Adult-FanFiction.org : Naruto

Sector Five	By : FlairForTheVeil Category: Naruto AU/AR > Yaoi - Male/Male Views: 2303 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto nor its characters. Rightful ownership belongs to Masashi Kishimoto. I make no profit of this fanfiction.

Chapter List
- 7
- 8
- 9
Chapter 7: Teamwork
When the whole group reached the hospital, Naruto dug Dr. Snakes’ identification card from his pocket and thrust it in front of the lab scanner. The doors slid open to another view of hopelessly shattered glass. He clumsily gathered Karin in his arms and she flailed and batted at his head a bit through the whole walk through the lab. When he set her down, Karin quickly jogged to the U turn of the hospital that led to its patient rooms, her feet slapping loudly on the hospital’s marble floor.
Naruto shied away from Skully’s room and gently knocked on Sasuke’s wooden door, pushing it open when a grunt was heard from inside.
Before his eyes even adjusted to the brightness of the room, the cocking of a gun and the pang of a knife was heard. His eyes got used to fluorescent light and Itachi stood protectively in front of his brother with a sleek handgun in his left hand and the same knife Sasuke had been stabbed with behind him in his right. The man growled and shoved the chair he had been sitting in out of the way, tensing up and setting himself in an offensive position.
“Itachi, it’s okay, these are the p-“ Karin tried to interlude but she was quickly interrupted by the brunet.
“Which one of you shot this knife,” he spat at all of them and tossed the gun to the side so hard that it bounced off the wall and skidded under the bed. He switched his feet and bared the blade with a tight grip and glared at all of them. “Tell me right now or all of you die slowly.”
Ino scoffed and removed the hood off of her blonde head, crossing her arms and jutting an eyebrow at the man. “It was me. Why the hell are you people making such a big-“
Before anyone could tell that he even moved, Itachi had Ino pinned to the wall with the butcher’s knife over the exact same spot that his brother had been stabbed in.
The room was silent and Ino clenched her jaw when the man dug the blade hard enough into her that her cloak ripped and the cool metal kissed her skin.
“An eye for an eye, am I correct?” Itachi hissed and tickled the blade along her skin, some tendrils of his hair escaping over his shoulder and brushing her forehead. “Maybe you don’t understand the seriousness of this situation, the critical condition of my brother. Maybe I’ll just stab you like you did to him and leave you to bleed outside like a whore.”
Kiba shoved the brunet away from Ino and grabbed him by the front of his shirt. “Back the fuck off, man, we already apo-“
“Apologies don’t fix anything!” Itachi yelled and struck him in the jaw. “I am above all of you. Every single one of you will treat me with respect. You are under my hostage and I will-“
“Itachi, stop,” Naruto cut in and held up a hand. “They’ve got the best doctor that was in Konoha in their group, and they’re offering that as an apology for Sasuke.” He glanced over to the boy whose blood bag was empty and looked slightly more normal.
“’Hell’s wrong with ‘er lot,” Konohamaru slurred his piece and chewed on a piece of gum. “’S like you got-“ Akamaru bit him in the ankle and the boy immediately shut up and nearly pissed himself when Itachi turned that glare on him.
“How the hell do you believe these fuckers?” Itachi paced in front of all of them and snarled at a weak looking pink-haired girl. “And what did they want in the first damn place?” He flicked the knife at the white dog and it whimpered at the glimmer of it in the room lights.
“Well,” Naruto slumped his shoulders a bit and up righted the chair Itachi had kicked earlier to rest next to his friend. “Sakura here said I was a part of their group, before I got the amnesia.”
“Dumbass,” Itachi laughed emptily and picked up his gun to switch the safety off and point it at Sakura. “How the hell do you know they just haven’t been tracking us and gathering our information?”
“I have,” Ino gazed out the room window in a bored manner. “But I can bring up information and old photos of Naruto to prove that he was, especially stories from Jiraiya.”
Naruto frowned at the name and Kakashi’s silver eyebrows shot into the sky. “Itachi, lower your gun. These are good people.” Kakashi looked less amused when he didn’t. “Now.”
Itachi huffed and flicked the safety on, but still stood in front of his brother in a protective gesture. Naruto idly poked at Sasuke’s warm and bare shoulder.
Kakashi stuffed his hands in his pockets and set his dominating gaze on the Konoha group. “Jiraiya and I have been friends for a long time,” he drawled and patted Ino on top of the head. “I know he probably put you up to his. Isn’t any place for a kid.”
