Disclaimer: Naruto is the property of Masashi Kishimoto and not me.

Author's Notes: Thank you ten times over to all who have favourited, followed and reviewed this story so far. It gives me no end of joy to see some kind of response! An especially great thank you to KARASU25, whose enthusiastic response spurred me on to this next chapter. I hope you enjoy! And to other readers, please let me know what you think.

"Sakura-chan? Are you awake?"

There was a knocking at her bedroom door. Sakura opened her eyes. The cool grey light of dawn was pushing through the curtains. On the bedside table, the alarm clock was lying on its face. She must have switched it off, but, for the life of her, she couldn't remember when she had.

"Sakura-chan?" called the voice outside her room again. The knocking grew more frantic, until her mother flung open the bedroom door. "Sakura-chan!?"

Her mother saw Sakura sitting up and rubbing her eyes, and stopped in the doorway. The colour slowly returned to her white face. She breathed out slowly with her hand to her heart. "Please, Sakura-chan," her mother said, smiling wearily, "answer the door when I knock. I thought…I thought…"

Hearing the tremor in her mother's voice made Sakura want to curl up in bed again, but this time in shame. Her mother worried about her enough as it was, what with Sakura's work in the hospital, and the breath of the Plague in the air. She shouldn't have to needlessly worry every morning that her daughter had died in the night.

"Sorry, Mum," Sakura said, stretching as she stepped out of bed and yawning. "I'll get dressed now."

"How are you feeling today?"

"Fine," she replied quickly, and then realised Mum was still waiting in the doorway, and so added, "No coughs or throat tickles, and I can feel all my fingers and toes."

She watched Sakura tie up her hair for the day and sighed. "I'm being silly, aren't I? Nobody just keels over from the Plague. I need to stop worrying and remember the stages. You would've thought the mum of a medic-nin could at least do that."

As her mother earnestly chastised herself, Sakura smiled. "There's a poster on the fridge door to help you."

"I'm well aware of that, young lady," her mother said primly, but at last she turned away. "I'll do your breakfast. It's the least I can do."

There once was a time when people thought plagues and agues and poxes were caused by malevolent demons and lurking sprites, unleashed by unwitting sins or the displeasure of the gods. Then there was the time when they said diseases were foul mists, deadly miasma that oozed from the ground and the pores of the infected.

As Sakura travelled through the streets of Konoha, she felt she could understand those beliefs. There was a tension in the empty streets like a breath unbreathed, a living anticipation that was coiled and dangerous - the silence of birds when a wolf was crouched in the ferns. It was a settled and heavy unease, unmovable as a fog.

She saw were figures dressed head to toe in cloaks and the council issued visors. They were the ninjas - the genin in yellow, the chuunin in blue, the jounin in red and the medic-nin in black. Only their eyes were visible and those eyes were usually cast down to the ground as they went about their missions. Little was spoken in the early morning apart from the formal greetings.

The non-ninja civilians were just beginning to open their shops. As she ran past the local convenience, the owner was rolling up the shutters. He was an old scowling man who smelt faintly of tobacco and mackerel.

"Morning, Teranaka-san," Sakura called out.

Teranaka turned around and lifted his greying eyebrows. "I didn't recognise you in your medic gear. You doctors look like witches in your all blacks. Any chance you could magic some ninjas back to life?"

She laughed, despite the bitter note to his joke. "How are things?"

"Less customers, so less business," Teranaka said, looking grim. He rolled up his sleeves and finished pushing the shutter up above the door. "You run along now. Go do your job and save some ninjas. That'll save me and my old shop."

There were shops closed all along the street. Many of the civilians with ninjas in their families had fled the town before Konoha had been quarantined and now the glass windows of their shops were pasted over with newspapers. More fool them, thought Sakura a little bitterly, because they had taken the Plague with them and died anyway. Nobody was leaving Konoha anymore. Either the gates of the other towns were closed to them, or the Plague was already there. Besides, when picking between a village, with only the local healer, and Konoha, with the most advanced knowledge of ninja medicine in the Land of Fire, Sakura thought it was obvious which the better option was.

The receptionist was already at the hospital desk, shuffling feebly through papers. She looked up when Sakura signed in. By the looks of it, she had been at the desk all night. "The meeting's in the Mochizuki Room, Fourth Floor," the receptionist told her flatly, before going back to her papers. She was ticking off the addresses of patients, the ones who had died in the night. Someone would have to go round from the hospital later to, on the face of it, offer condolences, but in actuality check for signs of infection in the rest of the family. Sakura hoped she wasn't doing rounds today.

