- Lost Causes -

Sakura learned early in her surgical career that sometimes people show up on your operating table just so they can die there. Sometimes a patients death is not a matter of if, but a matter of when and how they will go. As a young doctor, Tsunade taught Sakura to compartmentalize her big emotions. She'd needed to, so Sakura could handle the harsh realities that came with being a battlefield medic.

The second thing she taught Sakura was how to recognize a lost cause. When to switch from trying to save an unsalvageable life to assisting someone's passing with compassion and mercy.

"Death might be inevitable, but suffering doesn't have to be."

The first time Sakura heard her mentor say this was during her first doomed surgery.

Sakura had been struggling for hours to mend a man whose body simply refused to heal. His veins tattered at the brush of her chakra like wet paper on a gravel road. By the time Tsunade got to them, there was nothing her mentor could do. Sakura was functionally that mans life support.

She knew that the second she took her hands off him, her patient was going to die. It wasn't her fault, it was just inevitable. That day, Tsunade talked her through helping him pass. She put her hands on Sakura's wrists, lifting them from his heart.

To this day, it was one of the hardest things Sakura has ever had to do.

That was also the day she learned the third rule of battlefield medicine: All resources are finite, especially time. A lost cause was something you couldn't fix, even with all the resources in the world.

Sakura had become intimately familiar with lost causes after that. Just, not in the way Tsunade had meant her to.

Because that surgery taught Sakura something about herself. It was the same something that became fully realized in her when Sasuke first defected. She learned that acceptance was simply not her way, and it was never going to be. She would eventually get better at picking her battles, but her stubborn nature never went away.

She could recognize a lost cause when she saw one. It didn't mean she knew how to leave it alone. After all, she had a history of clinging to lost causes.

What had loving Sasuke been if not proof of her perseverance?

What was Yume-Kakashi if not the manifestation of her defiance? Of her complete inability to put down a love once she'd already picked it up.

Her life has become practically littered with lost causes she'd refused to give up on: Gaara resurrected. Her summit bill passed. Team 7 reunited. Shikamaru.

Her heart open to real love for the first time in years.

Her battle with Sasori would have ended very differently if she hadn't been too god damn stubborn to stay down. Instead, she'd stared into the eyes of a hollow monster and put her fists up anyway.

Defying lost causes was just her way. It had always been her way…

But now…

Sakura stands in front of a burning barn belching smoke into the air. She watches as fire claws at the sky with hungry talons that refuse to die. She hyperventilates into her palms…

But not because the smoke is suffocating her lungs. She covers her mouth in visceral horror at the unkempt garden of massacred bodies. Ino mirrors her look of shock and despair. She feels Choji tremble beside her, knowing exactly what he's feeling.

Because how are they suppose to compartmentalize this?

She isn't even suppose to be here.

She's suppose to be on her way to Hitoshi's castle to find the man who taught her to trust. She's suppose to be there already, asking Shikamaru if he could still deign to love her. She's suppose to be pouring her hear out to him, telling him that the distance doesn't matter. She needs him to know that their love is not a lost cause. That even if it is, she's prepared to be stubborn.

Instead…she's staring down at a familiar travel pack while her brain screams out who it belongs to. She can't bring herself to say his name or she knows she won't be able to function. She's trying not to faint, trying not to scream-

Who could have done something like this?

'Please Gods, don't let him be here. Let this be a mistake, don't let him be here.'

They'd been on the imperial road when Ino spotted the smoke, their trio exchanging uncomfortable glances.

"What do you think it is?" Choji had asked.

"It could just be a controlled burn." Ino had offered. "This is the time of year they thin back the forest and burn the dead trees, right?"

But Sakura hadn't thought so. The smog was too thick to just be a bonfire.

In the end, her travel companions had left the decision up her: Do they head the castle and find Shikamaru before he leaves for Suna again? Or do they sacrifice their chances of seeing him to locate the fire and offer aid.

"We…we should go check it out." She'd said.

Talking through her disappointment had been physically painful. She didn't want this responsibility. She wanted Shikamaru.

But when she wasn't a kunoichi, she was doctor. Giving aid was what she did. If that smoke wasn't from a controlled burn, people could be seriously injured.

"Let's go then." Ino had said, leading them from the main road. They'd cut through the winter forest together, breath puffing in the chilly air.

