When Sakura woke up the next morning her head was pounding. She had tossed and turned restlessly all night. If the cries and moans of pain had not been enough to keep Sakura awake, the smell alone would have done it.
She spent the entirety of the morning looking over her notes and studying the few blood samples she had taken. She still found it curious that the nurses and Rokuda had not yet taken ill in spite of having been surrounded by the infection for so long and had taken a blood sample from one of the nurses to compare alongside the sample from the woman she met at the inn.
The infection was brutal, Sakura noted. She had lost the majority of the people who had been at the inn when she arrived. Almost three hundred people had died. Their bodies had been stacked in a pyre a mile or two west. The pyre stayed lit constantly, with a few of the civilian men looking after it, tossing in more bodies as they came.
Her gut wrenched with the thought that she was supposed to have saved them. Her entire purpose in coming to Toyeiki was to save everyone. At the first blur of tears in her eyes, Sakura had angrily wiped them away and refocused her attention on the papers in front of her. She didn't have time to be feeling sorry for herself. Everyone was depending on her.
By mid-morning, Sakura had made some progress.
"Rokuda-san," Sakura said, trying not to wake the few people left who were sleeping, "I think I'm on to something and I need your help."
"Anything, Sakura-san, what is it?"
"You and the nurses," she began, "I've been studying your blood samples and it seems that there are some people who are naturally immune to the disease. I think it might be related to chakra in some way. As far as I know, no shinobi have fallen ill, or no one who is able to use chakra, anyway."
"That makes sense," Rokuda answered, "The nurses and I, we've been exposed for so long. The only thing we have in common is a little knowledge of medical jutsu."
"Right," Sakura said, "But that isn't going to help me come up with a cure. I need to study one of you and see how the infection tries to fight against your body's defenses – if it does at all. Would one of the nurses be willing to let me do that?"
Rokuda tilted her head to the side, pondering who would be best suited for such a thing, "Kira would be willing, I'm sure," she answered, "But how long would this take her away from her duties? We're understaffed as it is."
"I don't know," Sakura admitted, "But if it will help me come up with a cure, it will be worth it."
Rokuda nodded in agreement.
.
Kira was a quiet girl, who Rokuda had incorrectly assumed would have been willing to take part in such a project. Maybe she had mistaken her penchant for avoiding conflict for a willingness to do nearly anything, but it was clear to Sakura that Kira was only doing as she was told.
She flinched at every needle, every probe of Sakura's chakra. She was an exceptionally difficult patient for someone who supposedly dealt with other patients on a regular basis.
"Kira-san," Sakura said, "Are you uncomfortable doing this? Should I ask the other nurse?"
The petite girl shook her head, "No, Amika would not like this anymore than I do."
"Is it really so bad? You have it much easier than the people around you who can barely stand up."
"I know."
"Don't you want to help them?"
"I'm still here, aren't I?"
Sakura narrowed her eyes but said nothing else. She continued to run tests and study the samples for the rest of the afternoon, stopping occasionally to check in on the sick.
So far no one else had come seeking help – no one who had been more recently infected. It should have been a good sign, that no one else was getting sick, but it meant slower progress on the cure.
"Kira!" Sakura exclaimed, startling the poor girl out of the comfortable silence that had descended on Sakura's makeshift office, "I think I have it!"
Kira stood up quickly, nearly knocking over a stack of books on the table beside her, "You do? What is it? How can I help?"
"The infection," Sakura began, pointing to a diagram of the human body in one of her journals, "it seems to be more prevalent in areas of the body where chakra accumulates – chakra points. Except, for those who are sick, they don't have an accumulation of chakra there."
"What does that mean?" Kira asked.
"It means, we can use our chakra to stimulate the chakra points in the infected and hopefully burn off the infection with their own chakra as it responds to our foreign chakra," Sakura answered, pleased with her new discovery.
"So we'll have to do that for every single person here?" Kira asked, "That's not really a cure."
Sakura was too pleased with herself to scowl, "No, but it will help us prevent more people from dying – and if we manage to get every person infected clean, then we won't have to worry about a cure immediately."
