Sakura, now fifteen, coughed.
And then coughed some more.
And then tried very hard not to itch.
Splayed across the rest of the room, in one bed and two futons, Himari, Kohana, and Sayuri coughed right alongside her.
The pox had come to Konoha.
Sakura had been extraordinarily unlucky—she'd been one of the first.
(She knew she shouldn't blame Sachiko, and she wouldn't later, but for now, she was going to allow herself to be a bit irrational. Sayuri certainly had no problem loudly bemoaning Sakura whenever she had the breath.)
She coughed again.
All the windows were boarded up, hot food was left next to their front door twice a day, and none of them had left the house in a week.
"I'm bored!" Himari whined.
"Good for you." Sakura huffed. They'd tried to entertain themselves—read, work on various projects… it was hard to do anything when sick, hard even to concentrate.
Staring at the ceiling: that was enough.
.
A little over a week later, all the household's symptoms had disappeared, and Sakura was bouncing off the walls alongside Himari.
"You're fifteen years old!" Sayuri chastised, dramatically falling to the floor after Sakura's solo race to every room in the house led to her being dealt a glancing bump.
"I am!"
"So am I!" Himari, taking advantage of all the bedding being put in the backyard to dry, had taken all their mattresses and futons and made a fort. She didn't seem to much mind that she wasn't actually fifteen, and truth be told, Sakura didn't mind either—they'd been trapped at home for weeks, so Sakura felt even the slightest suggestion that they should act their age should be met with ridicule.
Kohana just snorted. With the washing finally finished, the children of Kaoru and Kenta had fallen back into boredom, but now they had the energy to do something about it: Kohana's choice was sewing, a far less messy option than Himari' or Sakura's.
Sayuri's was the most sedate of all: she was trying to meditate.
All of them wanted out.
Five more days.
.
Sakura, finally finished with quarantine, was put right back to work.
The Human Research & Engineering lab was—
Busy.
It looked like the vast majority of everyone who worked anywhere in Research was working there, and a good number of others besides. Desks had been divided into three, new ones had been brought in, and temporary structures had been built in the Hospital courtyard besides.
Sakura made a beeline to Orochimaru, his hair plainly visible among all the others.
"I'm back."
"Nothing lingering?"
"Only shortness of breath, and barely that."
"Good. You'll be beside me—I need an assistant, and you don't know enough about medicine yet to act alone."
"Understood." Sakura jogged to her desk, (gently) shoved the dead-eyed man working at it out of the way, unlocked her cabine,t and retrieved some papers, her clipboard, and several pens.
And then she fell into step behind Orochimaru.
The fervor of the lab, once enveloped by it, only seemed to grow.
But it also lost some of the hope that it seemed to exude from the outside.
These shinobi—all of them very smart, all of them very motivated—were doing their best to try to find a treatment for the disease.
These shinobi—all of them very smart, all of them very motivated—were making absolutely no progress at all.
The Hokage stopped by to check on their progress a mere two days after Sakura had begun work again. By then, Sakura's hope for a treatment had plummeted to somewhere many leagues below sea level, and she hadn't even had time to wave goodbye.
"Hello, Orochimaru."
"Sensei."
"How is the race going?"
The race. That's how the search for a new medicine was always phrased: a race. How many people, in other words, would die before a workable solution is found?
"You know how well it's going." Orochimaru looked a curious mixture of exhausted and angry. "We do not have the Uzumaki false bodies."
And that—
That had been…
Sakura hadn't known, not until two days before, that Uzugakure had invented sheets that could be infected and treated just like human bodies.
Uzu had protected the invention fiercely—apparently it could be modified easily for several less wholesome applications—but Fire's relationship with them had allowed Konoha to use the false bodies whenever a plague took over the land, and regularly for medical research besides.
And now there was no Uzu.
And no false bodies.
And that—
That meant things.
That meant, for instance, that the entire basis for their plague research over the past century or so (the Senju' and Daimyo's relationship with Uzu stretched back at least as long as that, and that was when the false bodies were invented) no longer existed.
It was no wonder, really, that every Researcher was hitting brick wall after brick wall.
"We need—"
"Never."
"If you would just—"
"I will not allow it."
"IF WE DON'T, THEN NO ONE WILL LIVE!" Orochimaru stopped, then stepped back. Yelling at the Hokage was never something to take lightly.
Now, though, the teacher and his brightest student were at odds.
