"So, your team had to leave you behind?" Tsunade set warm, brown eyes on Sakura and leaned forward.

Her former apprentice should have known that Tsunade wouldn't set right to work, but she felt some dismay when the Sannin set a bottle of sake between them. She almost forgot the question. "Oh …well Kakashi-sensei said he spoke to you about it."

"He did," Tsunade confirmed. "But he said the mission was for the three of you."

"It still is, but I'm going to take it from here for now, and Naruto and Sasuke are not going to be gone long." When Sasuke said anything to Tsuneo and Natsuo, he meant it. "We're hoping that the mission can mostly be done from the village."

"Well, I'm thankfully not forced to keep all classified information," Tsunade teased the bottle open, "but from the little that I know …it doesn't sound like it will be one of those missions."

Sakura sighed. "Well, I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get to it." She and Sasuke would figure it out, but she had a feeling that her mentor was completely correct, and she wished that Kakashi could have waited before assigning this to them. As much as she was really overjoyed at working with her old genin team, there were other concerns now.

Tsunade snorted as she watched Sakura, shaking her head.

"What?"

"I'm just grateful that I didn't have children," she said. "Being a kunoichi is hard enough."

"You would have been a good mother," Sakura argued. A scary mother …but a good one.

Tsunade waved her hand. "Shizune, Naruto, you …now your boys …I have had my taste, and far less responsibility. That was all I needed."

If Tsunade started drinking this early in the day, she would get even more morose and they would be doomed to get nothing done. Sakura started running through her old mental list of excuses to keep her master sober, when they heard a knock on the door.

A nurse cracked open the door and bowed her head quickly. "I'm sorry for interrupting, Tsunade-sama, Uchiha-san, but we found a young boy wandering the halls and when asked, he said he was looking for you."

Tsunade's eyes fell to Sakura when she groaned loudly. "It's Tsuneo…"

"Isn't he supposed to be at the Academy?"

"Of course." Green eyes darted back to the nurse before she continued. "You can let him in here, please."

"Right away!" The door closed and Sakura sighed.

"He didn't even last the morning…" she muttered to herself.

"Oh? Is this an established problem, then?" Tsunade guessed. "See? I'd rather watch you deal with this than deal with it myself. And this is your well-behaved child!"

"Not necessarily..." After all, Sasuke had only left this morning. Natsuo would have made far more of an effort on his father's word.

Tsuneo cracked open the door and bowed, like he was an ambassador of peace. Tsunade snickered and Sakura twisted in her chair. "Tsuneo…"

"I'm sorry, Kaachan," he said immediately. "Don't make me go back. I'll just be quiet and watch, I promise."

"Is Hospital Administration your specialty, Tsuneo-kun? Or were you hoping you'd find us in the labs?" Tsunade's eyes were twinkling in a way that made Sakura want to play bad cop, lest she encourage this.

"A promise?" she asked sternly. "Didn't you promise your father, and what good was that?"

"I didn't promise," Tsuneo answered certainly, padding over to her with those solemn, dark eyes. "Because I wasn't sure I could keep it, Kaachan."

Tsunade laughed out loud and Sakura glared at her. "Sakura," Tsunade chided her! "Don't be so hard on him. The Academy is boring anyway..."

"You're not helping, Tsunade-sama…" Sakura said quickly. What was she thinking? Praising Tsunade's mothering skills…

Sakura ignored her for the moment, turning back to her son. "You couldn't have been bored, the day has barely started."

"It wasn't that. I just wanted to read my book, but it was hot and some others—" Tsuneo closed his mouth suddenly, before starting again. "I just wanted to read my book."

Sakura caught that quick and stifled vulnerability in her son's eyes and she couldn't help but run a hand through his hair. That kicked puppy look was nearly impossible to resist. Something buzzed briefly around her head. "Honey…" she began.

Tsunade stood, pressing her hands against the desk as she did. "Let's make a bet, kid."

This again. Sakura shook her head vigorously. "You never win!" she protested to the former Hokage.