Ino pursed her lips but relaxed at his casual aura. “I’m sorry it came to this,” she glanced at a figure blocked by Itachi but she could tell Naruto was fiddling with it somehow. “We thought Naruto was taken hostage.”
“Understandable,” Kakashi quipped and shifted his weight. “But doesn’t explain why you couldn’t have taken a friendlier approach. We’re all just trying to survive here, aren’t we?”
Ino grumbled something along the lines of how she hadn’t thought of it and the camp just wanted the blond back. “After this, we’ll take Naruto in our greatest apologies and I hope we can move onto this.”
“That doesn’t seem to be acceptable,” Kakashi smiled and leant down into her face. “We aren’t just letting him go like that, and I’m sure he doesn’t want to leave like that. He’s made friends, right, Naru?”
Naruto ceased his poking of Sasuke’s soft skin and rolled the fact around in his brain. He nodded and crossed his ankles, leaning back into the chair and sighing at the drama he knew was about to ensue.
“And I’m sure you’ll have Tsunade and the rest of your group here by nightfall.” The silver haired man added. “We want Sasuke awake by tomorrow.”
Ino’s eyes widened when she took in the information that this man actually did know Jiraiya and his childhood friend, Tsunade. She viewed Kakashi in a new light and merely nodded.
“Sakura and I would like to have a look at the member of your group, if you wouldn’t mind,” she slipped off her cloak and stood in khaki pants and a light green tunic. “We’re both medics.”
“Ah,” Kakashi leant back from her face and sighed pleasantly. “So is our Karin. Won’t you girls get along?”
Sakura offered a small smile to the redhead and jerkily headed towards the bed, nodding to Itachi but he never gave up the intensity of his glare.
She looked at the boy’s face and blushed prettily at how handsome he was. She lifted the blanket to his waist and folded it, immediately getting distracted and grimacing at his injury. She felt along his collarbone and gently turned him on his side to feel his unfortunately shattered shoulder blade.
“You have very nice stitching skills,” Sakura murmured absently in appraisal to the skin drawn perfectly together. “I’m going to realign his collarbone further,” she announced and set two fingers on the thin bone, tucking its broken discs tighter together. She grimaced when she caught sight of his heavily bruised shoulder and didn’t set a finger on it. “I suggest we power up an x-ray machine.” She made eye contact with Karin and Kakashi.
“What I thought,” Karin grumbled and crossed her arms. “You think he’ll need surgery to correct it?”
Sakura quickly shook her head. “He’ll just have difficulty rotating it when it’s completely healed; I just want to check for missing pieces that might have been taken out with the knife.”
Ino shook her head from the foot of the bed. “That’s going to take a while to heal,” she griped.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Itachi spat.
Ino only sighed and ignored the tall man. She peeked around him and was immediately enraptured with the big hunk of handsome that Naruto was drooling on.
Before she could lunge at him, Kakashi cleared his throat. “Why don’t we get him that x-ray while you bring your group here?” he suggested and smiled.
Ino grumbled under her breath and trudged outside.
Sakura, Kiba and his dog had proved to be enjoyable and resourceful company. Kiba was willing to fetch certain medical supplies they needed and Sakura lent her helping medical hand.
She politely explained the x-ray to Itachi who had no reaction whatsoever. He only nodded when she told him that his brother was going to be perfectly fine. Sakura sent him a wary look when the man seemed to completely relax (or, as relaxed as an uptight being like him could be) and leaned shadily against the wall. Something about him wasn’t right, she thought to herself and frowned.
Naruto had been napping all over the place every time they switched places in the hospital. Karin had explained that the boy had given two and a half pints of blood to Sasuke, who looked smug about healthy blood running through his veins even as he slept. His skin was back to its healthy ivory that Karin could only remember from their toddling days, not the pasty sheet white it had been for years. Karin griped about it to Juugo who only smiled and chuckled a bit, giving his small friend a rough pat on the shoulder that nearly sent her flying across the room.
Suigetsu hadn’t said a word in a while once he saw how pale Sasuke had used to be and the horrid x-ray of his shoulder. He glanced at the straight stitches running on his breast and over his shoulder and wished for his gallon bottle of water. He swallowed roughly. The white haired boy grimly slipped Kusanagi from his belt loops with a quiet zip and laid it by Sasuke’s side on his bed. Maybe it would help protect Sasuke from injuries like these again in the future, he hoped. Perhaps he wouldn’t have gotten this hurt if Suigetsu had just given up the damn thing and been fair in his bet.
