdered them with his terrifying dogs, she's never felt like this before.

What happened?

Groggily, she opens her eyes – they don't hurt, at least, even if they feel almost plastered shut. Her vision swims dizzily for a moment before snapping into focus: she sees trees. Trees. Trees in darkness, night, clearly. Trees…

The Chunin Exam.

Sakura sits up and immediately bites her lip so hard it bleeds to try to muffle her cry of pain. Her whole body hurts like hell, yes, but her arm…Tears well up in her eyes as she looks at her left arm hanging limply by her side. It had been lying underneath her, wrenched around, and she wonders if she had instinctively been trying to cushion her fall, in those last few moments of falling. Maybe it worked. Sakura can't tell. What she can tell, though, is that her arm is dislocated. Possibly broken.

Tears roll down her cheek, and she can't help it. The girl lets out a half-choked sob. It's dead silent – and god, she's terrified that she's going to climb up the trees and find someone well and truly dead – the nice Ame boy, Oboro, is fucking dead and her team was attacked by a fucking Sannin.

The moment she saw that snake summon, she knew. After Zabuza, her newly formed library habit (thank you, Sasuke!) had brought her to the bingo books, and she did her best to memorize the ones that might come up. Orochimaru had been Konohan, once. She remembered him.

And he had come after them.

He had come after them and he had toyed with them and-

The girl leans over, carefully trying to not jostle her arm as she hangs her head between her legs and tries to breathe. Breathe, Sakura, breathe. What does she need to do? What would Sasuke do? (No, no, she can't think about Sasuke, she left him alone with that monster-) What would Naruto do? (He was so still, so still and silent and she thinks of the way Oboro's neck just snapped and-)

What would Kakashi do? She's gonna hug him so hard when she sees him and then hit him for putting this dumb idea in the boys' heads, it's his fault they're in this situation!

No, she can't picture what anyone else would do. It's impossible and makes her heart hurt because all she wants to do is hug them all and never ever go on another mission again. Ever. She'll do D-ranks for the rest of her life if everyone comes out okay from this.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Step one: Arm. Deal with arm.

She's read medical texts, she knows anatomy, she… sort of thinks she knows what to do here. Sakura needs to pop it back into place, probably bite something so she doesn't chew off her own tongue (or was that just a myth? God, she can't remember), and then probably make some sort of splint if it seems broken.

The genin is no medic, and she can feel the deep-seated terror set in every corner of her bones at the sheer silence surrounding her. It's terrifying. She needs to- she needs to do this and get it over with and see how her teammates are. She needs to.

She can do this. She has no other choice.

It's funny how a simple event can turn your whole world upside down, Sakura thinks. It's not being put on a team with Naruto and Sasuke – though, honestly, she's pretty sure her patience is getting stretched beyond belief with this kind of dynamic. No, it's a simple act.

"Don't you have any books to read, Sakura?" Sasuke asks, and things. Shift, just a little. She's long resigned herself to never impressing him via her physical prowess (She's just. Not that strong, no matter how hard she tries), but this- she can do this.

Sakura is good at reading, and Sasuke seems a little happier in the morning when she's got a book in hand. (Maybe happy is a bit much, but he does frown less!) Maybe she'll never be a rival like how Naruto is, never be someone that throws herself at Sasuke in a fight, never has quite the same… dynamic as the two of them, but she's eager to be useful. She's eager to show Sasuke that she'll listen, that she'll learn, and so she does.

The genin becomes a frequent visitor at the library, and reads a vast variety, particularly now that she has access to more books as a shinobi. She needs to learn what she's going to do. There's so many different things, and a lot are less physical – thank goodness.

Elemental ninjutsu. Genjutsu. Medical ninjutsu. Fuinjutsu. The list goes on and on, and Sakura doesn't even know where to begin. True, she's only a genin, but… but…

She feels like, with these sort of teammates, she might get a little left behind. She doesn't want that.