"Trust me on this." Tsunade sent her a silencing look before looking fondly back at the boy. "We'll sneak down to the lab, right now. And if I can show you something that surprises you, you have to go back to the Academy. Deal?"

Her son hesitated, and Sakura decided to put her foot down. "That's not a deal, it's a gift. You have a choice, sweetheart. You go back to the Academy now, or you see something cool and then you go back. Which is it?"

Tsuneo was trying hard to hide his disappointment at her hard line, fidgeting with his hands for a moment to delay his answer. He had likely expected that she'd give in to him, but she actually agreed with Sasuke here. The bad habits that Tsuneo had formed in Hidden Sand could not be allowed to continue in Leaf. It wasn't good for him, and it wasn't fair to Natsuo.

She did suspect that Tsuneo was like her, and apt to be bullied. Kami knew that she didn't wish that on her child, but she also knew that she would have never gotten anywhere if she had run off and avoided all of her problems, instead of attending the Academy.

He looked up at her finally with coal-black eyes, resembling her husband suddenly. "If I go right back, we don't have to talk about it with Tousan?"

Sakura raised an eyebrow at him. "If you can do as Tousan asked from now on, maybe I will tell him how you tried to follow his rules."

He took her hand and wriggled it, Tsuneo's quiet way of apologizing for the trouble. "Tsunade-baasama, I would like to see your cool thing down at the lab."

"Great!" The blonde Sannin rounded the desk and waved them along after her. Tsuneo scratched his neck, and Sakura pulled at the little hand in hers. She still felt bad about making him go back, but she knew all too well what the right thing to do was. She could almost imagine Sasuke's uncompromising in that moment.

"—go to class and pretty soon, you'll be with us med nins, down in the lab as much as you like!"

Tsunade was finally giving a lecture as they went out the door, and Tsuneo slowed and drifted sideways as they followed. Sakura turned her head to look at him. The hand in hers was clammy without warning, her palm dampening against his.

Sakura's gaze sharpened clinically as Tsuneo blinked up towards her, looking strangely feverish. The air buzzed. Tsunade was saying something else, and it hit Sakura without warning that something was about to be very wrong.

"Sakura?"

"Kaachan…"

Something was in his face—a split second of confusion and fear—that had her heart rate tripping over itself. Sakura dropped to her knees in front of him, her hand clamping against his cheek.

"Tsuneo!"

He jerked back and his eyes squeezed shut and he cried out, but she didn't let him go. Sakura yanked him toward her and grasped his cheek with the other hand. The boy froze and his gaze shifted past her shoulder, unseeing. Sakura released his cheek and waved her hand in front of him, but there was no acknowledgement. She glanced behind her, and confirmed that there was nothing.

"What?"

Genjutsu? She couldn't think of all the reasons it couldn't have been possible, but her son's next behavior ruled it out. He screamed.

"No… NO! NO! NO!" He actually tore at his clothes and Sakura watched almost hapless for a moment, before he lunged, his arms swiping offensively. Automatically, Sakura caught him and tried to contain him without hurting him. His screams of "no" were horrified, angry, and frantic, resembling nothing that she had ever heard coming out of his mouth before.

"What's wrong?" Tsunade asked in alarm, for once at a loss of what to do.

"Tsuneo!" Sakura cried, trying to call him back, bewildered. "Stop it!"

"NO, YOU—" he keened. "YOU KILLED HER—YOU!"

She had never in her life seen her inquisitive, careful son react like this, to anything. And there was nothing there. His distress was so acute that she looked around again, to see if she was wrong. It had to be a hallucination—she didn't detect a genjutsu? And he wouldn't have been moving if it had been. Were all three of them in one, a layered one? She was almost completely resistant to genjutsu. She didn't detect anything. Why couldn't she detect anything when something must have been going on?!

Tsuneo's legs, shaking, gave out on him and he slipped to the floor like a stringless puppet. His forehead had broken out in a cold sweat and his breathing labored. He hissed something she couldn't understand.

