Chapter 12 - Phosphorescence Trail

Andou told Sakura that Naruto hadn't left his office since arriving in the early morning - he hadn't left since Andou had come in for work, at any rate, and Andou always came in very early. There'd been advisers in to see him, accountants, frustrated citizens - the usual.

"Those men from the Taki syndicate didn't even leave any payment for our services in helping with Kiine-san, or much of anything else, for that matter. That's a big problem…" he said, thoughtfully. He adjusted the papers in his arms. "There are a lot of people mad at him for just letting them leave like that."

"Oh… wow," Sakura said. That was how badly this was all affecting him? Naruto wasn't book-smart, but he was by no means stupid. He knew how to run his village. Though he was very much prone to charity cases - usually dealt with personally, because that was just the kind of guy Naruto was - but he always made sure payment was given where payment was due.

"Yes. All of these papers? IOU's," Andou explained. He shifted them again. "Well, most of them, anyways… I've got to organize them, put them in a binder, at least; maybe make a spreadsheet to keep track of which business got stiffed where; and there's also the investigations we gotta do on which claims are legitimate or not…"

"Andou-kun, can you get a message in to him, at least?" Sakura asked, before he could wander off, his white eyes shining with numbers and order. She could feel her foot tapping uncontrollably. "At least tell him that I want to talk to him soon. It's kind of urgent."

Andou smiled. If he wore glasses, this was where he'd adjust them, needlessly, smiling over the tops of the frames. "You don't need to ask me. He'll see you no matter what, Sakura-san."

Andou was a very truthful young man.

When Sakura entered Naruto's office, Andou opened the door for her. Naruto was sitting with his hands folded together on the desk, head down, shoulders hunched. He looked tired, and there were papers everywhere.

"Hey," she said, quietly. Andou closed the door behind her. "You feeling all right?"

"Huh?" He looked up. His eyes were half-closed. "Oh, hi, Sakura. What are you doing here?"

She took a breath, in, and out. "I need to talk to you about something," she said. "About Yuki - um - I mean, Kiine-san." She was still getting used to calling the girl by her real name. Everyone was.

She saw something harden in his eyes. "Oh."

"Is it… okay if I ask you a few things first? I mean, I get that you're a little stressed," she said.

"Stressed? Me? Nah, I'm fine," he said. His laugh sounded more like a sigh. "What did you wanna talk to me about?"

Sakura stepped forward, took a seat in the chair across from his desk. "Do you remember when I took some blood samples from you and… Kiine-san, a few days ago?"

He narrowed his eyes, struggling to remember. "Sorta. It was for… chakra-stuff, right?"

Good enough. "Well, not just that. One of the tests I conducted was…" Come on, Sakura, man up! "It was for… paternity."

Silence and narrowed eyes. It took a moment for her to realize that it was less him being angry at her and more him simply not understanding what the heck she was going on about. Probably.

"I wanted to see if you two were related, Naruto. Like… father and child."

Naruto blinked a few times. "…but why did you wanna do that?"

"There were just rumors going around, I wanted to…" Prove a point? She could practically hear Sasuke's voice in her head. "…clear up some things."

"…seriously, though, why did you think I was her dad?"

What, it wasn't obvious? "Look, never mind. The fact is that I had tests done, okay?"

"Okay." Naruto thought for a moment. "So… is this what you wanted to talk to me about? 'cos… well, I'm not Kiine-san's dad, and she just went home this morn-"

"I'm not done yet, Naruto," Sakura said. She groaned slightly. How in the world was she going to explain this…? "Well, see, normally I'd have just not told you about this."

"Why's that?"

"If you two weren't related," she explained, "then I wouldn't have even brought this up to you."

There was a moment of thought, internal processing.

"…wait, but… I just said that I'm not her dad or anything, y'know." Naruto was making a strange face, like somebody had just told him to perform long division while juggling. "At least, I don't think I am… And anyways, I didn't even know her before she came to Konoha. How in the…"

There was an opening here, and Sakura seized it before she could think too hard on what he'd just said. "Well, see… technically, Naruto, you aren't her dad. Not even remotely."

A pause.

