Having written almost all of my work in the Pirates of the Caribbean universe, this is a fresh new thing for me, writing for Naruto. This will be a short story, probably 3 or 4 chapters at the most. Just dipping my toe in! Hope you enjoy! Reviews make me cry happy tears.

This story is post 4th war, but disregards the Sakura/Sasuke relationship completely. You can decide if Kakashi still has his sharingan, I have left it up to interpretation.

(This story will contain dark themes and could perhaps be triggering to some people who are experiencing grief. Read at your own risk.) Crosposted on A03. I do not own Naruto.

It was the noises, sometimes, that kept her focus from stepping off a cliff.

Those small scrapes of metal on the doors as they flapped back and forth. The gusts of air as people flew through them, blowing her pink hair in her face. The constant beep beep beep of the heart monitors. The distant shouting of the team scrambling into position to save the lives of an ANBU unit. Someone needed blood transfusions, and someone else needed to be knocked out...he was going to "kill himself if he kept thrashing around like that". The voice was shrill, a tone reserved for those unique moments where it was your responsibility to save a human life. "We're gonna lose him" being passed around to different people like it was a game of who could shout it the loudest, as though increasing the volume of that particular phrase made the chest compressions 10% more effective.

...it never did. Sometimes, she had learned, death just happened and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Death was an absolute power, and it didn't care how much skill you had, it didn't care how much hope you had, it didn't care how much you loved someone...it didn't care about anything.

It just was.

Accepting that losing wasn't something she could control...some days she still couldn't do it, couldn't fathom it. She hadn't studied medical jutsu under Tsunade to lose. She hadn't honed her chakra to a fine science to lose. She hadn't spent long hours in the library where days and nights blended together into a homogenous blurry timeline to lose.

Her hand clenched into a fist, her fingernails digging into her skin. Haruno Sakura wouldn't lose. Couldn't lose.

But Haruno Sakura did lose.

And those two realities would be at war within her forever.

It was the harsh reality of being a medic.

Her head tipped up for a moment, refocusing on the team with the ANBU unit. Everything had gone quiet except for the monotone beep of a flatline.

A few moments dragged by. Her eyes shut with slow acceptance. Someone was asking "time of death?" as if anyone standing there actually thought it mattered.

She wondered who it was this time...which soldier has sacrificed their life for a cause that they were taught was noble? Which soldier donned a mask, used a codename, lived in the shadows, chipped away at their soul...and now died for their village?

ANBU, even here, was kept a secret. A special team had been set aside to deal with them...as though they were rabid dogs not fit for regular society...

Sakura had asked Tsunade two months ago what she needed to do for clearance...was it some kind of special hell she was supposed to resign herself to for the opportunity to watch more people die? Some sort of extra training? The part of her that refused to believe anyone was lost until they were dead gnawed at her inability to be there for those soldiers...but ANBU...you didn't see one of those porcelain masks here unless they were critical.

They were taught to endure...as long as they could breath and move, they were to remain on mission until completion.

She thought that perhaps they gave them masks and codenames to reduce them to a husk of a person...to engineer their psyche to slowly accept that they weren't anything more, that they lived and died on a mission...it was cruel.

But on some level, she understood. The world was cruel, and sometimes you had to fight fire with fire.

Tsunade had told her that she was probably ready now...but she also said that it was a bleak position to be in, that being on the special ANBU team would twist you, that having a 50/50 shot between life and death would grind your love of medicine into dust.

Some idealistic part of her thought that maybe she was good enough to beat those odds, that maybe she would be the difference, but then reality slammed into her every time and reminded her that just because she saved lives didn't mean that she had the power to control death.

With a heaving sigh, she resigned herself to forgetting about the dead soldier behind the porcelain mask, knowing she would never know their name. Her shift was over in a few minutes anyway, and she was supposed to meet Team 7 at the pub for drinks.

"Meeting them" really meant sitting there twirling her straw while Naruto shouted about whatever he deemed exciting in the world that day. Hinata always just sat there blushing, Ino would needle her about her sexual conquests (there weren't any) and Sasuke sat there acting like emotions were a troubling thing to be ignored. Occasionally he would add a sarcastic comment here and there, but she did her best to ignore him altogether.