"Baby," she murmured. "Baby, baby, it's okay. This …everything is okay. You're safe." Her heart sat in her throat, clogging it when she heard him hiss again, his eyes jammed shut now.

"I hate you."

"What …is going on here?" Tsunade said darkly.

"I don't know." She couldn't see what he saw as his eyes widened and then shut, and Sakura shuffled closer, her heart out-of-control. "Tsuneo. Answer me. What's wrong? Where does it hurt?"

He didn't respond, he would have if he had heard her, she knew. Whatever horror was occurring in his mind had not ended. Hallucination caused by what? Was it an infection? He wasn't feverish. Could he have inhaled something? Been bitten by something?

"Sakura!" She had frozen, racing thoughts, and Tsunade's call jolted her into action, reminding her of what she could do. What would she do if this wasn't her child? She began a scan of his chakra, to find the problem herself.

"Has this ever happened before?" Tsunade asked, pointlessly.

"No." But then Sakura's scan came to a heart-stopping halt. Because abruptly, underneath Tsuneo's shut eyes …ran blood.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

"I don't know why Kaka-sensei sent us here weeks after anything happened," Naruto complained. They had been traipsing around the clearing area the villagers had indicated for a couple of hours and Naruto's attitude had changed greatly in that span of time.

Sasuke, on the other hand, had only grown in his irritated interest. He had thought there would have been a trace of something… It was a shame that Sakura wasn't here.

"Just go over it again, dobe."

Naruto obliged wordlessly, dropping into Sage Mode and scanning once more. "I'm seeing nothing out of the ordinary." Naruto's griping was far more subdued when in this state. "My guess is that if we had wanted to find something, we needed to be here earlier."

Sasuke was about to give in and agree when Naruto's slitted-pupil eyes darted to the left, clouded with distance. His face froze.

"What?"

He didn't answer right away. "…probably nothing," he conceded. "But we should check it out, since we're here." With that, he took off in the direction his eyes had been seeking and Sasuke followed wordlessly.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

At the same time the buzzing stopped, his mother's hand disappeared from his grip, and the room disappeared into the darkness. Then, a blinding light hit his eyes.

"What do you know about them?"

Tsuneo's mouth ran dry, not at what was said (he didn't know what it meant), but at the whispers in his ear. He was alone, a bad alone. He twitched away from it, but there was no one close enough to have spoken anyway.

"Nothing?" It asked, like it was giving him a second chance.

"What?" he asked meekly. These whispers sounded angry, like a bully at school, but worse. It was a grown-up voice that promised harm. Like if he didn't know the right answer, that they'd hurt him, even if he didn't understand the question.

But it was worse.

Kaachan was suddenly knelt in front of him—but she had just been beside him—her hair falling in front of her eyes and her shoulders slumped. But that wasn't what frightened him: he couldn't look away at the shadowy figures surrounding her. "No…" he whispered, a deep and visceral panic unlike anything he had ever felt in his life came over him and his hands started trembling. Where was Tousan? Why was Kaachan just… kneeling there, not fighting? It didn't matter why, because he was certain what the shadows were about to do.

What did they ask him?! He had to get the answer before they—

One of the faceless things drew back and he choked.

"No, please!"

Her scream shattered him as the sword burst through her back with an alarming, red arc of blood.

NO! NO! NO! His mother slumped to the ground and he tried to run to her, but he was frozen—seeing that bloody splash, wanted to put it back. He tore at his clothes in agony, but it felt like they were still trying to stop him—they wouldn't let him get near! And Kaachan wasn't making any noise anymore. They had killed her.

Why?

Something broke in him, and his eyes snapped shut in sudden, physical pain. Not seeing her lying there in that dark pool was a relief like nothing ever would be again.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Naruto had stopped short a while ago and sought out. He hadn't said anything else, and Sasuke huffed in frustration. "Nothing? What did you notice before?"

Possibly, he could help if he knew what the knucklehead was looking for. Naruto scratched his head before responding. "I don't know what it was. It could have been a fluke, I guess. It was just a …tiny hole?"