But nothing could have prepared her for the slaughter that awaited them. For the endless bodies scattered around the mill. It takes a while before any of them can move. There is just no compartment big enough to hold back the horror that paralyzes their limbs.

Women…Workers…Teenagers…Kids…

As a doctor, Sakura is intimate with death. Murder is another story.

"We…we need to check for signs of life-" She croaks. It feels like she's swallowed razor blades. Her throat cuts itself on them when she tries to talk.

"Stay alert." Choji warns.

The three of them break off in aimless direction, afraid to look but knowing they need to. They warily divide up the field of victims, looking for survivors. But the only noise in this newly consecrated cemetery is the groaning of the still burning barn. Everything else rings with a deafening silence.

Blood coats the soles of Sakura's boots as she moves from body to body. The deaths get more brutal the further in she goes. Every time she looks back towards the barn, her eyes fall onto a hauntingly familiar backpack discarded in the bloody dirt. Panic spirals within her every time she looks at it. Eventually, she stops looking.

'It's not his. It's a mistake. He's safe at the castle. It's a mistake.'

When Choji returns from the back side of the building, he violently wretches up his last meal. Ino and Sakura rush to his side, but he holds up a warning hand.

"Don't…Just, don't go back there."

Sakura and Ino take his word, averting their eyes even further. The terror squeezing Sakura's heart grips her even tighter. But there's no time for a panic attack here. They still have not found a single survivor.

The death tole keeps climbing higher and higher. Smoke continues to spill into the air.

Sakura is holding two trembling fingers to the absent pulse of a small girl when Choji cries for one of them to get over there. Ino is a frozen statue staring down into the crater of a small explosion. Sakura wants to check on her, but she will have to do so after. For now, she rushes over to where Choji-

…No.

The razor blades in her throat cut her cries to ribbons. Her mind is static. This doesn't make sense.

This has to be a mistake-

Sakura takes in the bloody form of a red haired girl who doesn't belong here. A girl who's suppose to be back at Hitoshi's castle pickpocketing vases and swiping souvenirs.

"She still has a pulse! Get over here!" Choji yells. It jolts Sakura out of her fight-flight-freeze.

Hope. Wild, maddening hope.

Sakura's panic converts into adrenaline, propelling her forward on wobbly knees. She skids across the bloody gravel, switching from adrenaline into triage mode. She can't hear a word Choji is saying over the pounding of blood in her ears.

She puts two handed pressure onto the wound in Kiwa's abdomen, blasting it with molten chakra. She calls up every bit of energy she has, forming it into tiny green suns. Desperately, she cauterizes Kiwa's wound, assessing her friend for internal bleeding.

Her puncture wound slowly knits over, leaving behind a nasty red scar. It isn't pretty, but every second counts right now. Pretty isn't going to save Kiwa's life.

Sakura threads chakra through the pipes of Kiwa's arteries. Everywhere she finds something severed, she bridges her friend's vascular network back together. She burns and ties and stitches wildly, reorganizing Kiwa's insides in a messy way that stabilizes her none the less.

Infections can be healed, scars can be mended, but the dead can not be brought back to life. Prioritize life saving actions first, then work your way down the decision tree. This is how she's been taught to operate.

She feels Kiwa gasp in a miracle breath just as Ino finally starts to scream.

She screams and she screams in emotional agony. Choji abandons her side to rush over, catching Ino before her knees hit the dirt.

Sakura's mind is chaos and relief. Her heart sings with fear and beautiful elation. When Kiwa takes another watery gasp, Sakura risks lifting her eyes from her patient. She turns her head looking for the enemy. She scans the horizon for what ever thing is making Ino scream like this.

Her heart kicks heavy in her chest, then goes eerily silent. The crater at Ino's feet is not a wayward explosion.

It's someone's grave.

The bits of rubble around the blast perimeter are not bits of shattered wood. They are charred body parts. Anatomical detritus scattered everywhere. The gravel is not dark with bomb-tag soot, it's dark with coagulated blood.

'Oh god, oh god-'

Ino screams at the thing at her feet, a knuckle knife that Sakura would know anywhere. Off to her left, her vision swims with images of that familiar daypack. She can't deny it any more. It's the same travel pack she'd stared at it in the Summit hallway, waiting for Shikamaru to return with water bottles.

She looks back to the pile of raw meat and dark hair that use to be a person. She pleads helplessly with silent lips. Her eyes run raw with burning saltwater that pools under her trembling jaw. She begs and begs and begs the gods that the love she's come to offer Shikamaru is not a lost cause.