Orochimaru wanted human guinea pigs.
The Hokage said no.
Sakura… was split.
Some part of her, the part of her that believed Orochimaru was evil (she'd blocked out why), wanted to treat this desire as further evidence of that.
The other part of her, the part of her that remembered some of the lessons of Arden's world no matter how hard she tried not to, knew that in Arden's world, human trials were done, were common, were in fact mandatory before mass production.
And right now?
Sakura and her sisters were lucky.
Others were less so.
People were dying every day, suffering every day, and testing on other animals and trying to use logic was only going to get them so far.
They hadn't found treatment for a single plague since the false bodies, and their makers had been destroyed, and they'd been working to at least replicate the results found for existing maladies since then.
It really felt like something had to be done.
And yet.
"I am not risking my people's lives." The Hokage said. He looked down at Orochimaru from his shorter stature, clearly in no mood for argument.
"Then we'll use prisoners!" Orochimaru said.
"And risk the backlash? What if doing so convinces Kumo to join the war? What then?"
"We need to save our people, Hokage."
"And we will, I have full trust in you."
The Hokage left.
The Researchers who had been at their desks, pretending desperately not to be hanging on every word, went back to work.
Sakura, who hadn't bothered to hide her interest, watched Orochimaru wearily. "What should we do?"
Orochimaru sighed. "He is our Hokage. We cannot disobey." And then, under his breath, "No matter how stupid his orders are."
Two months in and the pox wasn't gone yet.
It would, the theory was, die down enough to end the wave during the summer due to the heat, and Konoha's sanitation system and healthcare were advanced enough that it wasn't seeing nearly as many losses as the rest of Fire, much less the death count of the worst hit countries, but deaths were still happening. Still regularly.
Two months in, and Nara Shiho, daughter of the Nara Head, died.
She wasn't the first—wouldn't be the last—wasn't even in line to rule (that was her older brother's path), but her death was the 'highest ranking' one in Konoha yet.
She'd been eight.
And healthy.
The rest of the information Sakura took in on a daily basis—number dead, number ill, number of permanent effects…
The only 'good' wasn't even good, only an absence of bad: Iwa was being hit even harder, meaning it couldn't push its advantage.
That had been a worry at first.
Now, at least within earshot of Sakura, the only worry was how badly the pox would hurt them before the summer heat killed it off.
Orochimaru… wasn't doing well.
He hadn't given up on his campaign for human testing, arguing that it was literally impossible for them to do anything about the pox in a reasonable timeframe without it, but the Hokage held firm.
And so every day, from dawn to dusk, Sakura followed him around as he took measurements and tested bacteria as well as he could and used the various animals that the Hokage was less defensive of and always, always came up short.
No progress was being made in the lab.
No one stopped trying.
Two of the Yamanaka elders died one after the other in late June, followed by half the Nara elders—they'd caught it more or less simultaneously, and did not have nearly enough strength to fight it off. The elders of the various other tribes caught the pox, too, and suffered similar fates in similar numbers. Those who were retired had been quarantined throughout the spring, but with the oncoming of summer, they'd grown restless.
They paid the price.
It wasn't until August that the pox truly started to abate.
10% of Konohagakure's population, already hurt by the war, had died in that time, the majority stationed far away from the frontline of the war.
The losses outside the ninja village, where sanitation and healthcare were less readily available, and hoven animals roamed everywhere, seemed even worse.
Still, as the number of cases began to recede, there was little time to waste. Iwa had, on average, colder temperatures, so the slight benefit Konoha would get—fewer deaths in the Hidden Village itself—had to be used before it was wasted.
Quarantines continued, of course, and signage was left up to promote the continuation of good hygiene, but…
They could no longer 'waste' the resources.
The Human Research and Engineering lab, which had been bloated for nearly half a year, seemed to deflate overnight. Retired doctors went back to being retired, genin were promoted to dozens of other careers outside the lab, Nara Taro—who had grabbed onto the challenge of the pox with both hands—was taken on as a full-time Human Research genin but now worked with only two other Researchers as all the others turned to a dozen different now equally worthwhile pursuits.
Sakura, in the end, did not complete a single invention. Kato Doi and Orochimaru divvied her work among themselves, but she wouldn't be able to help them any longer.
With the plague subsiding it was finally time for the radio, and Sakura was being transferred to help with it once more.
Half a year, gone, and nothing to show for it.
At least, Sakura thought, her communications inventions were provably useful.