The morning mist hung in the air, blanketing the park in a thick, heavy grey. That lovely spring mist that obscured even the moon.

They were supposed to be here to look at the flowers. Too bad there was this mist. She couldn't being herself to feel very sad about it, relaxing on the park bench as she was. He, however, did not appear to feel the same.

Lip jutting out, arms crossed, squinting to get a single flash of green. Hinata hid an amused smile within her sleeve. She'd been doing that quite a lot recently. She couldn't help it.

"Hinata," he complained. "You're laughing at me."

"Well, you're very funny, Naruto-kun."

He blinked. "Really?"

"Really."

He didn't whoop and holler like she thought he would. Or pump his fist in the air.

"Hyuuga Hinata, you're such a sneaky girl."

"What?" Her heart leapt. It was always leaping lately.

"You did it on purpose, didn't you?" His sky blue eyes sparkled mischievously. "You knew it would be all dark and misty. You lured me here under false pretenses!"

In another world, she might have become tongue-tied at the silly accusation. But here, in this dream world...

"No false pretenses from me, Naruto-kun. I only called you here because..."

"Because?"

She didn't try to hide her face in her sleeve again or mask her laugh with a cough.

"Because..." She rested her head on his shoulder. "I wanted to be with you."

Straightforward. Honest. In this dream world, she got to say what she meant and mean what she said.

Naruto's smile was something shy, fragile, and priceless, like a butterfly in the rarest shade of orange.

The things that happened when she acted for her self-satisfaction.

Morning light cut through the windows. Hinata groaned, rubbing her eyes.

For the first time in months, she was well-rested, notwithstanding the dryness in her mouth and the dull bands of discomfort clenching up her stomach.

Strange.

"Ah, I wouldn't do that," came Sakura's voice. "Honestly, Hinata, I told you that I'd be willing to walk you home."

Hinata opened her eyes a sliver.

Sakura, wearing a white lab coat, stethoscope, and gloves. At work, measuring some strange yellow liquid in a vial, one eye narrowed critically.

Just hours after her birthday party, in which she'd gotten plastered. Hinata's heart clenched with guilt.

"Sakura-san, you really didn't have to bring me here," she mumbled. "You should have just taken the day off. I know you must be tired."

"Nah," Sakura said breezily. She pointed at a bottle of pills on Hinata's bedside table. "Instant cure for hangovers. Tsunade-shishou invented it, after...well, you know what she's like. I wanted to give you one last night, but you took off so fast!"

"Ah, well..."

"And..." Sakura clapped her hands, wiggling her eyebrows mischievously. "Who would have thought that the prim and proper Hyuuga Hinata-san would get into a drunken brawl?"

Something warm flooded her cheeks. "I...I wasn't brawling!"

Sakura snickered. "Yeah, it was pretty one-sided. You wiped the floor with those guys, didn't you? I wonder what you fought about?"

"Sakura-san..." She was not going to tell anyone the reason. Ever.

"Ah, don't worry about it. You don't have to say anything." Sakura clapped her on the back good-naturedly, bustling out of the room with the vial in hand.

Pain jolted through Hinata's head. She groaned again.

"Take one of those pills! I'll be back with breakfast."

Breakfast was...hospital food. Hospital food had...a certain reputation. Hinata eyed the tamago kake gohan warily, but forced herself to smile as Sakura watched her reaction.

"So, how is it?" Sakura asked, as Hinata stirred the eggs and rice. "And please don't grimace and tell me it tastes 'really good' when you think it's bad. Be honest!"

Hinata gingerly took a bite.

"It's...it's not bad."

"Hinata! I said to be honest!" Sakura pouted, arms crossed, lip jutting far out. A strange flux of melancholy surged through her gut, twisted her lungs, and settled into her heart.

"It's really not that bad, Sakura-san. The soy sauce is a bit too much, but besides that, it's fine."

Sakura's green eyes widened. "Wow? You mean it?"

"I meant everything I said."

"All right! Your feedback is much appreciated! We want to destroy the negative reputation surrounding hospital food!" Sakura pumped her fist in the air, much like her old teammate. Yet again, Hinata's heart prickled with something like thorns.

Looks like being on a team means you rub off on each other.

A part of her always felt guilty at the thought – Shino and Kiba did not deserve it from her, and she had learned so much from them. Learned to talk to someone as quiet as her and loud as a stampeding team of horses. Learned to divine moods from annoyed yips and keening whines and joyful, thunderous barking. But there were some times when she'd look beyond the big, wide sky, and imagine a world where Iruka-sensei had assigned Hyuuga Hinata to Team 7, or Uzumaki Naruto to Team 8.

If maybe, she'd rubbed off on him too.

"Anyway, while you were sleeping off that hangover – " here Hinata grimaced – "I checked your medical records. And guess what?"

She must have seen those funny things Hinata puked up last night. Her heart sank.