Ino's screams echo into the void, drowning out her prayers.

- Body Bag -

Time drags on. More people finally arrive. Emergency service Nin put out the fire. Neighbors arrive in festival clothes to help identify the bodies.

They ask Sakura and Choji question after question. Ino remains unresponsive.

Inside an erected pop up shelter, Sakura doesn't stop working on Kiwa. She can't stop working or she will fall apart. She pours chakra into her friend by the bucket until her own palms begin to blister from the strain. Even then, she doesn't stop. She can't, she can't-

She goes on like this for hours. She snarls savagely at anyone who enters the tent. She stands her soul between Kiwa and death, absolutely refusing to let him have her. She's prepared to defend Kiwa with her life, prepared to trade her own for hers.

Because Shikamaru is really dead. Not even Tsunade could bring him back. Sakura is alone.

Cell by cell, vein by vein, she works to undo the damage done by a honed Katana blade. Her friend has already lost so much blood, she's practically hypothermic. Every second is touch and go….

When Kiwa blearily open her eyes, Sakura finally allows herself to hope.

But then she recognizes Sakura's face. Her voice breaks into a sob of grief. She reaches up shaky hands, trying to push Sakura off of her.

"Stop. Stop, Sakura…"

"No."

"Please, just…let me die. It's my fault. Let me be with them."

"No."

Sakura has had enough of lost causes. She stays with Kiwa for the rest of the day. She heals the wounds her chakra can heal and accepts the emotional ones she knows she can not. She picks her battles. She defends her arena.

Drained of chakra and eyes drooping, she holds Kiwa's limp hand between her own. She wants to beg Kiwa for information, but finds she can't open her mouth. She's always been bad with words.

'You only think you're bad with words.'

Her mind drifts to a better time. To sitting with her head on Shikamaru's while he sooted her in the summit hall.

If she doesn't think of better times, she'll just keep repeating the same statement in an unending loop.

Shikamaru, dead.

Shikamaru, dead.

Kiwa is alive, but this doesn't feel like living. Instead, they exist together in the silence of the medical tent. She has Kiwa on a sedative now, but there's a different between being sedated and being numb. When Kiwa is finally ready to speak, Sakura knows that she is both.

"Thank you." Kiwa says, breaking the silence. Her voice is a weak rasp like she's aged a hundred years. "I'm sorry I was…weak."

"You aren't weak. You were in shock. There's a difference."

Kiwa looks away. "If you say so."

When the winter sky is just beginning to dim, she helps Kiwa out of her cot. Together, they limp out of the medical tent. Kiwa staggers from her wounds and Sakura from chakra depletion. Sakura, Ino and Choji make plans to transfer Kiwa back to Konoha. She needs to go tot he hospital where she can receive more long term care.

They freeze when Kiwa's hollow voice asks if she can see the bodies.

"Which bodies?" Ino asks uncomfortably.

"…Of my team. I want to say goodbye."

"Kiwa… they haven't been dug out of the rubble yet."

Sakura averts her gaze as they talk. She can't look at the still smoldering pile of ashes that use to be the sawmill. It would still be some time before it was safe to recover the remaining bodies from inside.

Ruya and Utsuho's bodies were still missing. It's likely they never made it out.

This had been the general consensus until Kiwa looks at them, face confused. She waits, scanning her foggy memories before she tries to speak again.

"No, they weren't in the rubble. We got everybody out of the fire. We were all out front when we were attacked. Where are Utsuho and Shikamaru?"

Ino and Sakura trade worried looks. Utsuho's body might be missing then, but Shikamaru's was…

Sakura's body trembles under Kiwa's weight, her arm still slung over her shoulder. It isn't fair that she has to hold up her friend when she's barely holding herself together. She can't find a way to tell Kiwa they are still collecting the pieces of him.

But at her silence, Kiwa looks around. She takes her arm from Sakura's grip. First she becomes agitated, then nearly frantic. "Sakura, where is Shikamaru's body-"

"We are recovering what we can." Choji finally says, voicing what the girls can not. He gestures a thoughtless hand towards the bloody dent in the earth.

Kiwa shakes her head, panic in her eyes. She's going to reopen her wounds at this rate.

