Chapter Text
The next time, the patient is still awake.
With the curtains pulled it truly does feel like another world. Her own controllable environment tailored to her exact specifications, down to the kind of sutures that have been added to her medical instruments. Even the fabric surrounding her holds some symbolism to who she is. Tent walls are transient in a way. They fly in the wind when the gusts are particularly strong, flowing like a bride’s gown before the service, waiting for the calm that always comes after a storm. The hope kept that it’s not the calm that comes before it. It shuffles on the grass, creating white noise that Sakura, used to the utter silence of underground laboratories, has gradually adjusted to. It’s now calming. Nothing stays. Nothing truly obeys the hands of human beings, but they listen.
The tents are not the white walls of hospitals they all so desperately need, but they shield them from the cold night, and perhaps they can’t keep out the monsters in the dark, but they give comfort where they can. Sakura always thought she was the type of girl who belonged in the rigid and controlled environments she’d grown up in. She was the closest a person could get to a sterile, polished weapon, after all. But things change. She’s changed, and with the trees rustling and the sounds of footsteps muffled by grass laid flat from trampling, she is not angry. For that moment, she’s as flexible as the trees and their twirling leaves, green and new like the growth that follows the fire, and that is hope. Before everything else, that is hope.
Those words still ring in her ears. The look on Tsunade’s face as the other women buzzed and tittered, fawning over the man now healthy and whole, gushing about the talent she so desperately needed to show them. Their eyes were as green as her teacher’s. In another life she would have found them repulsive, how they simpered to her as bribery and manipulation, all to get a piece of her accomplishments for themselves. Trying to move up in the world.
Except, she understands the desperation. Not only to save lives, but to have something for them when the war finally ends, and medics go back to being the punchline of every joke. The men who slapped her shoulder as they passed by the commotion, congratulating her with offers to listen to the story over a glass of sake, desperate to have that edge that could make them special enough to be the exception to the ridicule of being a man in a “girl’s” profession.
For the first time in her life, Sakura pitied.
But Tsunade had listened patiently, eyes latched on each nurse in turn as they explained the circumstances, cutting through the compliments to her teaching and unnecessary flattery, right to the core of it. Her sharp eyes had always seen far too much of everything, especially where Sakura is concerned. Then those eyes had found her where she perched on her lab table, the same one a once dying man sat before being revived miraculously from the arms of the reaper. A stone in a river full of ripples, the center and cause of the hurricane in her makeshift hospital.
“The patient has recovered remarkably, Senju-San. It is simply remarkable! Such fine teaching has created a truly talented young medic, it is clear.” The nurse she’d seen hand out assignments in the mornings, exclaims. Her hands clasp at her breast as if a damsel about to faint for the hero to catch. In another life, lady , she contains her snort. No knights in shining armor coming to rescue little old us, I’m afraid. But there’s plenty of dragons , she thinks of red slicked kunai flying in the night and bodies dragged from the forests as the glint of hitai-ate flash in the shadows of leaf covered limbs.
“I see.” Tsunade says simply. Her eyes flicker around Sakura’s face for a moment, looking for something. But Sakura has no guilt or fear in her to hide. This is war, there are war crimes, and now is the time to do what’s necessary. She is not a good person; she is a good soldier. She will never apologize for saving a life. She meets the gaze head on with a lifted chin. Her teacher hums thoughtfully.
“A job well done, Brat. Keep it up.” And with a final nod, she’s spinning on her heel and disappearing in a green blur of fabric, leaving Sakura stunned silent in her wake.
Even now, days later, but the soonest she’s worked up the nerve to try again, those words have stayed with her. For a moment she can almost convince herself that Tsunade would be proud of the work she’s accomplished, for the research and results, even if not the application. Kami, it’s times like these she misses her snake eyed companion more than anything. She shudders to admit such a frankly emotional and sensitive notion, but Orochimaru truly has become something of a - and she truly hesitates to say it - friend. Possibly, considering her nonexistent teammates and lack of interactions with anyone her age, her only one. It’s juvenile and stupid and she aches for their little lab and it’s familiar walls. At least there she fell asleep over fascinating new breakthroughs in cutting edge medical ninjutsu research rather than a corpse. Waking up with ink smudged on your cheek is infinitely less traumatizing than coppery, dried blood.
How Orochimaru himself would adore to see her here, finishing the last of her preparations for disposing of the used instruments and just about to change history. She tosses out the last used scalpel, grimacing at the crust of green flecked pus still peeling off the edge that became trash the moment it got chipped. Taking one last gulp of breath while her quietly groaning patient waits impatiently behind her, she really really fucking wishes that he could be here. But she’s alone. She straightens, forces her hands out of their white knuckled grip on her shirt and smooths out the resulting wrinkles despite the steady shaking of her fingers.
