Sakura crouched on a tree limb with instinctive ease and gazed down what looked to be a standard cave entrance. The wind gently rustled the leaves around her as she closed her eyes and allowed her senses to reach outward. She looked for traps, seals, other nin, something hidden, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. This made her even more suspicious, as her last contact had mentioned this location in particular as one of Orochimaru's many hidden bases.

Or rather, laboratories of excruciating torture and exciting discoveries, she though wryly.

She stayed in the tree for a few more moments, suddenly feeling violently weary. It had only been two weeks since she had heard about Kakashi's death, killed ignominiously at the hands of a mutation from the Kaguya clan that had been terrorizing outer villages in Fire Country. This mission had been his, looking for Orochimaru's cache of hidden knowledge to bring back to Konoha. She missed him desperately.

Ever since Naruto's death at Pein's hands years ago, she and Kakashi had drifted together whenever he was home from missions. This was never all that often, mostly due to the fact that he had thrown himself back into ANBU with something like suicidal glee. She constantly struggled to keep him in Konoha when he returned broken after one too many missions without proper healing or rest.

One day, Pakkun had come looking for her at the memorial, where she had been tracing her friend's with scarred fingertips. He approached, concern shining in his oversized eyes, but said nothing. She followed him to Kakashi's apartment, only to find the man "sleeping off" four broken ribs and a hastily stitched kunai wound that had jaggedly torn a large hole in his shoulder. After alternately yelling and healing him, Sakura made him promise to come to her after every mission. If he didn't want to visit the hospital, she would fix up his wounds at her home.

"So help me, Kakashi-sensei, if you don't come here, I will find you. I will heal you and break you and then I will heal you again!"

"Maa, Sakura-chan, don't be so mean to your poor old sensei! It's not that bad, I'm still alive aren't I?"

After that, he would stumble in through her bedroom window once he finished reporting to the Hokage, passing out on her bed or floor to wait for her to come home. He never sent any messages to let her know and his ninken weren't always around to be useful. After the third time returning from the Hokage Tower to see Kakashi unconscious and bleeding onto her duvet, she devised a seal that she placed on her windowsill to notify her whenever his chakra signal entered. She tattooed the corresponding alert seal on her wrist and it would burn slightly whenever he dragged himself in.

He noticed it when he literally fell into her bed in the middle of the night, startling her into wakefulness. The burn on her skin was the only thing that saved him from the instinctive senbon she had nearly tossed in his direction. He had eyed the seal as she forcefully man-handled him around on the bed, running glowing green hands over his torso.

"Sakura-chan, are you going through a rebellious phase? You don't need tattoos to attract a bad boy, you know."

She snorted and said, "Kakashi-sensei, I'm not looking to attract anyone. This seal tells me when you're too much of an idiot to let me know that you're bleeding to death in my house."

She efficiently removed his flat jacket and cut off his black shirt before he could reply. Propped up on her pillows, he looked down at the fist-sized hole in his stomach knit together quickly under her skilled hands. Broken bone and ruined organs were made new against the unrelenting surge of her tingling chakra.

"Besides, you're the only bad boy I need, Kakashi-sensei. Caring for any more might very well kill me." She said this lightly, but he recognized what she didn't say.

He didn't question the seal again, pretending to take her healing and her caring for granted. But gradually, there was food on her counter that he made and left for her the day he started a mission and there was a shelf full of the trinkets he brought to her, little ceramic statues that she knew he left, though she had never caught him in the act. Sakura didn't question these things, pretending to take his nonchalant attitude at face value. It was a dance of silent understanding. A shinobi had to look underneath the underneath, after all.

Life wasn't good, she had lost too much for that. Still, she managed to plod on through it. She took whatever small comfort she could in the people she had and dully carried on when they, too, were stolen by death.

Naruto and Tsunade were the first to leave her, one right after another as Pein had been defeated. Naruto's indomitable will had slipped through her fingers as she frantically tried to heal his body, chakra coils burnt beyond recognition. Sakura had begged with him to pull on the Kyuubi's strength, but he had only looked at her with sad blue eyes.

"Sakura-chan, I used everything I had. Everything. But Konoha is safe and so are you and baa-chan and Kakashi-sensei. It was worth it."

