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Silence reigned across the room as Sakura continued to pump chakra into the once lifeless boy. Activating his sharingan, Sasuke watched as her chakra flooded the boy's system and manually made every organ work. It wrapped around his lungs, pumped his heart, willed his blood to flow, kept his neurons firing, kept him alive.
The rest of her chakra inspected the length and breadth of his body as if trying to locate the origin of the disease, but Sasuke guessed it was to no avail when her face contorted in an expression of anger and frustration. Her chakra began to recede from his body and Sasuke assumed she had given up, but his eyes widened she gathered chakra back in her palms and forced it through his body with twice the intensity.
He watched as white chakra coursed through the boy's body, destroying every cell it touched. He opened his mouth to question her motives when his sharingan eye detected a second wave of chakra closely following the first one, repairing all the tissue and rebuilding every organ. No one in the room moved an inch as Sakura worked on the boy. It felt like an eternity had passed since she began destroying and restoring the boy's body, until both the waves culminated in the boys heart.
Sasuke stood bewildered, trying to grasp the magnitude of chakra required for the feat he had just witnessed and assumed his estimate was correct when Sakura detached her hands from the boy's body, swayed, and began to fall.
Moving before anyone in the room could grasp what had just happened, he caught her limp body before it hit the floor. He glanced at her face, covered in a glean of sweat and twisted in pain, and wondered if he had truly comprehended the extent her strength till now.
Summoning a susanoo arm he lifted Sakura and moved towards the door. Medics rushed forward to inspect her but stopped when her feeble voice spoke barely an octave above a whisper.
"Tend to the boy. He still has chakra burns on his epidermis." pausing to breathe, as if the sentence had sapped all her strength, she spoke again. "I'm just tired, I'll heal on my own."
The medics looked skeptical, but knew from experience it was better not to question their taichou. As they went to work on the boy, Sasuke carried her downstairs. Sakura only spoke again when he began to push the door of the temporary hospital with his back.
"Sasuke-kun, where are you taking me? There's a spare bed in the infirmary, I'll rest there."
Choosing to not respond, Sasuke continued on his way. He thought she might argue more, but she only closed her eyes and let head loll against his chest. He frowned a little when he imagined just how tired she must be if the normally feisty girl could not push an argument, and his feet began to move faster.
Taking her to his room at the inn, he laid her down on his bed and disappeared from her sight for a few moments. By the time he returned, she was already asleep.
Nudging her awake, he offered her a glass of water. Smiling at him listlessly, she attempted to sit up but her arms shook violently. Silently Sasuke sat down on the bed, close to her, such that she could lean some of her weight against his chest, and handed her the glass of water which she drank gratefully.
He remained sitting behind her as she finished the water and gulped down heavy breaths of air, as if tired from running a marathon. Twiddling strands of her hair between his thumb and forefinger, he spoke.
"You need rest. If you had stayed in the hospital you would have been far too distracted by the patients there."
Sakura frowned at his sudden statement, before realizing that he was justifying why he brought her to his room instead of leaving her at the hospital, as she had questioned earlier.
Smiling softly, she whispered, "Thank you, Sasuke-kun."
She felt rather than heard his grunt of acknowledgement as it rumbled in his chest, before he got up and used his sole arm to cradle her head as he lowered her back down. In less than a moment, she was asleep.
Hovering a moment to take in her sleeping form he activated his sharingan, and then just as quickly he turned it off and left the room to allow her to rest.
When Sakura awakened from her slumber, the sky outside was already dark and Sasuke wasn't present in the room. Sitting up, she closed her eyes and began to meditate.
Glancing inside herself, it was clear to her that only a fraction of her chakra had returned, but other than that her body seemed to have recovered fairly well. Inhaling deeply, she let the air saturate her lungs and continued her mediation.
Her attention returned to reality when she heard the door open and she popped open one eye to see Sasuke entering the room. Looking at her comical expression, Sasuke snorted and she stuck out her tongue at him. Smirking lightly and shaking his head, he plopped down on the couch.
Sitting on the edge of the bed to face him, feet brushing the floor, Sakura spoke.
"Where did you go?"
In the middle of removing his shoes, he answered. "Hospital."