A few hours slugged by and Naruto only roused from his sleep once to use the restroom. He wrapped a blanket around himself and butted his head into Sasuke’s side, pursing his lips into the mattress. He gently snored when sleep reclaimed him.
Sakura stood behind the pair and reached forward to gently run her fingers through soft blond hair. She had missed Naruto’s glowing presence, his subtly perverted comments, and his immature sense of humor. But beyond that, she knew Naruto was aged well past his actual years with the deaths of his original group. She weakly smiled when he practically purred and nuzzled against Sasuke’s side, causing the boy to snort in his sleep and inch away and Naruto to snort back and creep closer. His snores rose to a crescendo in volume until Sakura’s nose twitched and she shifted his jaw for him, silencing them.
She watched the duo for a few more moments and giggled when Sasuke appeared to reach out for something in his dreams, but his arm going lax and smacking Naruto in the face with his elbow. The blond awoke with a start and his head darted from side to side, eyes unfocused and the side of his mouth wet with drool. He rested his lazy gaze on Sakura, slumping over his chair and playing dead. “I’m hungry!” He whined.
She caught herself rolling her eyes. “You’re going to have to wait for food,” she scolded, but her face softened considerably when she saw he had already fallen asleep in his sprawled position.
Her delicate features hardened once again once she considered the circumstances of this situation. From what she had learned, Naruto had hit his head so hard that he seemed to have some sort of permanent amnesia. According to Karin he had recalled significantly little information of his life before the group he had been… adopted by. Even if there was information that he could call up with reminders like Itachi’s gun, most of them were gone, dead, extinct, whatever she’d like to call it. It wasn’t like she could recreate Konoha and bring his past group back to life to make him remember, and force on him some tragic moments.
In their childhood days at Konoha, when Naruto lived in the partial ghetto with the rest of the town orphans, his closest companions had been the group of nine Jinchuuriki that took him under their wing. When the Sectors had been divided and Danzo had tried to eliminate the younger generations, he had made promise with Tsunade that he would spend a certain amount of time with the nine and then migrate to their group, like a cycle. It had been unfortunate that the Jinchuuriki had accidentally crossed into a secured portion of Two and had been murdered by Katons and scouts. Concluded from what the shady entity Gaara had told them, anyway.
But in the end, on well terms or not, Naruto would be returning to his rightful group. It would be a clearly helpful decision for his memory if he were back in a familiar environment and not with an unstable, small group like Kakashi’s. In this world, it was quantity, not quality, of which the silver haired man’s group was three-sixths fighting material and five percent healing material. Tsunade’s group was standing steady with thirteen people of four medics and a dog, all of them ready for battle.
She was jarred out of her unfair thoughts when Itachi slipped through the room door. He regarded her with a cool gaze before hovering over his brother again, tucking a glossy lock of cold toned hair behind his ear. The man gingerly touched Sasuke’s collarbone, slightly grimacing when he felt the sharp lumps and soft empty spaces in the area one would usually feel smooth bone. It was bruising yellow and would be near black by the next day. Itachi wondered when his brother would be healed to his best composition and didn’t notice when he spoke the question out loud.
“Six weeks,” Sakura murmured and schooled her face. “It’s a wonder why his muscle wasn’t torn…”
Itachi’s handsome face flicked to her for but a second and he rested thin fingers on rough stitches. “How will you treat him when he wakes up? Wouldn’t a sling-“
Sakura chuckled when she thought about the sling Sasuke would need. “He’s going to look pretty ridiculous for a while. He’ll need a different type of sling – a cuff sling – it supports like a necklace and holds his wrist like a cuff. It won’t hurt his collarbone and will set his shoulder for healing. I’m sure that if we can get our hands on our own group’s correct equipment, his healing time would be shortened more than two times.”
The brunet glared at the girl when she interrupted him. Bold one, even more so at the moment than Karin. But at least Karin respected his superiority. At least Karin had common sense to talk shit behind his back and not to his face. This Sakura girl gave him the impression that she thought she was higher than him, more intelligent. What made such a group like hers that was made of idiots stronger than his own? Well, he had one thought for that: No. And this behavior, her unspoken thoughts would stop soon. He rose to his full height and squared his shoulders, narrowing his eyes and stepping closer to her.
“Do not look or speak to me as if I am below you. I know as a fact that, now and in the end, I am stronger than you in all aspects. You will regard me as your elder, superior, and temporary leader, child. Doing things like inter-“
“My apologies for the misunderstanding, Uchiha,” Sakura met eyes with the towering, devilishly handsome man and clenched her fists. “I’m sorry to break it to you that I am not a member of your small group and I have no written rules to recognize you as what you just asked me to. It’s you that-“
“Weak female,” the man spat and appeared in front of her to be stories taller than her, a building made of obsidian and cold black, empty and destroyed.