Kira shrugged, "Alright, let's do it."
.
For the next few hours, Sakura taught Amika, Kira, and Rokuda how to use their chakra to stimulate the chakra points and burn off the infections. It was tedious work – dangerous work. They could potentially damage chakra pathways and cause severe damage to the central nervous system.
When Sakura was satisfied that each woman was able to perform the task sufficiently, they set about healing the remainder of the sick.
It took the better part of the day, and they lost several patients in the interim, but after a grueling seven hours, each person in the inn was cleared of the infection.
"Thank you so much, Sakura-san," Rokuda said wiping her brow with the back of her hand. "We couldn't have done this without you."
"It's not over yet," Sakura said tightly, "I still need to find an actual cure. We don't know how many more infected there are out there, and this thing is highly contagious. I still would like to be notified if someone else shows up who has been recently infected."
"That might happen sooner than you think," Kira said from her perch on Sakura's cot. She tossed Sakura the newspaper that had been in her lap.
Sakura caught it with ease and glanced down at the headline. It appeared that Toyeiki had just become renowned for its care of the sick. She skimmed the article, noting that the author had deemed Toyeiki to be a safe-haven for the sick.
"Oh my god," Sakura muttered, "I guess we better prepare for an influx of patients, then."
.
Later that night, Sakura sent a messenger bird back to Konoha with a message for Tsunade. She had been in Toyeiki for almost two weeks and was no closer to finding a cure. He work-around had bought her some time for those who were infected, but if she was going to create a vaccine, she needed some help.
She had asked for reinforcements – a small team of her nurses from back home that could help her with the sick, and also some equipment that would be useful for data analysis.
She didn't like to admit it, even to herself, but Sakura felt in over her head. She wasn't used to being the one in charge and it was taking a mental toll on her. There was no one to ask for help, and no one to catch her if she fell.
Having a found a way to help those who were infected, Sakura felt much better about the situation. The inn was no longer filled with the cries of the sick, the moans of pain that had kept her awake for nearly three weeks.
But a cloud hung over her head. Was there something that she was missing? Tsunade had put so much faith in her – it pained her to think that she might have misplaced it. The mission was supposed to only last for a month. That was how long Tsunade had estimated it would take her. She was nearing on three weeks now. Had Tsunade over-estimated her abilities? Was she wrong to have sent her instead of Shizune?
Sakura didn't often doubt her medical skills. Sure, she was young. But Tsunade herself had said that she had surpassed her mentor.
At the hospital, Sakura knew exactly what she was doing. She could heal a broken bone, repair a damaged lung, she could even use chakra to sustain someone's life after they had been dead for several minutes. She was a miracle worker. She could command her nurses efficiently, she could think well under pressure. She could multi-task like a champ.
And yet, she was at a loss.
Unbidden, thoughts of Naruto came to her. She could vividly remember a time that Naruto had hurt himself training and been rushed to the hospital. It was shortly after he had returned to Konoha after training with Jiraiya.
He had used up nearly all of his chakra – an impressive feat for someone like him – and was verging on death when Jiraiya carried him through the hospital doors. Sakura felt lucky to have been standing in the lobby at the time. She wasn't usually one to dawdle – certainly not when there was work to be done. But for whatever reason, she found herself near the entrance, chatting amicably with one of the nurses.
Her heart nearly stopped when she saw Naruto's limp body flung over Jiraiya's shoulder. She had rushed to his side and her glowing green hands reached his chest before Jiraiya had even set him on the gurney.
Had Tsunade been there, she would have snatched Sakura away from the boy so fast it would have given her whiplash. It was a rule – medics could not work on their family. And of course Naruto was family. At least Tsunade would have seen it that way.
But Tsunade was not there, and the nurses were wise enough (or scared enough of Sakura) not to say anything.
For hours, Sakura pumped her own chakra into Naruto's system, slowly leaking it to prevent damage to his chakra pathways. It was grueling work, but if she stopped for even a moment, Naruto's life would be over.
"What do you think you're doing?"