As she climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, there was the sound of running footsteps. Shizune appeared at the top of the stairs looking as pink in the face as Tonton. "Oh! Sakura-chan!" Shizune cried. "Thank goodness. I was about to send a messenger to your house. Come on. Hurry. Nearly everybody else is here."

"Who's missing, Shizune-san?"

"He's not missing. Kakashi's just bleeding late, as usual," Shizune muttered. "Now come on. Tsunade's on her third cup of coffee already."

It was nearly a week after the first three cases of the Plague. Tsunade had announced a formal meeting to bring together results of their research and decide on new measures. Shizune pushed open the door to the Mochizuki Room. "Found her on the stairs," Shizune announced, as Sakura followed her in, thinking that the circle of medic ninjas sitting about the table in their black visors and hoods looked like oversized crows crouched about a body.

"What kept you? Never mind. We'll have to save cards for another time," Tsunade's voice came from the largest figure in black at the end of the table. She packed away the cards she had been shuffling in her gloved hands and motioned for Sakura to sit at the empty space to her left. Shizune took the empty seat to her right.

There were several jounin in red cloaks at the table too. One was petting a large grey dog. Another sat with his arms crossed. Sakura could see the edge of a scar near his eye through the slit of his visor – it was probably Shikamaru's dad. There was one empty seat at the table waiting for Kakashi-sensei.

A gloved hand touched her wrist. Sakura looked up to find Ino sitting next to her, pens and paper ready to take notes. "He'll be here soon," Ino said. "Don't worry."

"Now that Sakura's here, let us begin," said Tsunade and she clasped her hands in front of her. "The first item on the agenda is our research on disease prognosis. Shizune-san, would you please stand?"

"Yes, Ma'am," Shizune stood from the table with a stack of notes. "From a study of approximately three thousand patients in collaboration with the head physicians of Ageha and Tateha," she nodded then to two figures in black at the end of the table, "we have made the following observations. The disease acts over a course of ten to fourteen days, the majority dying around day thirteen. After initial infection there is an asymptomatic latent period of three days, in which the patient is not infectious. This stage is followed by five days in which the patient is highly infectious and experiences chronic coughing and a reported dulling of the senses. As the disease progresses white sputum is observed. The patient may experience a generalised pain in his limbs and lose sensation in the extremities of his body. In the final stage of the disease, Rasmussen's aneurysm tends to be a major cause for haemoptysis – "

There was a sheepish knock and Kakashi entered the room. "Sorry, sorry. I fell in a plague pit."

Tsunade tutted impatiently and gestured for him to take a seat. Sakura felt the tension in her chest finally ease away and uncapped her pen to take notes.

"- haemoptysis," continued Shizune, "and this is followed by rapid multiple organ failure, and death. Throughout the course of the disease, physicians have noted fevers, chills, night sweats and weight loss."

She sat down and took a deep breath. Public speaking wasn't one of Shizune's strengths and she was sweating under her cloak.

"The identity of the pathogenic organism itself I shall discuss with the aid of my two apprentices," Tsunade said, looking round the table and then nodding at Ino and Sakura. "We found that the cell walls did not take up a Grams stain, but appeared red under a microscope with the Ziehl-Neelsen. Looking at the lipid rich cell walls and the similarities in its pathology, we have identified the pathogen as a hypervirulent strain of Mycobacterium."

One of the medic-nin raised a hand. Tsunade nodded at her to speak. "Have we found out why it's only infecting ninjas and not the civilians?"

Tsunade looked to Ino, who cleared her throat and spoke. "On testing the Konoha civilians, we actually discovered that a lot of the civilians are infected, but the disease has not progressed to its infectious stage. The bacteria don't multiply in their bodies, because the bacteria only multiply in response to a very particular environmental stimulus." Ino shivered and gripped her notes. "The bacteria multiply in the body with chakra use, and they multiply faster the stronger the chakra of the infected ninja."

There was a muttering from the ninjas around the table and frantic scribbling of notes. A medic-nin stood and shouted out, "This would explain why the chuunin and the jounin are the most affected groups, as opposed to the young children and the elderly."