“I’m not weak in any way,” she countered just as snippily and tilted her head towards the hospital bed, keeping her eyes glued to narrow ones. “But baby brother seems to be perfectly vulnerable.”
“It only makes sense to target the weakest one in the room,” Itachi loomed over her once again. “as a woman.”
“For how much you talked about being superior to me, you sure are fixed on your immature sexist insults.”
They both started when a deep voice grumbled from the right. “Itachi, stop taking your anger out on the girls.”
When they had been arguing, Sakura and Itachi hadn’t noticed when Sasuke had jerked awake and sat up in the bed on his own. His mouth tasted like blood and acid and dirt and he wanted to do nothing more than brush his teeth at the moment, and perhaps take another shower. His arm was numb, the medically induced kind of numb, and he could barely feel the characteristic tightness of Karin’s stitches in his shoulder. Naruto let out a few ridiculously loud snores to his left. Sasuke curled his lip and reached behind his back with his right arm, grasping the thick pillow in his arm and hurling it at the blond’s head.
It startled the blond so much that his chair knocked over backwards and he fumbled around to right himself. When he finally opened his heavy eyes, it was to the sight of Sakura and Itachi having a staring contest and Sasuke giving him an irritated look with his left arm resting limply on his lap.
“Hey!” he called out to Sasuke and righted the wooden chair, sprawling in it once again. “Does your arm hurt?”
He saw an unidentified emotion flicker in black eyes and falter a firm look. He nearly frowned before Sasuke answered.
“No,” he turned his head to look down at his significantly bruised collarbone and stitched shoulder. “No, it just feels weird. Doesn’t hurt.”
“Can I… touch it?” Sasuke looked up to be met with shockingly close blue eyes and a curious face. He thought about how he had only seen water as blue as Naruto’s eyes in picture books and paintings and thickly gulped to nod his approval.
The blond held their eye contact for another moment, then directed his attention lower to bruised skin. He carefully reached out with his hand and poked at Sasuke’s collarbone, watching the boy watch him watching him. The raven was regarding him out of the corner of his eye and gave him a single nod. He smiled a little and applied a bit more pressure, inwardly wincing at shattered bone. He poked his way up a pale shoulder and skirted around delicate stitches to the swollen area of the raven’s back.
“What did it feel like?” Naruto leaned back, but enough to be considered leaning forward in his seat. Sasuke idly scratched at his inner elbow and frowned.
“It was cold. The knife, I mean. I guess that’s what hurt the most about it, because it felt like it was practically frozen. I felt my collarbone break,” Sasuke pursed his lips and tilted his head towards him. “Like the crunch of breaking a branch.”
Naruto made a baffled noise and such a face at his morbidity that Sasuke snorted and bit his lip a bit.
In a way, Naruto caring about how he felt was… different. Sasuke knew that Itachi would worry about him in situations like these only when he was injured and up until about the point when someone would tell him how long it would take Sasuke to heal. Then his brother brushed him off and expected him to be back in shape practically right after he took his first few steps out of the hospice bed. Then it would be back to looting, growing, hunting, working, travelling, never resting and always on the tips of their toes and sleeping their little hours with one eye open. There was a physical fatigue that Sasuke would sometimes feel, but a different fatigue, a mental sluggishness and dreary mindset that would haunt his mind would set in when things got too busy like this because he knew in the end, they were running towards a false haven, an empty golden pot, wasting medical supplies on him in run down deserted towns. Exiles. Exiles was what they were. Eliminated from their Sectors because they were deemed useless or troublesome. Maybe, in a different universe, they would have had a better chance at surviving. Instead of one where it was survival of the fittest and certain people were deemed too slow, too much trouble.
His mind set back to when he was six, when he and Itachi’s parents had been travelling with them for three days after the cleaning of Oto. Three days was all it took for Itachi to deem their parents too slow, too old, too demanding, and drown them both in a lake. Sasuke wished there was a world where people respected each other as equals and were united under one another, living peacefully as they did like when he was a toddler.
Maybe, in a different world, there would be enough time for things boys his age used to fret over and to relax. He read in tattered books that they liked sports, and girls. Was that it? Maybe they liked bugs? He didn’t even know anymore. Sasuke could see no time to fit something like a girl in his life. Karin had already wiggled herself into most of his time, anyway, and Sasuke barely even recognized her as a girl except for when he caught accidental glimpses of her cleavage. Karin was as strong as the rest of them, perhaps even more so headstrong than Itachi. He admired her for that, but never in a romantic way.