"A tiny hole." Sasuke deadpanned. Metaphors was bad enough, but when Naruto started making them, the lack of explanation was worse.

"Like …of chakra!" Naruto babbled. "Or not-chakra, really. Tiny… argh, never mind! It was probably nothing."

But Sasuke wasn't so sure. "What do you mean, not-chakra?"

"Sasuke. I don't know, but I probably just read it wrong," Naruto shook his head. "It was a weird read, but …it was barely bigger than a speck. Concentrated. Just hadn't felt anything like that before…" He ended on that lame note and Sasuke blinked, looking around.

"Well, where is it now?"

"It kinda …winked out?" Naruto grinned in what he hoped was an endearing way and Sasuke scoffed.

"Dobe."

"I told you that it was probably a fluke!" the future Hokage said defensively.

"We'll mention it to Sakura," Sasuke muttered, annoyed that this whole trip had likely been taken with nothing to show for it. He wished Kakashi didn't decide to start this operation like an afterthought. And worse, there was probably some mundane explanation for the whole set of incidences that wouldn't end up requiring their abilities.

But people were dying…

"Let's just head back."

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Sakura was brought to a very harsh and horrifying reality when Tsuneo started weeping blood: there was nothing that could prepare you for something being seriously wrong with your child. For a half of a second, Sakura completely and utterly froze as panic bloomed in the pit of her stomach.

"Sakura!" Tsunade barked. Sakura felt the weight of the woman's hands on her shoulders. "What's happening?"

"It…" She was speechless. She thought of her husband—of Sasuke's eyes dripping like this and almost choked. "Couldn't be…"

"—an Uchiha thing?" Tsunade wondered. "What caused this? Could he have been poisoned, slow-acting?"

"Baby, open your eyes. Open your eyes!" She shook him at the last words and his screwed-up lids slowly relaxed. He was trying to do as she asked.

She scanned him, but she knew where the problem would be. It was far too obvious. But the root of it could be elsewhere. What was the cause?

Already holding him, the obvious and unthinking thing to do was to take the plunge. She knew the frequency of her sons' chakra just as well as hers, or Sasuke's. Her mind raced clinically and emotionally, but her options weren't about to change, no matter how invasive and sudden this was. Whatever was in his system needed to get out!

"Sakura, don't!" Tsunade ordered, anticipating her. Whatever this was, it was likely a foreign element, perhaps a poison that triggered his pathways. She knew what concerned her mentor, the risks of throwing her own system into chaos, but no amount of common sense was about to stop her. She clasped his face and sank her chakra into his body, letting it race through his body like rats in a maze, searching…

Tsunade tried to wrench her back, breaking her concentration, but not the connection. Sakura clamped down harder.

"No! I have it!" Sakura continued to run her chakra down from her palms and into her son, headed right toward the most pointed location: his eyes. Whatever she found, she would handle it. There was no other option. Tsuneo went limp with exhaustion, his head dropping to Sakura's shoulder, but her hand stayed attached, filtering chakra and shushing him needlessly, a song that focused her.

"Tsunade-sama! Tsunade-sama, is everything alright? What's happening?!"

Viral? Chakral? Poison? She moved as quickly as she could without losing the frequency, making her way agonizingly to the point she was certain she would find it.

"The boy—is he hurt? Should we—"

"Don't touch them, stay back!"

All Sakura heard was the hum of her Tsuneo's chakra as she reached the point she wanted, and then it hit her: a searing, blood-curdling invasion of something that wasn't any part of her child. She felt the presence of others now, but she was blind to it.

Not poison, she thought as whatever it was advanced on her. Not… not anything I've ever seen. How could that be? Instinctively, she reared her chakra back to the fringes, but it moved like it had sensed her, moved far too fast. How could that be?

She didn't know what it was, but she had an idea for getting it out. There were no consequences to consider, not if the choice was between her and this beautiful boy she loved so much.

"It's going to be …okay…" Sakura murmured to Tsuneo, before she fell sideways into Tsunade's arms, never letting him go.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

"Why do you have that funny look on your face?" Boruto whispered to Natsuo. Except Boruto's idea of a 'whisper' hurt your eardrums. The whole class shifted to the loud sound and Natsuo flushed at the attention.