"…huh?"

"All things considered, it's genetically more likely that she's your mom, rather than your daughter," Sakura continued. "That's how unlikely it is."

A long pause.

"…okay, I'm confused. Kiine-san's my… mom?"

Sakura sighed. "No, no, she's not your mom, Naruto."

"Then why'd you say she was?"

"I never said that, I was just trying to make a point!" Sakura said. "Can you just listen for a moment? I'm trying to tell you how those blood tests turned out!"

"Okay, okay… Just don't go sayin' stuff like that, y'know?" Naruto seemed just so suddenly more awake, leaning forward. "I mean, it's kind of impossible for Kiine-san to be my mom, that's just weird…"

"Yeah, yeah, I know," Sakura said. "I'll get to the point."

Naruto nodded once, twice. "Okay, tell me."

"See… okay. We tested your blood, and the funny thing is that you have enough genes in common with each other to be definitely related." She added, after a moment, seeing his eyes beginning to narrow in confusion, "Genes are like these things in your blood that determine things like… what you look like, or your chakra type. You get half from your mom and half from your dad."

"Huh." Naruto thought on this for a moment. "So these… gene things. You said there are enough for us to be… related?"

"Yeah, we found enough matches."

More thinking. "But… you just said that there's no way I could be her dad."

"Mhm, which is what made it so confusing at first."

"Well, how d'you mean that?" Naruto said. "I mean, I'm not her dad, so…"

"Well, I was getting to that. See, we looked into these other things, called mitochondria? They're…" She could see Naruto's eyes narrowing even further. "Okay, we'll say that they're like genes, too, but you only get them from your mom," Sakura explained. She opened the folder, looked over the papers again, as if to remind herself what they meant. "You and Kiine-san had the same mitochondria."

Naruto thought about this for a while. "But if you only get them from your mom… But how does that even?"

"Well, there's a lot of ways this can happen, Naruto," Sakura said. "For example… if you were her mom, then you'd have the same mitochondria."

Naruto stared at her for a moment, and then laughed, mightily. "Okay, Sakura, get serious with me here."

Come to think of it… "Well, hey, you said that you didn't know if you were her dad or not…"

"But I'm not her dad. Pff, you said so yourself…"

"But you're not her mom, either, right?"

Naruto just laughed at her.

Well excuse her for wanting to get a confirmation!

…why the hell were you thinking that was even a possibility, anyways…? Kiine is just flat-out not descended from him. End of story.

(Sakura really did wonder sometimes.)

"Okay, okay. Something that's not blatantly impossible, then," she said. Naruto was still sort of laughing at her, but they both managed to sort of compose themselves. "Well, if you two were siblings, too, you'd have the same mitochondria. Even half-siblings, if you had the same mother."

He fell silent. The look on his face was sort of hurt, sort of confused.

"…okay, so I know that's impossible, too…" Sakura said, averting her eyes for a moment. "But… say your mother had a sister, and she had kids, then you guys would all have the same mitochondria. Heck, anyone from your mother's family that's female probably has the same…"

Naruto's face had frozen. Sort of hurt, sort of confused.

"…you see what I'm getting at?" Sakura said, softly.

Naruto didn't say anything.

"It means that… considering the genes you share, and the mitochondria, then maybe… she's from your clan, Naruto. That maybe you have… family, living somewhere."

Real family, she almost wanted to add. Why did she think that, though?

Isn't it obvious?

She left this unvoiced.

There was something like a smile on his face, now. "So that's why you wanted to talk to me about this?" he said again, after a while.

She nodded. "Yeah. I mean, that's… kind of something important to know, I guess?"

"Kind of important? Kind of?" His sort-of smile grew into something more real, and he was starting to laugh, in short bursts. "Well if I've… got a clan somewhere, y'know… That's what this means, huh? Really?"

"Well, I'm going to have to look into the matter a little more, but… yeah." Sakura was smiling, now, the same smile she'd had when she first realized what the results meant. "That's what the tests are pointing to."