The more time goes on, the more terror Sakura feels. Even when she screams, muffled by the kunai in her teeth, shoving her left arm back in its socket, there's not a peep. She weeps softly, trying to stay as quiet as possible, as she breaks branches off the closest tree, bandaging them around her arm and then ripping off part of her dress to create a make-shift sling-

Not a single soul even breathes.

"They might just be unconscious," she mumbles to herself, bracing her good arm against a trunk to help her struggle to her feet. She can't quite believe it. "Just get up there, Sakura. You can do it."

She's shaking, she realizes, trembling with both cold and terror and nausea curling in her gut- Nope, that's bile climbing up her throat, and she leans over to throw up. It's not a pretty sight, and she barely swallows down another go of it. No. No, don't.

It's as good as incentive as any to finally climb the trees.

Sakura mentally thanks Kakashi-sensei for teaching them how to do this – it takes so much effort, one foot in front of the other, but she wouldn't be able to do it with her hands. That's how she realizes she's bleeding, though.

"Oh," she says, softly, looking down to where there's a ragged line cut down her front, starting to slowly bleed again. It… scabbed over, it seemed, or dried, or something (how long was she out), but now that she's moving again… it's open. Bleeding sluggishly.

Well, she doesn't have the chakra to stop and deal with it now. She has to keep climbing.

One, two, one, two, one, two, Sakura counts, focusing on something, anything. Anything than the silence coming from above, anything but the pain echoing through her body (especially her arm) with every step she takes, anything but the slow trickle of blood staining her dress and starting to slowly drip, drip, drip. She thinks she might be leaving a trail.

She thinks she doesn't care.

It feels like it's forever until she hits a solid branch and carefully steps onto it, immediately sagging against the tree trunk behind her. Sakura has chakra – she hadn't really used any before this, and she's so glad for that – but she's so achingly tired she still worries she'll slip and fall, that she won't be able to find them, that she- that she-

No, no, fuck, no. Sakura slaps herself with her good hand, shaking herself into awakeness, into clarity. No, she can do this.

Opening her eyes – when had she closed them? – the genin looks around, squinting into the darkness to see if she can find her team. Naruto is- Sakura swallows sharply. He's one branch over, hanging from the tree trunk by a kunai. Sasuke is- She shakes, clutching at her ruined dress with her free hand. He's lying on that same branch, not making a single movement. From this far, she can't tell if either are breathing.

She lets out a choked sob, and leaps.

Wave only encourages her – and reaffirms her thoughts. Sasuke and Naruto had been… they had been useful. They had fought. Naruto was the absolute dead last in the class and he had done so much more than her.

Sakura had done nothing.

Sakura had been nothing.

"Kakashi-sensei," she asks one morning, when the boys are racing ahead to the missions desk, Naruto racing to get there and Sasuke doing his usual 'I'm not racing you Naruto but like hell you'll beat me', while she and their teacher hang behind. "Can you help me figure out my ninjutsu affinity?"

He gazes down at her with his one eye that sees far more than she ever could, unreadable as ever, and the girl steels herself before she continues. "I… I want to learn some, but I don't know what would be the easiest for me, so I-" She's interrupted as a gloved hand shoves a piece of paper in her hand, and comes to a stop.

Kakashi-sensei is offering her the small square, and his eye crinkles up in a smile. "Maa, it's always good to see my cute little students bettering themselves. Do you know what this is?"

She nods eagerly, taking the paper from him and starting to walk again. Sakura can channel chakra into a piece of paper and walk at the same time, so she does – and it turns into dirt, crumbling away. She blinks once, twice, and then beams up at her teacher. "Earth, right?"

He laughs a little, reaching out to ruffle her hair. "Yes, yes, Earth. Come on, or we'll get left behind," he says, and then he disappears from her side in a swirl of leaves and smoke.

Cursing quietly in her head, Sakura starts to run. "Hey, hey, wait for me!"