First Shikamaru, then Shino and Kiba. The last thing Hinata needed was Sakura worrying after her too.

"You haven't had a check-up in months."

"Ah, well, Sakura-san...you know, if it isn't broken, don't fix it." She determinedly gazed at the plum tree just outside her window. Thankfully, there was no mist obscuring her vision and her excuses would be quite plausible.

"See! That's the attitude that we medical professionals have to constantly fight against! Do you know that early screening for ailments dramatically reduces chances of severe illness?"

"Sakura-san – "

"A routine blood test does wonders."

"But you'll have so much work to do, Sakura-san. I don't want to waste your time."

That was exactly the wrong thing to say. Silence stifled the air. She tore her eyes from the plum tree and onto her friend.

"Hinata." Sakura's voice was perfectly calm, but fortified with a hint of steel. "You keep doing this. You've always done this. Downplaying yourself. Not wanting to be a bother. I..." Sakura gulped. To Hinata's horror, tears glistened at the corners of her green, green eyes. "I...I lost one of my best friends. If we'd just gotten him treatment on time, that blood loss and chakra exhaustion wouldn't have done him in. So I'll never let anything happen to my friends again. Definitely not because they didn't get a check-up soon enough. So you just wait here. It's just a routine blood test. You can go home afterwards. Okay?"

"O...okay."

The hospital's new pathology lab was state-of-the-art, a shiny, silver and chrome structure, with funding from none other than Kumogakure, Konoha's erstwhile enemy. The room was equipped with strange devices with far too many tubes, pulleys, and levers, constantly humming and whirring and churning away in the background.

Sakura put her hands to her hips and beamed as though the instruments were her beloved children.

"Right, we'll load this..." She shook a borosilicate tube filled with dark red blood. "Into this." 'This' was a bulky device with a lid and little circular slots. "7000 rpm for thirty minutes, then we'll extract the dense mass of cells at the bottom of the tube after siphoning off the plasma, which we'll also test...just the other day, we did a full screening of all newborns for histidinemia..."

She went on and on. The hospital was obviously her pride and joy.

Sakura, insecure about her large forehead in childhood, insecure about her place on Team 7 in her adolescence, had bloomed beautifully in her adulthood. Her father had been so right to name her after those bright blossoms that awakened after long, harsh winters.

Long, harsh winters. Silver snow piling untouched in layers. A golden-haired boy with the biggest smile and the reddest scarf and the most impossible dream.

Long, harsh winters built character. Strength rose from struggle. That much was clear.

"Okay, Hinata, we'll begin in three, two..." Sakura pressed buttons that Hinata could make neither head nor tail of, and her blood test began.

Her friend scowled as the first round of results flashed onto a screen.

"Low erythrocyte count, high leukocyte count, platelets normal...Hinata, that's not healthy. No wonder Shikamaru and your teammates said you weren't well."

Hinata's face flamed. "They've been talking about me?"

"Everyone's been talking about you. Kakashi-sensei took your team off missions because he's been worried about you."

That ugly, brittle wave rose and fell in her lungs yet again. "I'm not a child who needs to be coddled."

"No one said you were, Hinata. Concern isn't coddling. Now...let's see...abnormally high levels of glutamine and asparagine...these are both vital amino acids, true...but then you also have abnormally high levels of polyphenolic compounds...and a build-up of unconverted beta-carotene. I'll have to check that out."

She had no idea what any of that meant. But unfortunately, Sakura was on a roll. Her eyes scanned over the medical report like lightning, eyebrows rising so far into her hairline that they vanished.

"For some reason, you have a lot of...Hinata, have you been...but no, that's impossible..."

"Sakura-san?" she asked timidly. "What's impossible?"

"This report. It doesn't make any sense. It can't be a technical error either. We just re-calibrated our equipment last week."

Sakura kneaded her forehead, her face pinched in confusion. Dread rose in her throat, dark and heavy, threatening to spew bright yellow petals all over Sakura's floor. Hinata gulped it back down.

She was not weak.

"The human bloodstream usually doesn't have these chemicals! Unless you've been chewing thirty pounds of leaves for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. What the hell is this?"

"Sakura-san?" she asked again.

She had an inkling of where this was heading. It definitely had something to do with last night, and two weeks ago at Sunagakure, and the month before that, when she sat atop the Yondaime's head and watched the owners of Ichiraku make miso ramen with naruto.

"I'm going to call Tsunade-sama. You have astronomical levels of chlorophyll in your blood."

A/N: I had to study things like this for my degree, you know...actually, sometimes chlorophyll is used as an antioxidant. I don't know what a very high level will do to someone...but too much of a good thing is a bad thing, right? There's even such a thing as water poisoning and oxygen poisoning. I did check out some articles on chlorophyll consumption in humans, but please excuse any artistic liberties I took here.

And please leave a review! :)