He laughed through his teeth and held his forehead. "Wow, I… I almost can't believe this, y'know…"

"I almost couldn't believe it either, at first!" Sakura added, managing a laugh of her own. "I mean, what a coincidence, right? That someone from your own clan is in something like the, uh… Taki syndicate…" She fidgeted, not looking at Naruto. "But more importantly! That Kiine-san came here, totally by chance, and that we had this done, right? So now we know!"

"…it means that I'll probably have to invite her back, huh," Naruto said, quietly.

Sakura's voice had a strange, uncomfortable laugh in it. "Naruto, where'd that come from?"

"Well, if she's part of my clan, then this means I should call her and her family back to talk with me, right?" Naruto said. His eyes were very wide. "Y'know, because she's from my family an' all. I almost have to, y'know?"

"Well by all means, I think you should call the Taki… family back, to talk about this clan business," Sakura said, "but shouldn't you focus more on… well, the payment they owe us? First and foremost?" How could she forget, with that huge pile of papers that Andou was holding?

And Naruto needed to reminded of things, sometimes. You know, memos. Sometimes multiple ones.

His eyes fell. "Oh. Yeah. That. Huh, I really should get on that, but they only left this morning…" He put his hand on his chin, thinking. "I dunno if it'd be the best idea to go chasing after them now, I mean, the chuunin exams are in a few days, y'know…"

No, Naruto wasn't stupid. He knew how to run a village. "I'm sure you'll figure out a good way of dealing with it. Just don't get too stressed about it right now, okay?" Sakura said.

"Stressed? Me? Nah, I'm fine!" Naruto said, and grinned again. His laugh sounded real. "Sakura, I just found out I got family somewhere. And that Kiine-chan is a part of it. It's… some of the best news I've heard all day, y'know?"

"Well, I'm still gonna do some tests, just to make sure this is really what we're dealing with here, but…" Sakura was smiling, again. "It really is wonderful news, Naruto. I know… how close the two of you were. I bet she'll be really happy to find out!"

"After the chuunin exams, though," Naruto said, nodding; strangely, his smile remained on his mouth, but it was utterly gone out of his eyes. "Thanks for, uh… talking to me about this!"

"Yeah, it's no problem!" She started getting out of her chair, when she noticed that his expression had fallen. "What's wrong?"

"…nothin'. Keep in touch, y'know!" And he was smiling again, a plastic smile.

Sakura waved as she left, feeling relieved, surprised, and slightly worried. What had that frown been about?

(And why wasn't he happier about this, anyways? She'd have thought that surely…)

Oh, never mind. She had to get to the hospital.

She started laughing on her way down the road. The more she thought about it, the more fantastic it seemed.

What a coincidence. What a fantastic coincidence.

A coincidence that someone like Kiine would turn out to be someone like that. That there were still Uzumakis - other Uzumakis - out there.

She couldn't stop grinning. Whether it was over a confused sort of happiness for Naruto or a satisfied victory over Sasuke's skepticism, she didn't know.

Oh, and speaking of Sasuke. Speaking. Of. Sasuke.

There he was.

Sakura's smile grew, if such a thing was even possible. She walked up to him casually, where he was leaning against a wall near one of the training grounds she passed on the way to the hospital, watching as Kyou sparred with the other boy in their team, the girl officiating, in a way.

"Fancy seeing you here," she said.

"Mm." His only other acknowledgement of her was a glance in her direction.

"So I went ahead and got those blood tests done," she told him, and held the folder up. "You know, on your suggestion."

He raised an eyebrow, but he didn't look at her. "Oh, really."

"Yes, really. The results were really pretty interesting."

A slight scoff, but it was a defensive sort of dismissal. "Interesting how?"

"Taki Kiine's an Uzumaki."

Sasuke finally looked at her, and his eyes were ever so slightly wider. "You don't mean."

"Well Naruto's not her father, you at least got that right," Sakura continued, smirking. "But they're from the same clan. On his mother's side."

"…really." There was a darkness in Sasuke's face, one that she had seen a few days ago, when she first suggested the possibility of them being related.

"Yes, really. Fantastic coincidence, isn't it? That this is how it all turned out," she said.