He was freed from his thoughts when the hospital room door was firmly knocked on, then shoved open hard enough to make it slam against the wall and shut again. Sasuke tensed and glanced at Naruto, then to Itachi and Sakura, who were both staring at the door that looked like it hadn’t even been disturbed. The door opened in a gentle manner this time, a dark-haired girl with nearly white eyes stepping in and offering the people in the room a smile.
“Hinata!” Sakura scuttled over to the girl and attached herself to her by the hip. Hinata nodded and whispered something in her ear.
Akamaru trotted in and nearly knocked Hinata over with an affectionate lick then bound over to Naruto and rested his head on the blond’s lap. Naruto grinned and pet the dog on his huge head, chuckling when the dog seemed to smile and slobber all over his chair.
Two boys with questionable presences practically slithered in, one with a trench coat and sunglasses and the other who planted himself behind Hinata and regarding nobody else but her in the room. The boy with the trench coat nodded at Sasuke and faltered in a familiar gesture towards the blond when he realized the boy was looking at him like someone new.
The next amount of people that poured in made Sasuke uncomfortable. There had to be almost twenty people staring him and Naruto down now, and he turned to the blond to get the burns on his neck of being watched to go away. It seemed like Naruto had the same goal, the both of them equally as new to these people. Sasuke looked for recognition in Naruto’s eyes and was slightly… appreciative? Slightly appreciative to find none. Naruto gently poked him in the side through his blankets.
The door barreled open once again and a blonde woman and a man with long white hair stormed in. They immediately stalked towards Naruto and startled Sasuke a bit with their serious faces and tense postures. Were these people spies to evict them to a Sector and be eliminated? He set his hand on the blond’s shoulder and shifted, trying to warn him-
And was startled even further when the woman practically hurled herself at Naruto, gathered him in her arms and pressed him into her large bosom. Naruto flailed his arms a bit and tried to push her away, shoving at her stomach and groaning for help.
“I can’t breathe!” He whined, muffled.
The man with long hair and warts on his face chuckled. “We looked for you high and low, idiot.”
The blond finally freed himself from the confines of overly large breasts and turned to the man beside him. “What? Who are you?” He looked between the two, then pivoted to the other people in the hospital room. Sasuke looked a bit constipated with irritation at how his room was flooded with people he didn’t know.
The man’s mouth remained open in pause from what he was about to say and then shut, a grim look overtaking his face and crossing his beefy arms. “It’s true, isn’t it?” he said under his breath. “You really can’t remember even long term memories.”
He looked for the hearty red head of hair that he trusted most with his medical problems. Karin wasn’t in the room and the closest thing he found to her was the pink haired girl, Sakura.
“Um,” his voice was awkwardly wavering. “Just bits and pieces, but for the most part, no, I can’t.”
The woman with blonde pigtails shook her head. “I was hoping you’d have regained your memory,” she drew out and clasped her hands in front of her mouth. “You had a lot of memories, Naruto. Ones I’m sure that you’d want to forget, and ones I’m sure that you used to never want to. But, it has only been a week and a half since you’ve been missing from us and you still have a window of memory open.” She set her hand on his head and ruffled his hair. “Now, that’s not what I came here for. Came here to fix what Ino fucked up,” she smirked at the girl hiding in the corner of the room.
The woman approached Sasuke and he flinched when she pressed the back of her hand against his forehead and rubbed his cheeks. She pressed her pointer and middle fingers to the pulse in his neck and rubbed the joint of his jaw with her thumbs a bit to relax it.
“Ah, Sasuke,” she set a hand over stitches that he couldn’t tell were cold. “I’ve heard about you from Kakashi. I’m Tsunade, and I was the lead doctor here in Konoha before it was destroyed. Can you tell me who took care of your wounds?”
Sasuke tugged his head away from her hand and paused. “Karin,” he told her. “Where is she?”
“She went to get clothes for herself and you,” Kakashi peeked into the doorway and smiled a bit. “Good to see you bright eyed and bushy tailed, Sasuke.”
Tsunade narrowed her eyes at the raven and rubbed at his collarbone. “You can trust me,” she murmured under her breath just so only he could hear. “What’s your blood type?” She abruptly said in her regular voice.
Sasuke cast a glance at the other people in the room and then back at Tsunade. She looked over her shoulder and nodded to Jiraiya, who yelled something about nothing for there to be heard and to get something to eat and herded the people out the door. All who were left were Itachi, Kakashi, Tsunade, and Naruto.
