Day 19:
Ino is out partying and Sakura is up late decoding a letter. This may as well just be a normal Saturday night, she thinks wryly.
An hour later, she looks down at her handy work and frowns. The letter from Tsunade is disappointingly short.
Results are the same here. No good news. Have you managed IR on an unused sample? The active substance may be undetectable in the blood due to binding of organic compounds. I can imagine a few ways one might distort results that way when faced with most urine/blood tests.
And lastly,
Have you considered other possibilities?
The final question is a little bewildering. Other than the dozens of tests she's run on Ino's various bodily fluids, the chakra scans, and the little information she managed to glean from the used patches, she can't think of any other way to go about this. Whatever is causing the effects of the Rapture is impressively elusive. When they find its creator, she might have to shake his hand before she rips it off.
Sakura grabs a pen and paper to prepare a response. At least the first parts, she can address.
Shishou,
No luck on that end. We haven't been able to procure such a sample as of yet, but progress has been made, and that will likely come soon – I hope. I've considered that the active substance may be obscured in such a way, but there are no unusual disturbances in protein levels that might suggest such a thing, other than the obvious hormonal dysfunction in serotonin/dopamine reuptake. If that is the case, I have nowhere to begin in terms of finding a way to isolate it.
What do you mean, "other possibilities"?
My partner is handling symptoms of addiction well. First two weeks showed few negative behavioral changes. She's lost some weight and shows signs of fatigue now, but nothing dramatic. Her chakra control is still abysmal as of today, and getting worse, along with increasingly elongated times of recovery after each burst. I'm not yet sure if it's something specific to the drug, or the result of the disturbance of physiological functioning overall. Advice?
She does seem to be more urgent about the events, however. I'm worried that the addiction may be getting the best of her whether she admits it or not. She leaves quickly and spends little time here compared to the first two weeks. I'm worried that it might be me, and not the effect of the drugs. I'm not sure if I've done something wrong. With her heightened empathy and intensified emotions, I find that we're able to communicate in a more honest way than previously, now that we're not fighting all the time, and I'm worried that she's avoiding me now because –
The pen stops. Sakura slaps a hand to her forehead.
"Damnit," she berates herself aloud.
It's not a diary entry, and she's not a schoolgirl that needs to sit around and write diary entries to sort out her feelings, anyway. …Even if that's how it's beginning to feel.
She crumples the letter, perhaps with a bit more vigor than needed, and starts again. The new one is short, to the point, and entirely professional when she seals it and sends it off.
Sakura flops down on the mattress. She picks up one of the books she'd brought and has already read twice. It's hardly a good distraction.
Tsunade hadn't even asked about Ino, and she'd gone ahead and written her half a novel about the girl and the weird things going on in her own head. It's true that she's been getting a little bit mixed up lately, what with all the time they've spent together, and how easy and sometimes thoughtlessly intimate the conversations are, but Sakura has always had rather volatile emotions.
She has been known to snap at people at the slightest provocations, or become fiercely attached to ideas to the point of near obsession, and… well, it makes sense. The stress of this mission and her frustrations at being unable to untangle this mystery are probably adding to her warped perceptions. Ino's safety being constantly jeopardized probably isn't helping either.
To make matters even worse, she's going stir crazy. While she could henge to hide her distinctly unnatural hair color and go out, it's not like there's anything to do outside this room other than eat or sit at a bar and get drunk, which she wouldn't do anyway, and especially not while on a mission. She's hardly left this room in the past nineteen days. It's probably not doing her sanity any favors.
Sakura gives up on the novel. How can Kakashi read the same book so many times without getting bored, she wonders. She checks the time: one-thirty. Good. Ino will be back in a little over an hour – and that's another thing, Sakura thinks, piling up arguments. Being cooped up in this room and constantly attending to Ino's physical and mental health basically means that her life for the past few weeks, and for the foreseeable future, more or less revolves around the other woman. So, it makes sense, this weird attachment she's forming.
Not that they haven't always been attached, she concedes. It's just a little different. Now she finds herself occasionally second-guessing her words in a way she wouldn't have a few weeks ago. Watching her friend go through this high-stakes, tumultuous experience constantly reminds her of the reasons why she's always had such strong admiration for her – admiration she won't admit out loud, of course – and all those personality traits, the quirks and Ino's sense of humor, have become doubly obvious. Ino is strong-willed and confident and naturally charismatic. She injects humor in places Sakura would never think to, even despite this life-threatening situation, and she's sure of herself and her feelings in a way that Sakura never has been. Ino is the master of her own mind. Sakura struggles just to keep hers in check most of the time.
So, there's already their long and emotionally intense friendship, the fact that they've never been on a mission alone together, the circumstances… there are a lot of reasons why Sakura suddenly feels the need to sort out her thoughts via journal like an adolescent school girl with a crush.
Now she just has to figure out whether or not that makes them any less real.