"Yes. Quite the coincidence." He wasn't looking at her any more, instead observing his students. The boy with the dark hair struck another, soft blow to Kyou. "I'm sure Naruto's very excited about this."

"He's pretty excited. It should make the negotiations with the Taki clan go more smoothly, now that we have this link."

"Mm."

Kyou was losing.

"So… I suppose this is a lesson to you, Sasuke!" she added. "Don't go dismissing rumors right off the bat. There's sometimes some truth to them!" She folded her arms, shifting her weight from one foot to the next.

He was trying so hard not to show how he really felt, but she could see it, plain as day.

He said nothing.

She couldn't resist. "Oh, you should see the look on your face," she told him, almost imitating his own, dry laugh. "And anyways, you know what they say. Fool me once…"

"I've had enough," he said, and left the wall. "Kyou, your punches are sloppy! Tighten them, know where you are going to strike!"

His walk was a quick and an angry one.

Satisfied in her revenge, Sakura left as well, and returned to the hospital.

"Suiko-chan, can you get me those blood samples from Taki Kiine? They should be labeled under Hanamura Yukio," she said, entering the lab, the blood test results under one arm. She put a pair of rubber gloves on, having already gotten her coat from the hook in the locker room.

And the samples were fetched, one vial's worth of blood left. Sakura had to be careful, but then again, she wasn't Chief Medical Officer for nothing.

She had a Hunch, see. And given how things had turned out so far, she knew better than to try and deny it.

In genetics testing, everything was uniform. Genes were genes, no matter who their owners were or where they came from.

Looking at blood under a microscope, however? There were certain things you could look for that really identified someone, in a pinch, when you didn't have time to do a full analysis. You cut into an Aburame, for example, and they'd bleed bugs.

…okay, so maybe not that extreme. A better example might be something like a unique sort of cell in the blood that hyper-efficiently converted sugars into chakra. You found them only in Akimichi clan members, and they were enormous, those cells, incredibly hard to miss, and only an Akimichi, with their enlarged blood vessels, could even have them without dying of some sort of blockage. Things like that. They were the sort of things that were published in medical books and field guides, and were often used to establish clan lineage before the advent of genetic testing. Long-established clans tended to have those sorts of things in the blood.

Naruto was no real exception. Sakura'd had a lot of experience looking at his cells, and she knew how to identify them. They were unusual, undeniably so. With him, it was… a resilience of the cells, a toughness, a…

…okay, so she didn't know how the heck else to describe it, because "like they looked like they were made of rubber or something" sounded horribly unprofessional. But his cells were unique, that was for sure, incredibly resilient. And she knew what made them unique, and that was the most important thing.

His daughter had the same cells, too, so she knew it wasn't due to outside circumstances, or the nine-tails.

She took out a dropper and sandwiched a tiny drop of Kiine's blood between two slides and a drop of dyeing agent, and placed the slide under a microscope so she could take a look.

Another grin began growing on her face when she immediately recognized those rubbery cells. Uzumaki cells. Yes, confirmable, absolutely.

But… what were those?

She adjusted the focus on the microscope, narrowed her eyes. One weird little blood cell - no, there were a few others - what? - that just didn't fit. They were… rubbery, but not as much as the others, and slightly… discolored? She squinted some more, trying to figure out just what was going on.

It took a while for her to notice, but eventually, she did.

The handful of off-colored cells there, the ones that seemed so slightly out of place, were glowing. Faintly, ever so faintly, but they were.

It was more than just a residual glow, the hallmark of frequent chakra use; it was the sign of a cell charged with chakra that was slowly ebbing out, from lack of control.

She tried again with another drop of blood, on another slide. And a third, with a different dyeing agent, just to make sure it wasn't just the result of a contamination, somewhere.

No, in every instance, those cells were there.

It startled her, for a moment. Because she knew only one other person with cells like these.

Karin. The only other known living Uzumaki.

But, see, none of that made sense. Sakura had analyzed Karin's blood enough, during and after the war.

Karin's blood was pretty damn unique, if Sakura had to put it that way. There was a strange property to its cells that just seemed to hoard chakra away, until, well, she… released it. In that way that she did. Or… otherwise… well, Sakura never bothered to really ask, it was her technique…

And in any case, when it was discovered that she and Naruto were from the same clan, Sakura had taken blood samples and done a comparison, much like she was doing now.