“B negative,” he stated and idly scratched the back of his neck. That and his back ached and itched at the same time, his telltale signs that he had had a transfusion. He knew they would escalate soon now that he had woken up.
“Figures you would be unlucky enough to have that type in this world,” she shook her head. “Would have been a blessing if you were AB. They can receive from all blood types.”
“Okay,” Sasuke said and felt slightly uncomfortable with the look she was giving him, like she was inspecting him.
Tsunade stared at him with piercing honey eyes before letting out a loud snort and performing multiple actions on his numb arm. She poked in places that made it bend and his fingers flex, and a certain spot by his shoulder that made it go up. The woman poked at his collarbone and shoulder blade before humming neutrally and rummaging through her pockets.
“Got what you need,” she grunted and produced a transparent purple ointment from her pocket. “State of the art bone marrow cream from Oto. If you let me use this on you, your bones will be healed in a week. If you don’t, you’ll look like an idiot for over a month in a neck sling.” She held up a contraption with two loops for his viewing.
“How do we know that’s not poison?” Itachi cut in and strode to their side of the bed. “Try it on yourself first.”
She snorted again and twisted the cap open on the bottle, dabbing it slightly on the back of her hand and waiting a few moments for the purple hue to sparkle and dissolve. She handed the bottle to Itachi for him to inspect and boredly rested her chin in her hand.
“Am I dead?” She quipped and patted Sasuke’s thigh. “It’ll be better for you to have this, anyway. It’ll get you back to normal faster, and it’ll be useful on the go.”
Itachi flared his nostrils and handed the tube back to Tsunade. Sasuke tilted his head to the side to bare his throat and winced when she rubbed the cold ointment on his skin. It burned for a few moments at first, but then it hardened like stone and he felt the sensation of creeping roots invading his veins when it dissolved and gave an innocent sparkle. She patted more of it on his shoulder blade and he pushed himself through the strange steps of it setting in.
“Did you steal it from Oto?” Sasuke wondered and winced when she applied another coat.
“Kami, hell no,” Tsunade barked out a laugh and patted him roughly on his back. “We had a member of our camp that was a spy from Oto. When we killed him, we took his medical supplies.”
Silence breached the room and she suddenly pulled the bag under his eye down, peeked into his eye and let go before Sasuke had time to react. She touched his hands and clamped her thumb just before the beginning of his inner elbow. Then she clamped her hands over his ears and bent to rub at his feet. Sasuke felt like an experiment rat, with all the poking and prodding he was undergoing.
“Anemia’s gotten better,” she smiled and changed Sasuke’s bandages. He blanched and furrowed his eyebrows. Better? He thought it would have been at its all-time low.
The door creaked open and Karin padded in, clothing in her arms and sniffling a bit. She shrugged her lenses further up her nose. “You can thank Naruto for that,” she griped and sounded congested, trudging over to Naruto and handing him a thick orange sweater. “I gave you a direct transfusion with a syringe Itachi pulled out of nowhere.” She sat down on his bed and handed him an oversized fleece fourth-zip. “Figured you’d fit into that easier with your cast,” she rasped and coughed into her elbow.
“Are you sick?” Sasuke couldn’t believe it. Karin, the girl who got skittish even when Juugo sneezed, had caught a cold?
“Well, if you damn idiots hadn’t made me run around in a fucking towel maybe I wouldn’t be!”
“Direct transfusion?” he recalled, “What the hell is that?”
The redhead rubbed her eyes and nodded at Naruto, stealing Sasuke’s pillow and burying her face in it. Naruto smiled at Sasuke and pointed at his arm.
“Well, Itachi had this thing Karin called a double sided syringe, and it basically sent my blood to you. ‘Cause, you know, I have O, and you have B, and O can be given to anybody…” he lamely finished and tapped his fingers together, searching for a better grand finale. “I gave you some of my awesome blood, two and a half pints.” He flexed his biceps and grinned.
“You did?” Sasuke said disbelievingly and sat up a bit straighter. A stable iron count? Could he finally go over ten miles from their camp without practically having an asthma attack? Could he sleep better, sleep more, sleep less at unnecessary times? Would his feet be warm now with better circulation? He glanced at the obvious needle puncture at the inside of his elbow. Naruto would do that? Well, he would, and he has. Kami…
Tsunade interrupted his thoughts by chuckling and ruffling his hair. “Slow down, bugger,” She lifted the blankets and Sasuke crossed his legs once they were hit by the coldness of the room. Some point in when he had been unconscious, Itachi had probably changed him into the grey sweatpants he was wearing now. “Let’s get you in that cast.”