You are a fighter. Repeating the mantra in her head silently, eyes closed for that moment of reprieve, Sakura tries to remember how to breathe through a malfunctioning organ system. She turns with the calm detachment of a medical professional and launches into this version of herself.
“What hurts and how severely?” She asks crisply.
The man, blonde and ruddy faced with freckles and patchy facial hair, rolls his face towards her with a refreshingly put-upon expression.
“Everything, little lady. Absolutely. Everything.” Groaning again for added effect. This is a concrete process. There are steps to this she just has to follow. It’s easy enough. Sakura knows how to respond to this; she was trained to. She can do this, she can.
“If you could please hold still and stay limp, I’m going to do a quick examination since you seem pretty far from death’s door. If any pain occurs, I’m sure you’ll make it known to me.” She replies blandly. She slips a hand under his torso without any more warning, over his collar bones and between each rib, checking with the clinical precision that has gained her many rude remarks from past patients. It’s perfunctory and quick but not without almost constant and juvenile complaints from the man moaning about his delicate bones and battered soul.
It would have normally annoyed her, but he’s able to talk. It puts her in a surprisingly joking mood.
“It seems you have a puncture in your stomach lining. It’s a relatively easy procedure, but I can still reduce the amount of food you can eat by 75% if - for whatever reason - I end up distracted by - I don't know - an overdramatic, loud patient, perhaps?”
He takes it in stride, to his credit.
“Will do, doc.” He grins. She huffs a laugh against her will at his sheer audacity. His face is transformed by the smile, aging backwards at least fifteen years and showing off prominent smile lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes. She takes her position. Both hands rested over the patient’s core to begin with, fingers spread wide till the webbing is taut and palm placed over palm. She has one more breath to deeply release from her nose as her patient collapses fully back into the bed, limp as can be.
Shoulders tight, she knows it’s now or never. Green engulfs her skin in a wreath of inverted flames, and she’s in his blood, his skin, the follicles of his hair. She’s in his cells and the chugging of his heart, the expanding of his lungs and their fibrous membranes as oxygen is diffused and carbon dioxide pushed out to where it will be excreted. She’s a part of him at that moment. They are one entity. Where are you… she skims through the pulsing red walls of his chest cavity. The liver, the stomach, the intestines, big and small, looking, looking, looking… There! The glowing center of him. His core reaches for her in a way no patient’s chakra has ever done before. Not so intensely. Or perhaps, just not in such a way that her body knew to receive and interpret, before she had truly come to the intimate knowledge of what it really is and what can be done to it. Chakra is one of the staples of her world, and yet she now understands it in a dimension unknown to every other living person. A unique connection.
With the briefest of thoughts, her green chakra shifts suddenly to blue. She feels more than hears the man startle a bit.
“I need zero movement, remember? We don’t want any stomach reductions, do we?” She reminds him tightly, trying for humor despite the strained way it most definitely comes out. She keeps her eyes closed to avoid compromising her concentration, but she can feel the way he’s staring at her.
“What.” She finally snaps as he remains silent despite the wise cracking nature of his earlier commentary. Usually, a lack of dialogue is appreciated in a person having surgical procedures performed on them, but to hear this particular patient being silent is horribly off putting.
“Thought healing chakra was supposed to be green.” She eventually hears him say. He doesn’t sound suspicious, but there’s definitely something in the way he says it that sets off red flags. Though, blessedly, it does not set off alarms.
“It is.” She grits out as her chakra begins threading into the torn edges of his chakra system where it’s been disrupted by the chunk taken out of his torso. The stomach really is torn horribly, and if she was without her techniques, she would have probably had to make good on her threats of a reduction. It’s not something you would suspect from looking at it from the outside, and Sakura can guess that this was caused by an expanding or exploding style weapon.
Something small punctured his stomach and then something large already inside caused the destruction she’s slowly uncovering. If this level of injury had been clear from an initial look over, he would never have been sent to her at all, but to her teacher. Her face feels deathly cold with the realization that this is no longer a testing scenario for the sake of confirming her mastering of the technique.
The lining is just too far in some places to be scavenged. But no one but her would know that. To everyone else, it will look like a relatively tame injury that was healed by an exceptional medic. No one will know it will require the regeneration of a delicate structure that she hasn’t been taught to reconstruct yet and should have required her call Tsunade to fix immediately. No one but her.
This is now a do or die situation. She will save him. And Kami help her, the determination pushes out the fear and adrenaline eats her self-doubt whole. She abruptly feels strangely, unnaturally calm.
“This is obviously still medic ninjitsu. It’s usually green, but it can be mixtures of blue and green as well as the solid color, depending on the focus of the chakra being used.” She explains. With a small twitch of her pinky, she snags the edge of the chakra line that runs parallel to his circulatory system.
“Ah.” Is all she gets from him. A word of acknowledgement. She doesn’t have him yet, but she knows what will ensure his trust. Every good liar knows the two steps to a bullshit story; establish a line of reasoning, then use it to explain what’s happening.