She heard Tsunade enter the room behind her, but she didn't have the strength to answer, or the right words to say. She had been caught red-handed.
"Step away from him, Sakura."
"I can't," she choked out, "I can't let him die."
Tsunade stepped around the girl, clucking like a mother hen. She let her hands fall to Naruto's chest just above Sakura's.
"I'll take over from here. Go home and get some rest."
Sakura nodded and pulled her hands back, relieved that the only other person she would trust to take care of Naruto was there.
"Oh, and Sakura?" Tsunade spoke just as Sakura was disappearing through the door, "Report straight to my office first thing in the morning."
She had been in a lot of trouble for the mishap. Tsunade had stripped her of her duties for an entire week. She wasn't permitted to step foot in the hospital, preventing her from taking care of any clerical work as well.
At first, she felt that the punishment was unfair. It left her with nothing to do but "think about what she had done," in Tsunade's words. Sakura didn't feel that the incident warranted much thinking. She did what she had to do. She saved Naruto's life!
But after the first day, Sakura found some good company.
"Thanks for saving me, Sakura-chan," Naruto said, barging through the front door of her apartment. It was the first time he had ever been there since she had moved while he had been away training.
"You shouldn't have been so stupid," Sakura chided, but her heart wasn't really in it.
"I know, I know," he replied, waving his hand dismissively, "But I was on the verge of figuring out this new jutsu I've been working really hard on."
"Would it have been worth it if you died?"
"It will be worth it if it will help me bring Sasuke back."
The pair fell silent at the mention of their teammate. The air effectively sucked from the room, Sakura collapsed onto her couch with a sigh. Naruto followed suit and threw an arm around her shoulder.
She wasn't sure how long they sat there, or when she had started to lean into him. Those three years away from Konoha had really changed Naruto – had changed her as well. She couldn't remember why she had disliked him so much when they had been genin and felt guilty about the way she had treated him.
He had been obnoxious, true, and that hadn't changed much. But he had also been a good friend, devoted to her when Sasuke wasn't - kind to her when Sasuke was cruel. Realizing that had been Sakura's first step to getting over her crush on Sasuke. Sasuke would never treat her the way Naruto did. And maybe that was what she deserved for being so mean to Naruto for all those years.
"I'm going to bring him back for you, Sakura," Naruto said, his voice low and tense, "I promise."
"Thanks, Naruto."
.
A week later Ino arrived, carrying a massive pack on her back.
"Hey, forehead," she said, tossing her pack onto an empty cot in the lobby on the inn, "It smells like death in here."
Sakura gave her a pointed look and went straight for the pack. It contained several small medical machines that could break down the material make-up of nearly anything placed inside, a microscope, and a few scrolls pertaining to infectious diseases.
"So it's just you, then?" Sakura asked. "I asked for a team."
"You don't need a team when you have me."
"You do understand that you're my subordinate on this mission, right?"
Ino waved her hand dismissively, "Yeah, yeah, whatever."
Together, Sakura and Ino set up the equipment in the office and Sakura filled Ino in on what she had discovered so far. They sent blood samples through the machines, hoping to fill in the blanks with what new information the equipment could provide.
"I don't know, Sakura," Ino said after several minutes, "It doesn't look like the disease is responding at all to antibiotics. You said it didn't even try to adapt to them – they just had no effect."
"Yeah, I know," Sakura said, rubbing her brow with the back of her hand, "That's what I don't understand. The only thing it seems to respond to is chakra."
"Could you create a vaccine infused with chakra?"
Sakura thought about this for a moment, pinching her lower lip between her finger and thumb. "I'm not sure how I would go about doing that," she said, "I've never seen chakra utilized in that way before. It's worth a try, I suppose."
The pair grew silent, each girl scribbling down notes. They worked quietly for a while, and Sakura felt comforted by Ino's presence. She had begun to feel a little homesick after being away from Konoha for so long. It felt nice to have the blonde around, a little reminder of home.
She glanced over at her friend who was chewing her lip with determination as she studied something underneath the microscope. Ino's talents didn't really fall into the medical jutsu category. She had trained with Tsunade, of course, but compared to Sakura, Ino's knowledge of medical jutsu was extremely limited.