Sasuke nodded and dragged his legs to the edge of the bed. He was barefooted and he idly wondered what happened to his shoes. The raven set his feet on the ground and stood up, but immediately regretting it and scowling when they reacted to the coldness of the tile floor and he balanced himself on the outside of his feet.
“Bah, hang your shoulder over. Loosen it,” Tsunade patted his arm and held his wrist to his stomach. “Hold your wrist there with your other hand and relax it,” she set a hand on his shoulder and shoved him out the door. Naruto and Itachi followed him, Tsunade shutting the room door and leading them down the hallway into a main lobby. Whether that was his blood on the tiled ground he rather wouldn’t know.
Itachi strolled along at his side and Sasuke found himself more irritated than he should have been by it. “I lost your shoes,” he said dismissively. The raven only sent his brother a glance. It was always like this, and it would always be like this – Itachi deeming him completely okay to do anything once he was awake and not dead. It was like the man was always taking a chance when his younger brother got hurt and he always got worked up during the injury, but after, it was like he didn’t care in the first place. Actually, Sasuke was convinced that his brother didn’t fucking care at all, like back at camp. Like when he told Sasuke he would let him die if he didn’t find iron supplements on his own. Like when he told him he wasn’t allowed to make a new friend. His body temperature was rising and Sasuke snapped himself out of his angst and walked ahead of Itachi.
He walked with light steps behind the woman who probably worked in this hospital. She led them through a forked hallway, thankfully carpeted, and approached a set of military grade metal doors with a card scanner on them. Naruto held up a card and the door slowly raised open, revealing what seemed to be a destroyed lab with shattered glass on the ground and areas burnt on the ground from certain chemicals. Sasuke hesitated and his bare foot hovered over the tile floor. There was shards of glass literally everywhere, and-
He didn’t feel that startled when Naruto put an arm behind his knees and hoisted him into tan arms, so that his right shoulder was pressing into his chest and Itachi looked like a severely abused and angry cat. The blond wrapped an arm around his stomach and grunted a bit. “God damn, why are you so heavy when you don’t look it?” he complained and crunched through broken glass.
Sasuke ignored him in favor of staring at burnt glass bottles with names and numbers on them. There was a dead snake in the corner of the room as well as a bottle of some white liquid. He noticed some untouched, pristine bottles lined in perfect rows.
He winced when Naruto set him down back onto the cold floor, the warmth in his back leaving him and being replaced by stress. He followed Tsunade when she turned to the side into a large supply room and pulled out three of the same contraptions she had showed him earlier and inspecting their information.
She unwrapped one and set a sling over his head, a stiff plastic rod coming down to his stomach and ending in a wrist cuff. She guided his hand into it and made slight adjustments before leading him out of the room.
“Don’t try to change shirts by yourself, don’t put your arm through a sleeve, don’t take the damn sling off, don’t do anything besides put a shirt on from this point on, you brat.” She turned down the hallway opposite from the lab.
Itachi was reminded of the fourth-zip Karin had given Sasuke, and immediately held it out for his brother. He poked his head through and shrugged his right arm into the sleeve, keeping his left arm uncomfortably slung inside the fleece.
Tsunade pulled a card out of her pocket to unlock a different set of doors that held what seemed like miles of file cabinets and led their team through there, stepping on loose sheets of handwritten papers. They came to another set of doors that automatically opened and veered off into the right, a large glass window to their left with flickering lights and rows of empty incubators with moth-eaten pink and blue blankets still resting inside of them. Some of the incubators were slightly crooked in their row and some were boldly knocked over, empty baby bottles littered everywhere as well as diapers and rubber nipples.
Naruto eyed the scene with sadness and turned away before he could dwell on what happened to those babies.
The woman led them to another set of open double doors that appeared to be the hospital’s food court, with dirty blue tiles and walls and circular white tables with benches. The people from earlier and Suigetsu and Juugo congregated and laughing at a story the man with long hair was boasting about. They all silenced and turned at heavy footsteps, and most of the people turned their eyes to a familiar whiskered face that could only do nothing but ask them to introduce themselves.
Jiraiya stood before the group and clamped a hand down on Sasuke’s and Naruto’s shoulders, Sasuke immediately slapping his arm away when he felt a bolt of pain shoot up his bones.
“Sorry, kiddo,” he patted his head and turned his large body to him. “And a greater, more formal apology about this incident that’s left you severely injured.”