"No. That's….that was Ruya. Shikamaru was with me-"

"Kiwa…"

"God Damnit, listen to me!" She screams. "Shikamaru was with me! He was alive when I passed out. The person who attacked us was trying to talk to him-"

Ino's grip becomes a vice on Choji's forearm, strangling off his circulation. "What are you saying-" She demands. It's the first signs of life Ino has shown in hours.

Kiwa spins in a circle, hands to her temples. She's scanning the courtyard for bodies she won't find. Her voice is the high octave rush of someone about to burst into tears.

"Utsuho and Shikamaru are gone! I didn't see them die. Sakura…They could still be alive. What if they escaped? Utsuho could still be Alive—"

The word becomes a war drum in their ears-

Alive. Alive. Alive. Alive .

Sakura has dealt with natural disasters. She's trained for years in emergency triage. Every brutal second under Tsunade's tutelage comes back to her all at once, propelling her into motion.

Some unknown authority has possessed her body. Her training takes over and her mouth starts barking orders like it's running on muscle memory. She starts yelling to the officers in vests. Her arms point to the woods all around.

Every second counts and they are wasting seconds. How long have they just been standing there while Shikamaru and Utsuho were in mortal danger?

Electrified by her desperation, everyone present starts spreading out in a fan. They check the perimeter of the sawmill for tracks. They search for anything that might hint at people fleeing the vicinity on foot.

"Over here!" A paramedics yells out.

Sakura's heart combusts in her chest, her defiance of lost causes resurrected. She could find them. She could bring back help-

Her mouth barks more orders like she's in her OR. She's not going to risk being outmatched.

"Ino, run back to Konoha. Fucking Sprint. When you get within telepathic range, use your transmission jutsu to radio ahead to Tsunade. Tell her everything that has happened here. Don't ask her for help, tell her to send me a fucking army."

"I'm going now." Ino nods. The color is back in her face again. She's panting from the same rush of hope flooding every nerve in Sakura's body.

"Choji, I need you to stay here with Kiwa. You're the most physically capable of protecting these people incase the enemy returns. In the event Shikamaru doubles back, you two know each others strategies. You two will be even stronger together. If there's no sign of him by the time Ino returns, both of you come and find me. I'll leave marks for you to follow."

She's about to throw herself blindly into the forest when Choji grips her shoulder hard. She anchors her mind to his steady hand, trying to imagine what he's feeling. She knows he wants to come with her. He's scared, but he's giving her his trust.

"You can't go out there like this. You're exhausted." He says.

And he's right, she is exhausted. She's poured almost every ounce of chakra she has into the walking miracle that is Kiwa standing beside her. But it doesn't matter, Shikamaru is alive.

She's about to start protesting her capabilities when he reaches into his hip pouch. Slowly, he pulls out a small container. He hesitates for only a moment before popping out a yellow soldier pill. "There will be a cost to using this." He warns, but he puts it in her hands all the same.

"There will be a cost if I don't" She says, pocketing it for later. She won't waste it running through the forest. She'll save it for once she finds their friend.

"When you find him, he'll need these." Ino says. She unslings Shikamaru's travel pack from across her shoulder. She's been clinging to it up till now, but the time for comfort is long passed. "Be careful while you run with this. I don't know what Shikamaru's been doing, but the outer pocket is so stuffed with flash bombs the thing is likely to ignite if you flare too much chakra."

"I will find him alive." Sakura promises. She turns to Kiwa and makes her the same vow. "I'm bringing Utsuho back too."

Kiwa has been lost in her own thoughts until now, high on hope that her Captain is still out there. But here she grabs Sakura by the wrist. Her nails are crescent shaped teeth that bite into her skin. Kiwa might still be numb with fear, but as Sakura has seen this transformation before. The first feeling to come back after grief is rage.

Kiwa comes alive with it now. "Sakura…hunt down whoever did this. Bring war. Show no mercy." Her voice is the singing of cold steel across a wet-stone.

Sakura locks eyes with each of her friends. They all have their roles to play now. There is no more time to plan. It's time to follow through.

At the perimeter of the clearing, an older woman shows Sakura the trail of blood leading off into the forest. Sakura takes a hikers map from a local when they offer it, grateful for anything that will shave time off her search. Overhead, sun down is rapidly approaching. She knows that finding the boys will only get harder once it does.

She doesn't spare a look back as she runs off, praying she's not too late. She praying that her friends are still alive. She prays Ino will return in time with help.

She throws herself into the winter woods, vowing to never again accept a lost cause.