Naruto is the closest, but she stops right before she touches him. Come on, Sakura, she thinks. Naruto would have done so much more for you by this point. He would. Unreliable, dumb, idiotic as he could be – he was the most selfless of them all, and it's with that in mind that she reaches out, brushing past his hair to gently place her fingers on the side of his neck.

For one heartbreaking moment, she feels nothing. She feels absolutely nothing and her heart climbs up in her throat, beating so loud as if to beat for him too, and god she should have been so much nicer to him, but now he's gone and she can't even remember what the last thing she said to him was-

And there's a heartbeat under her fingers.

She stares, wide-eyed, but she can feel the faint twitch underneath her fingers. The slight pulsing of some vein, some artery, whatever, but it's there and it's real and Naruto's alive.

Sakura hugs him. He's unconscious and hanging from a kunai and pretty slimy, but she's so relieved she hugs him, and then gingerly pulls out the kunai, catching him before he can fall and then laying him down on the branch. He looks… asleep. Peaceful. Not like he had just attacked a missing nin and nearly gotten killed in turn, and it's such a relief she could cry.

But she can't. Not yet.

Still, Naruto being alive has bolstered her, and though she takes a deep breath to steady herself, she's not shaking as she walks across the branch towards Sasuke. He's… crumpled on the branch, hand clutched at his neck, and she's so scared of what she'll see underneath it. A wound?

Sakura crouches next to him, and pries his hand away – no, it's not a wound. It's a seal, she realizes, something she only knows from her time in the library, but that can't be a concern right now. Living, living is the concern, and she can figure out everything else from there.

She presses her fingers to his neck, and this time, she has the mind to be patient. Wait a few seconds, and then the pulse seems to come to life. Thank god, they're both alive. Naruto's alive. Sasuke's alive. All three of them are alive.

Sakura bends over her teammate and weeps.

She studies as much as she can – she reads, she devours. When she's not training with her team, not taking missions, she reads. It's not like she has any social life to speak of.

That realization actually… hurts. Ino had been the main person she spoke with when she had been in the Academy, even with all their bickering, and now they're on separate teams and she can only see Ino if one of them seeks the other out – which neither will do, of course. They're rivals! They fight!

But Sasuke and Naruto are rivals, and they see each other every day…

It's a bit of a sobering thought. Naruto- Naruto doesn't have any friends, she knows this. Neither does Sasuke. Sasuke doesn't because- because he's Sasuke, because all he does is train and get stronger (and that's really really cool!) but that means that she can't hang out with him. She's been rebuffed since day one, and even though she'll keep trying because she really wants to, it means she doesn't expect an answer in the positive any time soon.

Naruto, though… Naruto likes her. (Why wouldn't he? She's the best girl in the whole year!) So maybe… Ugh. Even if he's annoying, maybe…

She crinkles her nose at the thought, but waits until Sasuke's left after training one day (she doesn't want him to get the wrong idea!) before approaching her other teammate. "Hey, Naruto. Want to go shopping?"

Sakura carries them down to the ground, one by one. She'd rather bring them down, first – leaving them up in the trees is too precarious, and she's so, so worried. And she doesn't want to leave them alone.

After a long moment of hesitation, she collects Oboro's body, too. She can't leave him lying there.

She's tired, and she can feel that ache in every part of her bones – and god, is it hard to carry people with just one arm – but she still places them under the roots of a tree, big enough to allow for shelter. Sakura carefully rummages through Sasuke's pack, not even blushing because of the circumstances, and pulls out some sweat towels she knew he had stashed in here. (She had seen him use them and wow.) She wets them carefully with some of their precious water, folding them up to lay them on both of her boys' heads, and watches them for a moment.

Sasuke is clearly having a nightmare of some sort – she wonders if it's related to the seal. He looks so distressed, so upset, that all she wants to do is reach out and wipe it all away but she can't, she can't. Naruto… Naruto looks better, but now that he's lying like this, she can see his knit brow, that something is bothering him as well. He's not just sleeping peacefully.

Oboro- She doesn't look at him, tucked away in the corner. She can't.

