Take Your Medicine

By Kaze and Kiba

DNON

Summary—You gotta kiss a few toads…

A/N-Getting down and dirty…oh, yeah, they went there. ~K&K

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Tsunade walked through the zippered plastic into the clean room, where they'd quarantined the two victims of this mysterious sickness. She looked at the unhappy young people covered with odd-shaped, orange blotches all over their bodies with a mixture of sympathy and mischief.

"Okay. Your test results are back. We've swabbed down all the places you two have been in the last twenty-four hours and found the source of this illness. Thankfully, nobody else was exposed, and you're no longer infectious."

Sakura snuck a glance at her teammate. She knew Sasuke was annoyed with her because he was so sure that she'd given them something incurable from all the poisons she worked with in the lab.

"Turns out the source of this ailment is Naruto's apartment. Apparently, he brought some sort of fungus back from one of his trips to Mount Myoboku."

"That son of a—" Sasuke started.

"Aha!" Sakura jumped up and pointed at him accusingly with an orange-spotted arm. "I told you we shouldn't mess around in Naruto's apartment! And you said this was my fault!"

He scoffed and turned his head away, embarrassed that the Hokage herself was laughing at them over this awkward situation. He put his chin in his spotted-orange palm and stared darkly out the window. It was only noon and the old broad was probably already three sheets to the wind. By dinnertime, the whole village would know about their indiscretion.

"Don't worry, kids." She pulled a bottle from her pocket and almost handed it to Sakura. "Hang on a minute. That one's mine." She found a second bottle and handed it to Sakura. "The good news is that it's not fatal. I've sent hazmat over to disinfect Naruto's den of iniquity," she snickered. "Take this medicine and your unfortunate case of, ah, blemishes should clear up in a day or two. Until then, I want you both to stay right here so you don't creep out any more of the villagers." She chuckled. "They really believed you guys were the living dead!"

"Thank you, Hokage-sama." Sakura sighed. She wasn't looking forward to spending the next two days stuck with the surly man. Sasuke hated being wrong. He was going to torture her by not saying a word for the next forty-eight hours. "Could you please send me up some paperwork to pass the time?"

"I think not. I've been telling you to take a break from work. Now, you have to take one. You can use it to think about your future. And don't worry," Tsunade unzipped the plastic to exit the room. "The cure won't harm the baby one bit." She watched the already stiff back of the boy become impossibly straight.

"Baby?" Sasuke asked breathlessly.

"Baby?!" Sakura dropped the bottle and it smashed against the floor. Her hands flew to her stomach. "W-w-what?!"

"Make that four days in here." Tsunade sighed, tossing Sasuke a broom from the linen closet. "It took me two days just to make that remedy, Sakura." She shook her head at all her handiwork splayed across the floor. "And I'm almost positive he or she won't be born with those hideous orange spots you two contracted," she added with a wink, laughing to herself.

"Sp-sp-spotted baby?!" Sakura looked at her, eyes wide in shock before they rolled-up into her head and she fainted. Sasuke dropped the broom and caught her before she hit the floor.

"Put her on the bed and elevate her feet higher than her head," Tsunade ordered the young man, who was holding Sakura as if he was afraid to touch the girl now that he'd met his final goal of re-instituting the Uchiha clan.

"When she wakes up tell her I was kidding—about the spots."

~The End~