He raised his hand anyway, now that everyone was staring anyway. "Sensei, may I be excused?"

The teacher blinked. "That has to be the most polite request to cut class that I've ever heard, Uchiha Natsuo."

The rest of his class laughed, but Natsuo clenched his jaw stubbornly. "I'm not cutting! I just want to …check on something. I'll come right back."

"Oh, well in that case, after you check, would you be returning with your brother—an Uchiha Tsuneo, right? Your twin?"

"If I see him, I'd bring him back here," Natsuo tried, his heart sinking in a way that he didn't like. He was never gonna get out of here now that Tsuneo skipped, and the feeling that something bad had happened wouldn't go away. He had never had a sense before like that, so how could he even explain it? And what if he was wrong? He would just sound stupid, or even like a liar.

"Well, I don't think we should take the chance of losing both of you." His instructor said pleasantly, and then returned to the lesson like the subject was closed. It was the dumb substitution jutsu and he didn't need to learn about that and maybe now he understood why Tsuneo never wanted to be here.

"Keep your voice down!" Inojin hissed to his right and Natsuo saw that Boruto was looking his way again.

"Are you okay?" Boruto did lower his voice, and the question went unheard by the rest this time. "You've got a look on your face like your tousan, and he looks scary ever since I've seen him."

"Okay? Like you care," Natsuo growled, ignoring the other boy and pretending to pay attention to dumb lectures about substitution. Boruto didn't even like Tsuneo. He called him a weirdo.

"You sure?" Inojin tried, but Natsuo pretended to listen to the teacher even harder and they eventually stopped staring.

Tsuneo had gone to find Kaachan. And Kaachan was a doctor, so everything had to be fine. And if it wasn't, Kaachan could fix absolutely anything! He repeated that over and over until lunchtime. Then, unable to quiet the bad feeling, Natsuo ran towards the Konoha hospital without looking back.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

"We could have just stayed the night, y'know!"

Sasuke finally reacted with a mere eye-roll, picking up his speed. "There's no point."

"There is if I'm hungry, teme! And I am."

"Go back if you want," Sasuke said shortly. "This was a waste of time already, and what little we got, we need to get back to Sakura and get her insights."

"Sure that's why you want to go back so bad." Naruto waggled his eyebrows in a way that made Sasuke want to punch him. "For the mission."

"Dobe, go back if you want," Sasuke repeated. "I don't care."

"I don't want to stay away!" Naruto protested vehemently, suddenly getting the implication that he was avoiding his own family. "I'm just hungry!"

"They have food in Konoha."

"Hours from now! Gimme a break!"

Sasuke should have known that asking to travel back in silence was a pipe dream. But if he had been able to look at it from an outsider's perspective, it might have seemed that he was rushing back home. He had been away before, that was true. His family hadn't been in Leaf Village at the time and why did it feel like things were more foreign there than they had been the other times? It seemed that he missed them—Sakura and the boys—more when he was away now. But Sasuke didn't spare much thought towards his impulses and he certainly wasn't going to share these musings with his best friend, especially with the constant complaints.

"We ate a couple of hours ago," Sasuke said evenly. "Suck it up."

"Well, if that's how you feel…" Naruto grumbled and matched Sasuke with his next jump. "Then we'll go your speed. But I'm not gonna do this every single time just so you can pester Sakura-chan. You know, you're a real weirdo. All that time pretending you didn't want all the things you actually did." He snickered. "I'm happy for you and that's why I'm humoring your bullshit, teme."

Sasuke grunted in acknowledgement, mostly because there was no other reason to respond. Naruto could think whatever he liked, as long as Sasuke got to maintain his imposed schedule. He briefly mused over whether Tsuneo was obedient enough to stay in class for the day, or not. It forever surprised him that his more reserved and thoughtful son was the only the happened to cause the most trouble underneath all appearances.

Appearances had deceived him before. They were bound to do so again.