"That is correct," Tsunade said with a nod as an appreciative mutter arose again. She then tapped the sheet of paper under Sakura's nose with her pencil and raised her eyebrow. This was Sakura's cue to stand and speak. "My apprentice will now take us through the proposed origin of the disease."

As all eyes turned on her expectantly, Kakashi's eyes glittering, Sakura breathed in and turned to her notes. After Hijiki Gobo had died his notes from Orochimaru's laboratory had been sterilised and passed to her and a team of medic chuunins, along with a case of cloudy vials found in Nemoto Ninjin's office. She had been up all night summarising their results.

"Laboratory Twenty Nine," Sakura began, swallowing nervously, "was the laboratory in which Orochimaru was overseeing the care of a single patient, Kimimaro of the Kaguya Clan. At some point during his errands for Orochimaru, Kimimaro was infected with a rare kind of chakra bacterium. From the laboratory reports, it was a disease with a very slow effect, a chronic disease, but the effects were the same as what we are experiencing now. The disease affected Kimimaro and not Orochimaru, nor Kabuto because of the quality of Kimimaro's bloodline limit.

"A unique limit that enabled plastic control of his osteoblasts and osteoclasts, Kimimaro's chakra system was constantly adjusting and readjusting as he transformed his body. It was in these stages of system adjustment that the old strain of the disease multiplied."

"I'm not entirely sure I understand – " began a red cloaked jounin.

"It means if the chakra use is accompanied with some kind of physical transformation," Kakashi whispered to him, his eye half-lidded as he listened. Sakura noted that the pen and paper in front of him remained untouched.

"Orochimaru valued Kimimaro highly and set Kabuto to find a cure for the disease. In the meantime," Sakura turned over the page of her notes, "in the meantime, Orochimaru took the Mycobacteria strain from Kimimaro and developed a range of hypervirulent strains with the potential for use in biowarfare. Nemoto Ninjin infected herself with the first generation of the hypervirulent strains. The other nine in the case were even more virulent and deadly than the disease we are dealing with now."

"Question," said Nara, raising his hand amidst the angry and scared buzz of voices. Tsunade gave him permission and he lowered his hand. "Do the elders know that Konoha has a powerful set of bioweapons in its possession?"

"They will know after this meeting," Tsunade's eyes gleamed, "that I burnt the case myself to stop it falling into the wrong hands. Continue, Sakura."

Nara Shikaku relaxed his grip on his armrests and seemed relieved. Sakura took up her notes again. "The only known patient of the old strain being Kimimaro, we propose that the old strain be henceforth known as Mycobacterium kimimarosis, and the strain we are dealing with now as Rapid Action Mycobacterium kimimarosis. In short, RAMK."

She sat down as the medic-nin talked around her. Kakashi gave her thumbs up. Sakura smiled but then couldn't help but wonder what Kakashi and the Inuzuka woman beside him were doing there. Nara Shikaku was there to give advice on devising a strategy to combat disease spread. There was a jounin with milk-bottom thick glasses from the treasury and a chuunin in blue from the Konoha Publications Office. The Publications Officer was recording the meeting into a scroll seal and was responsible for making the pamphlets and editing the Konoha Times. There were lines around his eyes and bags of fatigue. His forehead was greasy. The previous officer had died only two days ago and the thought no doubt weighed on his mind.

"The Kazekage has said he is will gift us medical glassware and fine-filtering masks, but apart from that notice, we have heard nothing from the other nations," Tsunade informed the ninjas in her crisp, brisk tone. "The Raikage and Tsuchikage, however, have recently put out orders to kill foreign ninjas and burn their bodies on sight. We shall see what the Mizukage has to say soon. Unfortunately, it will only be a matter of time before RAMK reaches them."

There were dark murmurs of agreement and knowing smiles. Kakashi raised an eyebrow and Sakura had a feeling that he very much disapproved of the gallows humour. The meeting moved on to discuss the Konoha economy and the lack of clients coming to Konoha to employ their ninjas. It seemed to be of some concern to the treasurer, who kept on pushing the glasses up the bridge of his nose, and sweating and stammering, but Tsunade, Sakura knew, was only half-listening. Shizune knew that too and had pulled out a seal scroll to record what the man was saying.

The hands of the clock slid round and touched eight. When they finished talking about the state of Konoha's coffers, Tsunade spoke up again. "To stop the spread, our best course of action is to take advantage of the three day latent period before the patient becomes contagious. Hatake Kakashi, you had a proposal for this?"