Sasuke said nothing and set his burning obsidian eyes on Ino, who looked much too pampered to be living in the wild with her long neat ponytail and unmarred skin. She herself regarded him with a bit of excitement, with his handsome face and delicious color scheme… but then he reminded her a bit of Sai, with his fake smile and passive-perverted slash intrusive jokes and questions.
“So,” the man announced and stood in the middle of the large group, “we’ve got matters we need to discuss.”
Kakashi appeared out of nowhere and pretended to blow smoke off of his pretend finger guns, setting them on his hips and squinting his eyes. “I believe we do.”
“Let’s get to the point,” Jiraiya drew out and shifted his weight to one foot. “We want Naruto back.”
“I can see why,” Kakashi said dismissively and tilted his head. “But he has made friends in our group and I doubt he wants to go into unfamiliar territory with unfamiliar people.”
“We’re not necessarily unfamiliar,” Jiraiya countered. “Just unremembered and with medical knowledge to make us remembered.”
“Um,” Naruto raised his hand and cut in. “I’m right here.”
“We don’t know if you lot are a group of spies just saying you are his group.”
“Oh, hell,” Tsunade groaned and rolled her eyes, “this again?”
“We can only promise that we’re not, and it’s to Naruto’s best interest that he comes home with us.”
“Naruto doesn’t remember home.”
“I’m right fucking here!”
“Naruto will never forget home, he is in the springtime of his youth!”
“Not the damn time, Lee!”
“Why don’t we let him choose-“
“Let him choose? He’s not in the position to. He doesn’t remem-“
“Shut up! If you don’t hand him over, I’ll shoot your fucking brains out!”
“Neji, calm down, please-“
“Aw, Akamaru shit on the floor! Damn it, bad boy!”
“He’ll remember home once he returns to it.”
“That’s enough!” Tsunade hollered and slammed her foot on the ground. “All of you are acting immaturely and irrationally. Jiraiya, even you have lost your level head.” The woman turned to Kakashi and bowed her head. “I’m sorry for the violence we’ve brought upon you all.”
“It’s frankly not excusable,” Itachi snapped and glared at the boy named Neji.
Tsunade didn’t react and instead voiced her proposal. “My vote it to combine our groups and work together in peace, as we are both friends of Naruto’s.”
Said boy smiled. “I like that idea!”
“With your death threats, how do we know you’re trustworthy?” Itachi cut in and frowned.
“We can only promise you that we are trustworthy and work side by side,” Tsunade nodded. “And it seems like you have a greater reason to stay with us,” she pointedly glanced at Sasuke and set a hand on Naruto’s shoulder. “I promise that we have a great amount of food and water, and plenty of shelter. We even have a hunter who leaves often to bring meat.”
Jiraiya set his head down. “I agree with this choice also,” he announced. “it will make us all stronger.”
Most of the group nodded their approvals, save for the ones with more violent tendencies.
A few hours later, greetings and introductions had been exchanged as well as a few daunting and scary stories. At one point someone had brought warm food and Naruto chewed his soup on a bench next to Sasuke, who was balancing in his state of skin and paling at some moments and looking healthy the next. They both went back up to his hospital room to retrieve a cold-stricken Karin.
When Sasuke was picking up the pillow she had left behind, he noticed something hard in the bed and wondered why he hadn’t noticed it before. He moved his hand up a bit and thought it was the railing of the bed, but lifted it anyway to make sure.
His eyes narrowed when he saw iridescent navy and he yanked the sheets down to reveal Kusanagi, glittering in glory and looking well-polished. The action startled Naruto but once he saw what was bundled in the sheets, he shot a hundred-watt grin at Sasuke.
Naruto picked Kusanagi up by the sheath and pointed it towards Sasuke. He grabbed the handle with his right hand, his fingers automatically falling into their natural worn burrows on its handle, and unsheathed the blade, both of their complexions reflecting in its flawless metal.
Naruto smiled at him. “You got it back from Suigetsu!”
Sasuke let a small smile slip and sheathed Kusanagi. “Yeah,” he said softly and tucked his sword under his thumb and along his arm. In truth, he felt one hundred percent more sure of himself now that Suigetsu had surrendered his chokutō.
“How good are you with it?” Naruto wondered aloud and rubbed his hands together from the cold.
“If you ask me, very,” Sasuke quipped. “And if you ask anyone else; very.” He smiled.
The blond chuckled and rolled his eyes. “Don’t be stuck up.”
“I’m not, I promise.”
Karin leaned against the door and chuckled.
- 7
- 8
- 9
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Sector Five