She watches them for a little bit, catching her breath, before she forces herself to stand. First, she needs to wrap up her side – she has no idea how bad it is, just that it's bleeding sluggishly and when she pulls off her dress the scabbing rips even more, and she has to bite back a cry. Sasuke had packed bandages, thank god, and she has to pull off even her bra to wrap her whole front. It's long and bleeding and that can't be good, but it's not as though she can do anything else for it at the moment.

Right now, Sakura needs to set some traps.

"Naruto, if you don't ask me out ever again, we can be friends. I won't ever say yes and be your girlfriend," she tells him, and he agrees.

He. Agrees.

"We'll be friends? Really?"

She rolls her eyes. "Yes, dummy."

"Okay!"

Sakura immediately regrets it when she's dragged off to go to Ichiraku – "No, I said shopping! Shopping!" – to greet a bemused Iruka, perched at one of the stools.

"Iruka-sensei, Iruka-sensei!" Naruto yells, releasing her hand to lunge at their old teacher, almost knocking him off the stool but not quite. He had braced for it. "Guess what! Me and Sakura are friends now!"

Iruka laughs a little, and smiles at him, before smile at her, warm and open and genuine in a way that she hadn't seen from the teacher before. It's not that he hadn't been warm and nice with her before, but this was… this was different? "Is that so, Sakura?" he asks, and she blushes a little, before nodding.

"Yeah. He's not so bad."

Naruto immediately protests that, but Iruka directs him away from arguing with her, steering him towards telling him about his week, which he eagerly does. He talks about the most banal things, and Sakura blows on her noodles and eats, watching. It's like her and her parents, but… but not.

The blonde seems to relish every single word Iruka-sensei says, brightening at every piece of attention, and Sakura wonders, when was the last time she appreciated her parents like that? When was the last time she had hugged her mom, eagerly told her dad all about her day, written a letter to her aunts?

For someone who's legally an adult, she… she has a lot of growing up to do, doesn't she?

By the time she finishes the traps, it's daybreak. Sakura has no true way of knowing how long she had been unconscious, before, but it had apparently been a decent chunk of time.

That's. Worrisome.

She's only barely settled herself down when out comes a squirrel from the bushes – and she stops it. Prevents it from going into a trap, and maybe that was too much of a giveaway, because out of the bushes come three ninja. Sound ninja, and they skirt the trap as easy as breathing.

"I'm going to kill the girl, and then I'm going to kill this Sasuke guy," one of them says, and Sakura stops breathing. They work for Orochimaru, work for that Snake sannin, and they're part of the reason that Oboro is dead. They're part of the reason that Naruto and Sasuke are unconscious behind her, and she grabs a kunai with her free hand, every part of her shaking.

The one covered in bandages laughs. "Don't bother with the second trap," he says. "We've been watching you the whole time."

She's going to die here, Sakura realizes. She only has one arm, and she hurts and she's bleeding still (did they watch her change she's going to vomit), but still, she braces herself. Maybe she's going to die here. Maybe there's nothing she can do about it, and tears well up a little in her eyes.

But she'll try to take down at least one of them with her, and hopefully she can stall long enough so her teammates can wake up and save themselves.

They rush at her, and she inhales. Mom, Dad, if we get out of this, I'm going to give you such a big hug when I get home. She tightens her grip on her kunai. Ino, I wish we were best friends again. I wish we weren't so stupid. She exhales. Naruto, Sasuke…! I won't let you down!

And then someone punches the female ninja in the stomach.

The new ninja moves, chakra visible around their fists as they punch her a few more times and she crumples to the ground, before they back up swiftly, getting between Sakura and the other two ninjas as they grind to a halt. It's a surprise attack, and wow, it's a really good one.

"What the hell?" the 'I'm going to kill you' one asks. "Who are you?"

"I'm Hyuuga Hinata," says Hinata, standing in front of Sakura, a squirrel perched on her shoulder. "I won't- I won't let you hurt them."