The crush that she had harbored for the man...it was dead, and looking back on it, she wasn't sure it ever existed, because she wasn't sure she had ever seen Sasuke for what he really was. She had loved the idea of him...the mysterious brooding had been attractive (but even that made her cringe)...but Sasuke was, in reality, a person who had one foot in reality and one foot always in the past, even now. He was trying, she knew, to move on, but when you have had the trauma of losing your entire family...that worms its way into your head like poison with no antidote. And then, all of the shit he did after he left Konoha...even if he had been an absolute ray of sunshine before that...no crush could withstand the utter depths of depravity he had sunk to.

Sometimes she wondered if he even deserved redemption.

"Sakura?"

Sometimes she wondered if any of them would be able to live their lives without that echo of pain always hanging over their heads.

"...Sakura?"

Probably not. You didn't experience the hell that they had without scars.

"Sakura."

Her head jerked over to where the noise was coming from.

"Oh, sorry Shizune...I was just...thinking," she mumbled, knowing that Shizune would understand what "thinking" meant.

A small hand was placed on her upper arm. "I don't know what their name was either, if it makes you feel better...it probably doesn't, actually," Shizune said, and Sakura stared at her dumbly.

"Huh? Who's name?"

"That ANBU agent...Tsunade will know, if you really want to try to pry it out of her...but honestly, it's best if you just...not."

Oh.

Yeah. It's best to just let them fade away into nothingness. Inside, she scoffed. They were expected to sacrifice their lives and then when they've done that, they stop mattering as if they were just...expendable.

Shizune squeezed her arm. "Your shift is over. You can head home if you want-wait, you are supposed to be meeting Naruto and the others tonight, right? That sounds fun. Say hi to them for me."

Sakura plastered on a smile. "Right, sure, I can do that."

She shrugged out of her white coat and hung it on the hook. The hospital's locker room was conveniently close to the ER, and that allowed her to be an indirect witness to every moment that someone lost. She would perhaps suggest to Tsunade to rearrange the building.

Shizune cleared her throat, and Sakura glanced over at her. "Do you suppose he will actually show up this time...on time?"

No. She didn't suppose that he would show up on time. She supposed that he would amble in when he deemed it appropriate...which was usually several hours later, after everyone else was already good and sloshed. The back corner of the round booth they sat in was a little darker due to a perpetually broken light, and he had claimed it. While she suffered from Naruto's astonishing ability to keep his voice just below the volume of a siren, he would sit there with his stupid orange book and pretend like absolutely nothing in the world was bothering him.

Occasionally he might flick his eye towards Sasuke to bask in their mutual apathy, or he might glance at her with mild sympathy for her poor eardrums, but otherwise, he was a terrible conversationalist.

Six months ago, after Naruto had consumed one too many beers, he had jerked his attention towards the mute head of silver hair.

"Hey, Kakashi-sensei, what do you do after we hang out? Like...do you ever, I don't know, d'ya ever"-and it had been at this moment that Naruto had swept his gaze around to the others like they were all participants in some kind of grand conspiracy-"like...get laid?"

She had been in the middle of taking a sip of whatever fruity pink concoction Ino-pig had shoved under her nose, and then had experienced the wonderful sensation of said liquid flying up her nostrils. Kakashi, to his credit, managed to keep a straight face to anyone who didn't know him.

(When you had been around him for as long as she had, you learned to tell when his eye was cycling through Naruto-must-die-immediately mode and how-many-ways-can-I-fuck-with-this-idiot mode.)

While she was coughing, he had actually dragged his attention away from his precious Icha Icha for a moment to level a disinterested stare at the obnoxious blonde. Ino-pig had, in turn, burned a hole in Kakashi's forehead protector out of vicious curiosity. Sakura had been busy trying to figure out which mode the man had settled on when he chose to not dignify the question with a serious response.

"What?" he had asked as though he was speaking to a small toddler after they had asked why the sky was blue for the 87th time that day.

Sakura had prayed that Naruto, with his attention span equaling that of a gnat, would have already forgotten what he asked, but sadly, on this day he had been in perfect-drunk-clarity mode.

"I said, do you ever get laid? I mean, we never see you with anyone and-"

Kakashi had snapped his book shut. Usually that meant one of two things: either he was about to verbally eviscerate Naruto, or he was actually considering entertaining the inane question. Sakura had suddenly been as curious as Ino to find out which one it was.