Kakashi started and blinked. "I did?"

"This is no time for games, Kakashi," snapped a medic-nin.

"Forgive me, Hokage," Kakashi said with a mild smile. He clapped his fist in his palm and raised a finger. "Yes, now I remember!"

"Watch where you're going!" a man hollered, picking up the end of the stretcher he had just dropped. Through the visor of his black robes, the man's eyes glinted icy and sharp.

"Sorry!" Naruto shrank back to let the man pass by into one of the many ranks of tents set up outside the hospital and then looked around the hospital grounds in bewilderment. "What the hell's been happening here?"

He had been in the Myoboku Mountains when the news reached him about the plague and, as soon as he heard, he had made the preparations to come back. Naruto couldn't stand the thought of being away, safe and sound and oblivious, when all the people he knew were fighting for their lives back home here in Konoha, where his friends lived.

They had let him in at the gates, although the ninjas had tried very subtly to urge him away. Nobody had said anything about stopping idiots trying to get into a plague-ridden city, only those trying to get out. Not that there were many of those anymore.

The first thing that had taken getting used to were those accursed robes the ninjas were all wearing, as though they were afraid of the very air around them, which they were. He could see it in the lines about their eyes and the heavy purpose of their movements, like they didn't know when they were seeing the last loaf of bread in their hands or whether they were touching the doors of their houses for the final time, lighting their final candles. Naruto recognised Rock Lee first. Those thick black eyebrows were a dead giveaway behind his visor.

"Bushybrow!"

Rock Lee glanced up and his eyes watered. "Naruto! Naruto, my fellow comrade in the vigours of youth-dom! Why? Why have you come back?"

"You think I could stay away?" Naruto laughed. The laughter sounded a little hollow in the street, but he ignored the disapproving looks turned his way with the ease of habit. "I heard about the Plague. I'm here to help."

Lee grasped his hands and shook it fervently. "That is so noble of you! But I'm afraid there is little that you can do here. There's little any of us can do, if we're not medics."

"I'll do anything I can," Naruto said, looking down the street. Three ninja were pulling a wagon loaded with long, lumpy objects wrapped in sheets towards a thin column of smoke beyond. He swallowed, the Adam's apple bobbing in his throat uncomfortably. "I'll do anything. What are you doing?"

Lee pointed to the wicker basket strapped to his back. "Delivering rice. A lot of ninja families are shutting themselves up in their homes – the one's with children. The Plague doesn't touch the children, but it gets their parents and Konoha doesn't want any more orphans, if we can help it. Anyway, no clearer show of the power of youth!"

"You want help with that?" Naruto asked, as Lee strode on with his shoulders hunched under the basket, frowning with determination.

"I shall see my rice delivered if it be the last thing I do!" said Lee stubbornly, but his eyes were smiling. "Haruno-san and Yamanaka-san are at the hospital. They'll be busy, but they'll be happy to see you back. And if you want to do something, the hospital will find you something to do."

"Thanks, Bushybrow."

Lee suddenly stopped and looked over his shoulder. "As much as I admire your fashion sense, Naruto, you'll have to get a suit from the hospital to move around town."
"Nah, I'll be fine just as I am," said Naruto, putting his hands on his hips. "I don't need no cloak and hooded mask to make me the handsomest ninja in Konoha village."

"But you'll get infected, and with your high levels of chakra - " Lee began to stammer and Naruto was alarmed to see huge globs of tears welling in the corners of his eyes.

"Lee, chill, I'll be fine. Trust me. I'm …" Naruto stalled and scratched his face. How could he explain to Lee that the nine-tailed fox sealed in his belly protected him from chakra illnesses, making Naruto immune to the Plague? As much as he hated to admit it, Jiraiya had been right. Jiraiya had advised Naruto from going back to Konoha. He said that it would be difficult for Naruto to explain his immunity, but Naruto had imagined that so long as Tsunade and the jounins understood he would be able to get by just fine.

Naruto settled for putting his hand on Lee's shoulder and looking him in the eye. "Because I'm too stupid to be killed off by some bug, right?"

"Right!" agreed Lee, and he wept fervent tears. "Because you are a truly moronic ninja, Naruto-kun! I salute you in your gutsy stubbornness!"

And bidding Naruto goodbye, Lee strode away down the road, still happily weeping. Naruto stared after him until he turned the corner of the road, before making his way to the hospital.