The cells were nothing alike; every cell in Karin's blood glowed with a radiance lent to it by the chakra that Sakura had never seen before. And Karin admitted, with a half-hearted, defeated sort of shrug, that she'd been "messed-with so much" that she didn't know if her cells were at all "normal" any more, for someone from her clan. "Either that or I've just been an abnormality from the start. A mutation."

And Sakura must have sighed or given her some sort of sad little glance, then, because Karin just glared over her glasses there and went, "Oh, don't give me that. I'm not looking for pity, okay? I'm just stating the facts."

When Naruto's daughter was born, Sakura tested her blood as well, and it was confirmed just how abnormal Karin was, but Karin, again, really did not care, when Sakura wrote to her about the results. She didn't even use the last name that belonged to her, remaining unattached, clanless.

That was just the kind of person Karin was. She looked her past, shrugged, and went "Whatever."

In fact, she was the one to lead the expedition into Orochimaru's abandoned labs and prison complexes to retrieve the remains of his research, once the war was over, since she knew where each of them were and how to explore them without getting killed by the traps. "Developed them with Sasori's help," she explained. "True story."

And her research in developing the Curse Seal Suppression Vaccine - the Seal Rehabilitation Team called them CV's - was unspeakably useful. And dozens of individuals had her to thank for a much better way of life.

Still, some parts of the past she just insisted on holding onto. "Believe it or not, he was a genius. Questionable as his experiments were, I refuse to see his work destroyed, okay?" she had said, after it was suggested that Orochimaru's notes on human experimentation be burned, among other things. "Besides, we'd know nothing about anatomy if it hadn't been for the first daring souls to cut into corpses and see what they looked like inside."

Karin had very red eyes, and they were almost as intimidating as Sasuke's, when she wanted them to be.

"Fortune favors the bold," she had said.

They let Karin keep the originals, after copies were made and stored away into heavily-classified sections of the Konoha archives.

She did make use of them, though rarely. And when she did, the results were always wonderful, beneficial, like the CV's; those wouldn't have even existed, had it not been for those research materials. It was making a good thing out of so much bad.

(Thank goodness.)

They were kept under lock and key, otherwise.

In the meantime, she had set up a clinic on the eastern coast of the continent, in the Land of Waves. Sakura consulted her occasionally, by mail, on more vexing medical matters, but Karin tended to keep in closer contact with the Seal Rehabilitation Team, and helped develop new strains of CV's when resistances began popping up here and there.

Sakura packed the slides of blood away into little sterile, plastic holders, and she had Suiko put the original vial put back into cold storage.

Then, she began writing a letter.

Karin,

Enclosed are slides of blood taken from a 16-year-old female I examined recently. I found some abnormal cells that seemed very similar to yours when I was performing some tests, and I thought to see what you think of them.

I'm enclosing a copy of the results of the tests I performed on her blood, to see if they're of any use to you, as well.

Hope that you are well, and get back to me soon.

- Sakura

She had copies made of the blood test results, and after crossing out "Hanamura Yukio" and replacing it with "Taki Kiine," and correcting the sex on the form. Sakura wondered, for a moment, just how accurate the form really was any more, but given that Kiine was gone, there was nothing she could really do about it. It was accurate enough for the time being.

Sakura had the package sent out via Courier Nin. The courier assured her that it'd arrive in the Land of Waves by the next afternoon, at the latest, before leaving with a jaunty little salute.

She decided not to tell Naruto about it, until Karin wrote back.

Then, Sakura went home.

Kenji and Lee had started dinner without her, since Sakari was out in the field - curry tonight, again? She couldn't help but laugh - but they had just enough set aside for her, kept warm, and waiting.

"You are just in time, my darling!" Lee told her, with his sparkle-smile. He was still wearing the yellow apron he always cooked in as he sat at the table with Kenji, and he got up to meet her, and give her a hug. "I am very glad that you are home."

And Sakura smiled, and hugged him back. "Me too."