Naruto died never knowing that Tsunade wasn't as safe as he thought, having fallen into a coma after using releasing her seal to heal thousands of Konoha's injured. It was a masterful undertaking, something no one else could have duplicated, but the technique had required too much of her own reserves. Tsunade died quietly, in a direct contradiction to the way that she had lived.

Danzo had been nominated Hokage in the aftermath. Sakura's grief had been too cutting for her to immediately understand how this would change everything she knew, but she learned quickly enough. He had called her into the office the day after Tsunade's funeral.

"Sakura-san, as Tsunade's apprentice, you also worked as her assistant, correct?"

"This is partially correct, Hokage-sama. But Shizune is more experienced with the workload than I am." It galled her to call someone else Hokage so soon after her shishou's death, but she remained politely neutral. Medicine was not the only thing time with Tsunade had taught her.

He waved his non-bandaged arm negligently. "Shizune is needed to head the hospital during the rebuilding. I need an assistant and you are qualified. You start now."

Not too long before she died, Tsunade had revealed to Sakura and Shizune her suspicions about the Council's drive to protect Konoha. She didn't think that they were above using anything and everything necessary to create a better military village and damn the ethical consequences. Tsunade had given Sakura a long-term mission to quietly poke through the archives, mission reports and any paperwork she could get her hands on from T&I, to create a dossier against the Council in general and Danzo in specific. Her access to most of this information was well within her rights as the Hokage's apprentice, though she had gotten a knowing look from Ibiki when she questioned the usage of a specific Sand Country poison on a run-of-the-mill border dispute interrogation.

Even though Tsunade was dead, Sakura did not consider her mission complete. Her beloved shishou had essentially entrusted her with Konoha's safety and she wouldn't, she couldn't, give up. Sakura worked as Danzo's assistant, logging time in the hospital whenever she could and sneaking peeks at the classified paperwork he refused to let her touch. She kept all her meticulously written and coded notes in a sealed scroll on her person at all times. She trusted very few people anymore.

Because of her position as his assistant, Danzo rarely gave her leave to take missions out of the village. The report of Kakashi's death gave her the impetus to change that.

"Hmm, so the Hatake brat finally bought, huh? And without completing his mission at that. Konoha shinobi these days are too soft. We'll have to start changing the Academy procedures if this is what we get from them."

Sakura stood beside his desk, white-faced and shaking. Another one of her precious people, gone. It wasn't fair! It wasn't right, that she should be here and healthy when so many of their lives had been cut short.

She took a deep breath and tried to control her trembling hands.

"Hokage-sama, if I may be direct?" She waited until he nodded imperiously. "I know that Kakashi-sensei's mission had to do with Orochimaru's bases. Might I be the one to take over the remaining locations? Surely a background in medicine would be useful …"

Danzo looked vaguely thoughtful. "That could work. Orochimaru's information is too important to Konoha to leave in an uninformed shinobi's hands. You certainly have the most direct experience with him and his work now that Hatake is dead." He saw her flinch at his last words and grimaced. "There's no use crying over what's done, girl. There is only the mission."

Sakura looked down at her hands, steady now. "Yes, Hokage-sama."

"Find Nara Shikamaru, he'll do for your replacement. Head out to Sound Country tonight."

Sakura realized that she had been sitting in the same tree for hours, staring into nothing. She tried to clear her thoughts of the past and hoped that Shikamaru was getting by all right. At least as the Hokage's assistant, he would be relatively safe. He and his father were the only other people left in the village that she spent any of her negligible free time, playing shogi and trying to drink away the inevitable grief that the quiet nights brought on.

The three of them had a standing date to meet in the Nara forest at the end of every week, bringing sake and their weary bodies. Ino and Nara Yoshino had both died not too long after the rebuilding of Konoha had commenced, during the smaller battles that had cropped up once other Hidden Villages realized that Konoha's strength had wavered. The men had never once mentioned their names to her, but she knew they were suffering just as much as she was.

Sakura dropped down from the tree, landing noiselessly. She shunshined quickly toward the cave's entrance while something small and ominous in the back of her mind hoped she never came out.