It took him half an hour to find Sakura amongst the tents pitched outside, or rather, she found him. The wards in the hospital were overflowing. There was no more room inside for patients, so they had set up these emergency wards in the open air. All around him, the medic-nins looked the same, flitting around in their black canvas robes and visors, and just looking at them made Naruto's skin crawl. The suits for the ninjas were practical, but they made the doctors look like shadow figures from nightmares.

"You're looking a little lost," said a dry voice behind him, when Naruto had finished glancing into a tent full of gaunt and pale men, lying still, very still, on low reed bedpans, feeling sick to the stomach.

He whirled round and grinned shakily. "Sakura-chan!"

"Naruto, you idiot. Why didn't you stay up on the mountain? No, don't even bother answering." Sakura sighed and slapped her forehead with her palm. "Anyway, you're here now. Better make yourself useful. We can't have you lounging around, dreaming about ramen, when you've got a thousand times the energy of the rest of us. We'll have to find you a suit…" she trailed off and looked at him critically. "I don't think we have any for genin in your size…"

"Don't worry, I won't need one!" Naruto told her jovially. "They're optional, right?"

"That's only because we didn't think anybody would actually be stupid enough to opt out, but, somehow, I reckon you'll be alright. Things have a silly way of working out for you, don't they?" Sakura began to walk towards the main hospital building. Naruto followed, still marvelling at the sights of the strange robed figures carrying stretchers, holding clipboards, shouldering packs and baskets and bedding, drifting all around them like coloured ghosts. It didn't look like Konoha anymore. This version of Konoha was an alien country to him.

"What do you think of it?" Sakura asked, as she caught sight of him staring. "Do you think this is Hell?"

"It isn't Hell," Naruto said firmly, clenching his fists. "It's still got our people in it. It's still got all our friends in it. And it's got Konoha ninjas helping other Konoha ninjas like only Konoha ninjas know how. It's a battlefield, Sakura-chan, but not Hell."

It suddenly struck Naruto that he didn't actually know if Konoha did still have all their friends in it. He had met Lee and now Sakura. Lee had talked about Ino, but he knew nothing about what had happened to the others. What about Shikamaru and Chouji? Neji, Tenten and Hinata? What about the jounins? How were they all holding up?

That moment when he couldn't even ask Sakura if their friends were dead or alive, Naruto finally realised what the feeling clawing its way up his throat since he stepped through the Konoha gates had been. It was dread - the dread of standing at the edge of an ocean and seeing the rolling crest of a very dark wave coming to the shore.

Strangely enough, they could hear the sound of barking dogs coming out of Tsunade's office. Sakura knocked on the door and they stood in the corridor, waiting to be let in.

Naruto thought of Kakashi-sensei and his pack of ninken. He thought of his friends, and then his thoughts turned to the men at the gates who had laughed when he had entered the village and told him he wouldn't be able to get out again.

At least, Naruto told himself, I have a village, even a sick one, because in the village we all look out for each other.

His thoughts turned to the ninjas who were village-less and on the run in the forests of the Land of Fire, being hunted as rogues or criminals.

"I wonder where he is?" Naruto murmured, as a medic-nin ran past them with a fistful of painkillers.

Sakura looked up at the ceiling, and the barking from Tsunade's office seemed to get louder. "Sasuke-kun? Who knows. But the other nations are killing all strange ninjas on sight now. He won't be able to go very far."

It was night on the road and the mosquitoes were already whining. Three figures in long coats were waiting in a hawthorn thicket, killing their breaths. There was a rustle in the grass, and another figure joined them.

"Finally, she's here!" one said, pushing himself up with the help of a giant sword. "How long does it take to buy some grains?"

"Shut it, Suigetsu," the last figure snapped. "It was hard enough getting past the guards. The town was much better guarded than usual and I could hardly find a shop open to steal from. I'd like to have seen you do better!"

"Enough," said another, rising to his feet. "Let's move."

"One moment." The figure who had been to the town coughed into her fist, cleared her throat and then coughed some more.

"Are you alright?" asked the largest figure in the group.

"It's just a cold," she replied. "Sasuke-kun, please, don't worry on my account."

"Sasuke isn't worrying about you," muttered the figure with the sword. "That was Juugo. Are you deaf as well as blind in the dark, Karin?"

"Enough," said the figure already quickly moving along the road. "Let's move on."

The four figures melted into the darkness as shadows.