With wry amusement, Sakura realized that Tsunade hadn't sent Ino because of her medical knowledge, but rather because of her ability to push Sakura forward, to spur her in to action.
Ino had always been one to get on Sakura's nerves, but not necessarily in the worst possible way. She had a habit of bringing out the competitive nature in Sakura. It all boiled down to Sasuke, she supposed. But she couldn't think about that right now.
"What are you staring at, Forehead?"
"Nothing, Pig."
.
In the few days that followed Ino's arrival, the inn had gone through some drastic changes. After Sakura's discovery of burning off the infection with chakra, the inn's population had dropped to zero, giving the nurses a much needed reprieve and Sakura an opportunity to work on the cure.
But the headlines had brought in an even larger crowd. New sick were constantly shuffled in to the inn, bringing it's population right back up to where it was when Sakura arrived almost a month ago.
To her dismay, it seemed that every new patient had been infected for at least a week, so there was no one recently infected to study. She called it intuition, as she had no reason to believe it, but Sakura was certain that if she could study someone who had been recently infected she could find out something that would lead to a breakthrough.
Kira and Amika were struggling to keep up with the new influx of patients. They did not have the same training as Sakura and Ino, whose chakra control was vastly superior to theirs. This left Sakura, Ino, and Rokuda to deal with the brunt of the work.
"We're sorry, Sakura-san," Kira said, having collapsed from exhaustion on Sakura's cot in her office. Amika was next to her, already snoozing and leaving a considerable amount of drool on Sakura's pillow.
"Don't worry about it, Kira," Sakura said, gathering as many clean cloths from the cabinet as she could carry, "It isn't your fault. You're doing your best."
Kira didn't say anything else, but Sakura could feel her eyes on her back and she went back down to the lobby.
.
By the next day, the inn had been mostly cleared again. There were stragglers that came in every so often, but Rokuda or one of the nurses were easily able to handle the work load now that there weren't several hundred patients to tend to.
Sakura and Ino were back in the office above the lobby, curled up in their chairs. To an outsider it might have seemed like they were catching up on some light reading, but in spite of their relaxed demeanors, they were both bordering on mental exhaustion.
"We could try using a seal," Sakura said, thinking out loud more than making a serious suggestion.
"Rokuda wouldn't be capable of sealing anything," Ino pointed out, "And if she couldn't, then the nurses couldn't either."
Sakura frowned.
"It's a good solution to the problem," Ino said quickly, noticing the frown lines deepen around Sakura's mouth, "But once we're gone, it won't help anymore."
Sakura let out a groan of frustration. She could burn the infection away with chakra. She could seal it away with a justu. But she couldn't come up with an actual cure. It seemed that nothing they did could fix the problem without the use of chakra.
"Do you think we should try to find patient zero?" Ino asked, "It might give us some insight about what the cause it and how we can prevent it."
Sakura mulled over her words for a moment. It made sense to try Ino's idea, but they wouldn't have a clue where to start looking. And even if they did, they couldn't leave the inn while the sick were still migrating to it. Rokuda and the nurses wouldn't be able to handle the workload on their own.
"That's a good idea," Sakura said, "But we'd need to recruit some help for that. We shouldn't leave the inn until we're sure Rokuda can handle it."
"Let's go ask Rokuda if she knows anything about patient zero," Ino suggested.
They found Rokuda in the lobby, behind the counter. She looked much worse than she had when Sakura first arrived. Her skin was sallow and pale and her eyes had deep purple bags underneath them.
Her eyes lit up when she saw them approaching and Sakura felt almost guilty for the glimmer of hope she saw flash across her face.
"Did you make a breakthrough?" she asked with barely restrained excitement.
"Not quite," Sakura said quietly. Ino shook her head mutely.
Rokuda sighed softly, her disappointment obvious and a little annoying to Sakura. Sakura couldn't really blame the woman. She had hired an elite medical ninja from the champion of medical jutsu herself and had nothing to show for it. It had been a month now, and there was no cure in sight.
