Disclaimer: I do not have the pleasure of owning Naruto.

She stared, dumbfounded, into the partially crazed Sharingan eyes before her.

'Sasuke? The patient is SASUKE?'

The intensity of his glare was drastically impaired as he winced, one eye shutting in pain. The medic in her sprung to life in her subconscious and spurred her to fling her hands, pumped full of perfectly controlled medical chakra, up to his temples. He jumped at the action, and started to try and attack her and win his freedom from the hospital bed, but only managed to groan in pain before she lulled him back to sleep with her chakra. No matter whom the patient is, no medic in her right mind should allow them to struggle and worsen their preexisting injuries. She gently eased him back into his laying position, carefully turning his head to the side and sliding the white pillow that went with the hospital bed into place.

She backed up, falling limply onto the stool behind her when her knees failed her. Here was Sasuke, the boy who completely shafted her every time she approached him throughout their childhood, the teenager who they had scoured the nations for throughout their adolescence, now a man and badly injured not five feet away from her the very year she turned 18 and was legally an adult. Was this Uchiha going to haunt her for all of her life?

She raised one partially numbed arm to twist the knob on his IV drip, releasing the second bag of fluids to begin their drip into him. Those drugs would keep him well under until her mentor had figured out what to do with the formerly-missing nin.

"Damn it Sasuke, as soon as we decide to stop looking for you, you just show up in our village alone—"

That thought struck her. What was that nagging thing at the back of her mind? Something about his arrival…Oh! That was it! He hadn't been here alone, had he? There had been that red-haired woman with him…but the ANBU had taken her away…away to where? Her head swam for a second as she tried to piece everything together. What had they known about Sasuke's whereabouts prior to his unexpected appearance?

He had taken down the fouler third of the Sannin; that was confirmed. And there had been sources that claimed he had left Otogakure with three other people, all rumored to be heading to the Akatsuki. That meant that for the red-haired woman to be in Sasuke's company, she had to be part of the group he'd formed in Oto. And Sasuke had to have felt safe with her near him; the youngest Uchiha had a habit of acting like a cornered and skittish wild dog when he was hurt, and if he let her stay near him without maiming her, he must've wanted her there.

She needed to go have a talk with this woman.

But first and foremost, she needed to go report to Tsunade. She hadn't had a name to put on the forms, so there was no way for the Hokage to know exactly who was laying in Trauma 1. She stood slowly, the greater part of her consciousness still in partial emotional shock.

She couldn't help herself; she was glued to the spot. She decided, or rather her body did, that she could spare a few minutes to really look at Sasuke instead of analyzing him as a patient. His hair was longer, his jaw was more defined. She noticed that he was very toned for his stature; he was probably somewhere in the ballpark of 5%-2% body fat. She noticed that he looked a lot like someone that she'd seen somewhere before, obviously like himself but strikingly similar to someone who's name she couldn't put her finger on.

She noticed his eyes moving beneath his lids, a sure sign of deep sleep. She couldn't help but smile, only a small smile, at how vulnerable and very much like his younger and happier self he looked in his sleep. His usually stony and apathetic expression had melted away as he had slipped back into unconsciousness. She was mildly put off by that fact that it hadn't left a peaceful expression in its wake, only a blank one. The blankness was softened by the fact that his mouth was just partially open in his sleeping state; if they had been several years younger, she would have giggled at how very much un-grumpy he looked.

She sighed to herself, her gaze dropping down to the floor while she straightened her skirt out of habit. There was no place for that type of thinking in the situation she had found herself in. There was a very dangerous traitor to the village inside of their hospital with unknown numbers of allies inside the village walls as well; if the red-head was here, why couldn't the other two be here as well? There wasn't time for her reminiscing.

She turned away from him, her back erect and her head held high, and silently exited his room. She closed the heavy metal door behind her and locked it before grabbing his patient forms out of the slot in the door and making her way out of the hospital and towards the Hokage's office.

He sighed, shaking his head wearily as he stared at the hard, cold rock before him. His hands were shoved deep into his pockets, his only visible eye trained in on the two etched names that he had irreversibly engrained into his brain. He hadn't been able to protect his teammates, and he wished everyday of his life that they would just walk back into the village, babbling something about a mission that they had just completed. But deep in his heart, he knew that there would never be a day when that would happen.

He often thought of them, and that led to thinking about his own squad of misfits. History really did repeat itself. He just wished, for the sanity of the two remaining members of his original team, that their missing teammate would waltz right back into their lives before it was too late.

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Tell me what you think, or at least whether or not it's complete crap.

-Perceptive Pawn