“In this case, I have to cut out some of the destroyed tissue to then create new material to replace it. Hence, the blue.” She states, lying out of her ass. She can feel him relax into her, satisfied with this application of what he was skeptical of being true. With that last easing of his tension, the rest of his chakra is much easier to secure with her own, putting up little resistance to her manipulations. The threads are secured, the connection made. Now it’s as easy as willing his chakra to do as she commands. As simple as taking control of his entire chakra network with her one in a million control, focusing her chakra into healing, she directs his own to begin the repairs. She has the intention, and his body has the intimate knowledge of his exact specifications, and together the result is the perfection of a procedure she has never learned to do. As Orochimaru had mused to her when she had come to him with the idea, chakra is a truly intuitive, and sentient force of energy. It knows what to do, all it needs is someone to say, “do it.”
Her chakra would have no knowledge of this body’s exact state before his injuries, at least not at first. But those precious minutes of examining the chakra system and mentally guessing as to exactly how his unique body was formed, all the trial and error that’s standard practice for medic-nin, could be the difference between life and death. This, of course, isn’t the part of the technique she’s really worried about someone discovering…
Oh no, she thinks as she pulls herself out of his blood and guts, recentering in her own body again, this is the least morally gray part of it all. But it’s a damn good red herring.
“And the brave medic has returned triumphant!” A freckled face greets her return to awareness with a smirk and boyish enthusiasm.
“Well, the good news is that your stomach’s only half gone-”
“Oh, come on doc, don’t do that to my heart!” He grasps at the chest she was just inside as if struck by her callousness. She has no business letting her lips curl a bit. He has no right to be that endearing.
“Alright,” she half chuckles tiredly. “Your stomach has been repaired completely and you should have no other adverse effects other than some tenderness in the region of the injury.”
Her small smile falters slightly at the way he shifts on the bed, obviously suffering discomfort in his hurt leg from sitting in one position so long. She can’t heal non-fatal injuries, there’s just not enough medics for the extra time it would take to heal patients completely. The fracture will fix itself within a few days, if not sooner. There’s nothing more she can do, though she finds her hands itching by her sides, twitching to do more. Be the medic she’s always strived to be, who leaves patients, not just in less pain than before, but in no pain at all.
He smiles at her. There’s understanding and sympathy in how he starts maneuvering himself from the bed, careful of his brace and why he has it. She finds herself jerking forward to help him the rest of the way when there’s a bark of her name from outside the curtain.
“Another one comin’ your way!” The voice calls to her as the curtain’s pulled aside to roll in another trolley with a heavily breathing kid barely older than her, a big chunk of what looks like half a tree trunk wedged between his ribs. The other medics are already hustling away, the curtain hanging half shut where a rapidly dying shinobi is laying in critical condition. She starts towards him before stuttering in place and turning back to her previous patient, torn between the tides.
“Don’t worry bout me, little lady,” he quirks his lips into a sad grimace. “You go save lives.”
The soft expression makes her throat hurt. He’s going to go out there and die and she can’t stop it, and for a moment she’s twelve years old in her Hokage’s office all over again. She’s being told she’s going to be a medic-nin instead of a proper kunoichi and she is wrathful like the child being ripped from their dreams and patronized by the ghosts of the heroes who never saved her. In that moment she wishes the world would burn around her so she could stand in the middle and feel the vindictive warmth of the orange blooming from her vengeance.
He must see it. Or he sees parts of it and interprets it in a way that’s at least sort of right, because he looks his age at that moment. Hurt and old and sad. But not for himself.
“My name’s Oichi, kid. We’ll see each other again.” He says it firmly, like he believes it, but Sakura knows how adults work. Even the good ones. He smiles once more, and then he’s hobbling out of her little nook, passing through the curtain walls and becoming yet another corpse she’s sent to the ground. She can’t feel her heart anymore. Her hand presses over her chest almost desperately, painfully aware of the boy losing precious moments behind her. But she needs to find the beat, she needs to know it’s still there, it’s still alive somewhere in her.
With scrabbling fingers, she finds the faint pulse, bump, bump, bump.
She breathes. She can’t feel it in her chest, but it moves under her fingers, and for now that just has to be enough. With a sigh, a centering of self, and a snap of her surgical gloves, she’s pulling the trolley into her makeshift room. Her eyes get to work on the outer injuries and her hands do their job for the inner workings, body thrown full force back into the fray.
Later, she’ll celebrate the mastering of this half of her technique.
Later, she’ll wonder if just this part is enough, if she can forget the other step exists at all.
Later, she’ll stand in the rain against the wall of her tent and watch two shinobi in the distance dig a muddy hole in the rain with shovels caked in blood and vomit, a bandaged corpse no bigger than five-foot two waiting by their feet with a pile of stacked bodies patiently soaking through behind it.