"We want to know if you have any information about patient zero," Ino said before Sakura could get too introspective, "Maybe if we know more about where the infection originated from we can figure out a way to prevent it."
Rokuda pursed her lips. "The very first person I treated was a woman from a town several days north of here. She said her husband had been sick first," she explained, "and that she sought out a healer after he had died."
"Why didn't she try to find a healer before," Sakura asked, "while her husband was still sick?"
"She said she didn't think that it was that bad," Rokuda answered, "that the symptoms didn't seem that serious. It wasn't until he was bedridden that she thought something was really wrong."
"Where is she now?" Ino asked, but they all already knew the answer to that.
"I'm sure her body was burned in the pyre."
"And the town she came from?" Sakura asked, "Was that the first you'd heard of the infection?"
Rokuda nodded, "Yes, it's barely even a town. Just a general goods store and an inn, really."
"I've been there," Sakura said, remember the three sisters she had met there.
"Yeah, me too," Ino said, "Do you think it's worth going to check it out?"
Sakura tapped her finger against her lips. At this point anything was worth a try. Anything that could give them a potential lead would be worth it. She could handle the inn on her own for a while.
"Why don't you go investigate, Ino?" Sakura suggested, "I'll stay here and keep working on a cure and taking care of the inn. You go find out what you can and report back as soon as you can."
Ino grinned, "You can count on me."
.
Ino left early the next morning with an empty journal to fill up with her sleuthing and an eager grin on her face.
Sakura wished that she felt as excited as Ino did. She couldn't say that she anticipated much from Ino's investigation. That left her to her own devices, working on a cure.
Between healing the sick that wandered in and doing what little research she could that hadn't already been done, Sakura was actually bored. It was a sickening feeling, knowing that people were depending on her and she was decidedly out of things to do.
She tried to continue her search for a cure, but reading the same words, seeing the same slides under the microscope only seemed to stress her out more. She had completely given up on being productive in her research and instead refocused all of her attention on the sick people who still wandered into the inn.
She was surprised by the fact that there were still no recently infected people in town, but she supposed that most of the people who fell ill didn't bother to seek help until their symptoms had reached a more serious state.
It really annoyed the medic in her that people chose to live their lives that way. Even her own teammates would wait until the last possible second to go get their health issues checked out. It was almost as if they feared going to the hospital more than they feared whatever potentially catastrophic thing could happen as a result of ignoring the problem. A sword wound through the chest? No problem. A little needle? Better run for the hills.
After Sakura had spent as much time as she could with the few people who remained in the inn (delegated into their own rooms now, instead of crowded in cots lined up in the lobby), she decided a nice long walk would clear her head.
River Country was far more beautiful than Sakura had ever given it credit for. The grass was thick and lush and soft, she thought. The leaves looked greener and everything seemed to be more alive. She followed the path of a river, watching as salmon sporadically jumped out of the water.
Sakura was no stranger to the outdoors. She had her fair share of missions that left her essentially camping outside for weeks at a time. Maybe it was the fact that for a month she had been cooped up inside an inn with stale, sick air, but something about being outside made Sakura feel more alive than she had felt in weeks.
A shrill cry in the distance snapped Sakura to attention. It sounded young – like a child. She darted off in the direction of the sound, masking her chakra just in case.
When she neared three figures that appeared to have been where to noise came from, Sakura stealthily leapt into a nearby tree and crouched low on a high branch, scouting the area.
There were two children and a man sitting in the grass. Sakura noted that no one appeared to be in any danger, and that the trio in fact looked quite amicable. The two children were taking turns pinching each other while the man, whose back was to her, watched.
Relieved, Sakura was about to jump down from the branch and release the mask on her chakra when the man turned and she caught sight of his face. The familiarity almost caused he to tumble out of the tree, but she kept a sure grip on the branch underneath her.
Sasuke?
No, that wasn't Sasuke. He was older. His hair was longer, his eyes darker. It was a face that she had seen only once before, but she would have recognized it anywhere.
It was Itachi.