Immediately her humor was replaced with seriousness as she asked, "How's Hideki? The boy?"
"He's fine now. Was complaining of soreness but he seems completely freed from the illness." setting his shoes aside, he laid his head against the couch. "What did you do to him?"
Sakura frowned as she looked down at the floor.
"First I used my chakra to keep all his organs working while I looked for what was causing the illness, but I've already scouted the other patients for the source and each time I found nothing, this time was no different."
She sighed before continuing.
"Without eliminating the cause, the only thing I could do was suppress the symptoms, but that would only work so long. Instead I used chakra to incinerate all his tissue and rebuild it immediately after. Since the tissue was new, it was free from any disease."
"So you built his body back from scratch?" Sasuke commented, raising an eyebrow.
She smiled softly as she raised her head to look at him. "Yeah, I guess you could say that. Still-" her smile dropped, "-the kind of chakra it requires, I can't do that on all the patients. We need to find a real cure, Sasuke."
Wordlessly, Sasuke left his position on the couch and moved towards the desk at the far end of the room. Opening the top drawer, he picked up the Pecha berry he had found earlier that day and placed it on the coffee table between the sofa and the bed.
Looking at it, Sakura frowned. "That's a pecha berry, isn't it? What about it?"
"I found it earlier today in the forest when I went scouting. There's a sheen of chakra surrounding it." he explained.
Getting up from the bed, Sakura sat down on the floor in front of the coffee table ans inspected the berry in front of her.
"You think this is what might have caused the disease?" she inferred from his explanation.
Shrugging, Sasuke took the spot on the floor in front of Sakura. "That's for you to find out." he said.
Nodding, Sakura got up to go get a knife from the cabinet by the door and reclaimed her previous position. Slicing it open, she peered inside.
It appeared normal at first glance, but Sakura expected as much. Summoning a minuscule amount of chakra to her finger tips, she let it spread through the berry, trying to find anything abnormal.
A minute later she spoke. "Sasuke, look."
Stretching his neck, he turned his attention to what Sakura was pointing at. It was hard to spot at first, but his trained ninja eyes quickly picked up fine chakra fibers embedded into the fruits, brought to the surface by Sakura's chakra.
Returning her chakra back to her body, Sakura quickly performed some hand signs to summon a scroll from a seal on her wrist. Sasuke was about to chastise her for using chakra in her chakra deprived state but she quickly slammed the scroll down on the table and opened it.
Picking up one half of the berry. she squeezed it until a few drops of it's juice fell on the the center of the inscriptions of the scroll. Immediately, the letters around it began to glow and the drops of juice in the center began to change color.
"What are you doing?" Sasuke questioned.
"Well, chakra as a whole is easy to detect when it's inside someone's body because it takes their distinct shape, which is why you and I can detect chakra signatures. It's like a recognizing someone's face." she explained. "But when there are traces of chakra left behind, it's still possible to analyze them and pinpoint whom it might belong to. Similar to the way you can't recognize to whom a strand of hair belongs to straight away, but by analyzing the DNA from the hair root, the identity of the person can be known."
Sasuke nodded, absorbing all the information.
"Of course, just like analyzing DNA, it's necessary to have a sample directly from the source to compare the two, but I've been working with poisons for years and I've encountered the chakra maps of many, many poison experts. It's a gamble, but maybe I'll recognize this one." she said.
A few moments after she had spoken, the inscription on the scroll stopped glowing and more letters began to appear on the scroll. Sitting up straighter, she gets to work and starts deciphering the scroll.
Her eyebrows remain furrowed in concentration for a long time before she takes in a sharp intake of breath.
Immediately alert, Sasuke asks "What is it?"
"I know this chakra," Sakura says, traces of disbelief etched on her face, "This is... This is Chiyo Baa-sama's chakra."
A/N: Believe it or not, I actually do try to write longer chapters. But I just...can't. I'm sorry.
How do you like where the story is heading, eh guys? Also, that bit about Sasuke activating his sharingan when Sakura was sleeping, I will tie it to the story eventually. Till then, keep speculating. And if Sasuke seems a bit yappy to you, I apologize. I try to keep him in character as much as possible, but since the curse of hatred has been lifted, I imagine he's a leeedul bit more open now.
Review, you wonderful people!