She had watched his lip twitch under the mask into what she could only guess was a smirk. "Why? Were you interested or something?"

It had been all she could do to keep her amusement to a chuckle hidden behind her hand. Naruto, as drunk as he was, had taken a few seconds to process the response. "Interested? What, like..."-his face had screwed up into a look of supreme concentration-"...like, interested in you?"

Kakashi, the bastard, had just raised an eyebrow at his former student while Naruto spluttered about the horrifying hole he had dug himself into. "Uh, no...no, you know what? Just forget I asked. Nevermind."

That had seemed to suit Kakashi just fine, because he had taken one more moment to pin Naruto with a that's-what-I-thought look before returning to Icha Icha and pretending that none of them existed.

That had also been the incident that had put the silver-haired man and sex into the same universe for her with absolutely devastating consequences.

It wasn't that she hadn't ever noticed that he wasn't hard to look at...but now it was the little things she noticed. The way the moonlight lit up his hair...the way his eye crinkled in different ways depending on if he was annoyed or amused...the slender shape of his fingers when they were wrapped around...well, anything. It was like she had always been looking at him with poor vision, and then suddenly he had come into perfect clarity.

She had thought that she had experienced "attraction" with Sasuke...but it hadn't been attraction. It had been a childhood infatuation, something that was intertwined with the immaturity of a young girl. It had been...cute.

This, this was consuming her. This had shifted something in her world to the point where she could divide her timeline into before-she-noticed-Kakashi and after. Often her mind would drift away and replay how his muscles looked during their spar that day, and frequently she would find herself wondering what his voice would sound like saying that. When she woke up in the morning, she would wonder how he would look sleeping next to her in the soft sunlight, and more often than not, her mind would wander into a fantasy of him giving her a devilishly crooked smile, his fingers finding their way under the sheets to bring her to a delightful peak. (She was on her third vibrator, and that embarrassed her more than it should.)

The only method of soothing she had was her ability to indulge herself in the absolute perfection of his body without actually giving away that she wanted to memorize every inch of it with her fingers.

She was the only medic whom he allowed to examine him after missions, and that was a privilege they would have to tear from her cold dead hands. (...It actually took unprecedented levels of concentration to not turn into a creature of absolute primal passion while she was pressing the stethoscope against his heart…)

Even Tsunade was a little jealous.

Shizune was the only person she had shared this crippling longing with. One day, after one of Kakashi's post-mission examinations, she had dragged the poor woman into an empty exam room feeling (and probably looking) akin to a crazed animal and had babbled that "these exams were torture" because "dear Kami have you seen the man" and that if she "didn't get fucked against a wall by him soon" that she would "simply pass away".

Shizune, in all of her infinite wisdom, had not helped. In fact, she had apparently decided that the only thing to do was poke the crazed animal right in the face. "Well, you know, Sakura...there is a wall in his exam room..."

Sakura's eyes had almost fallen right out of her poor head. The blush had felt like lava creeping across her skin, and she had actually been shaking a little. Behind her hands she had ground out a "not helpful", resolving to just collapse onto the floor and decompose into a pile of goo and desire.

Torture. That is what it was. Sure, there was real torture with knives and hot pokers, but this was something else, this was something that had settled into her neurons like a goddamn disease.

If it was just lust, she could probably ignore it, but she could never be so lucky. She had cataloged the tones of voice he used, she had memorized how his various laughs sounded and which ones were genuine, she had spent an unhealthy amount of time staring at his ass, and she was absolutely obsessed with the grace and speed he had in a spar.

Intelligence, she had decided, was her kink. And Kakashi bled intelligence out of every goddamn pore. Sure, he was supremely lazy, he was always late, he rarely found conversation interesting enough to participate, and he was apparently completely oblivious to the slow rotting of her brain...but when he sharpened his focus on something, it was intoxicating. He was intoxicating.

So, when Shizune asked her if she thought he might show up tonight to their little gathering, some small part of her wished he didn't just to preserve what was left of her poor sanity.

She was a 23-year-old-woman. A functioning brain, she decided, was important and losing her sanity now would just be so very tragic.

Resigning herself to another night of straw-twirling, she said goodbye to Shizune and headed home to take a quick shower and change into something comfortable.