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It's not the first time that someone's tried to kidnap Sakura to get her to heal someone else. Nor is it the second.
It is the first time that someone's succeeded.
It's also the first time she's been asked to heal a dead guy.
Sakura glances between Itachi's eyeless corpse and Kisame. Her hand drifts toward her chin as she studies the body and wonders, a little desperately, if Kisame knows his partner is dead. "Might be a bit beyond me," she says, because lying's probably not going to help. Itachi is Dead, the proverbial doornail.
Kisame folds his arms across his chest. Sakura takes a careful step back. He drained her chakra with his sword earlier. Sakura broke a few of his ribs, but clearly not enough given that he'd knocked her out with some kind of seal right after and carried her to this spooky cave.
The cave is dark, lit by a couple half-melted candles carefully arranged around Itachi's corpse. The flames wobble in a weak draft, sending shadows skittering along the floor and ceiling. The walls are far enough away that Sakura has only a vague sense that they're there.
The cave is cold--really cold. Itachi's laid out on a block of clear ice, his body probably at least partially frozen. Sakura can see every breath she and Kisame take, puffs of pale candle-lit yellow. "Look," she says, hushed and soft because her voice rolls through the cave in whispery waves. "He's dead. Like really dead. Probably has been for at least a week."
The candlelight makes Kisame look even more terrifying than he had earlier, standing in her closet, sword bared and way faster than a guy that size should be. (If and when Sakura gets back, she's going to rip her closet doors off and burn them, screw her security deposit.) Kisame looms. Stares at her sternly.
Sakura raises her chin, meeting his eyes, and tries to look--reliable? Like she can't bring the dead back? She has no idea. Sakura'd been in her pajamas--still was--and bunny house slippers when he'd kidnapped her. Kisame had grabbed her second favourite pair of boots on the way out and her terry cloth bathrobe, but no socks. Even if she could bring the dead back, she'd want to do it wearing a less stupid outfit.
Kisame laughs, low and eerily echoing. "I know. I want you to figure out what was killing him before he died."
"Like. An autopsy?" Sakura asks. She looks at Itachi again. There's a really large hole in his bare chest. "It was probably the hole in his chest."
"He was sick. Really sick. I want to know why."
On the one hand, Sakura has put a lot of hours in at the hospital, where that was a common and reasonable question. On the other hand, she's standing in a freezing cave next to an S-Ranked corpse and said corpse's living S-Ranked partner, who has gone through a lot of trouble for this. "Uh. Like. Are you sick too?" Sakura asks hopefully, "because I'm honestly a lot better with living people. I only did like a week in the morgue." She's not sure Kisame knows what an autopsy consists of. She also really doesn't want to do one in front of him.
His forehead furrows. "No."
Sakura waits, but Kisame doesn't elaborate. "So you want me to cut him open and look inside?"
Kisame's lips curl in a faint grimace. "Don't you have jutsu for that?"
"...no? I'm a healer, not a coroner," Sakura says, feeling a faint hope that maybe he'll just let her go if he thinks she's useless. Possibly with a thicker jacket and pants, it's really cold. "I only worked with corpses for surgery practice."
"Huh. You'd think it'd be the same job," Kisame replies. (It sometimes is, but Sakura is sixteen. She hasn't had time.) "Well. Get to it, I guess. He's not getting any deader."
She feels her shoulders slump in disappointment. "Really? Do I have to? Autopsies are nasty." Sakura takes a reluctant half-step toward Itachi, staring at Kisame out of the corner of her eye. Half hopefully, half searching for signs of weakness that may, somehow, allow her to overcome him in a one-on-one fight. With no weapons, while wearing her pajamas.
"I mean, I brought you all this way. You might as well." Kisame looks like he's fighting back a yawn for a second, but it passes quickly. "Do you need anything?"
Sakura looks around the cave again, finding absolutely none of the tools she'll need to crack Itachi's body open. "Rib cutters? Bone saw? Scalpels? A pan or something for the organs? A jar for the brain? Scales to weigh them? I'll need a notebook, too. And a pencil. Those are for notes."
There's a very long silence where Kisame stares at her. Then, carefully, he says, "Could you do it with a tanto?"
"Like. Not really." Another long and thoughtful pause ensues. Sakura wonders if she should mention that she could probably do a lot of it with her bare hands and that tanto, it’d just be. Absolutely awful. And probably pointless.
In a total non-sequitur, Kisame says, "Orochimaru probably does a lot of autopsies, right?"
Sakura eventually gives a careful, uncertain, "Like, he wouldn't be the last person I'd guess that of?"
***
Two cold and awkward hours, and 35 very loud and bloody minutes later, Sakura is standing in the middle of a very-well appointed lab specifically set up for autopsies, watching Kisame very carefully set Itachi's corpse on the slab she'd pointed at as being the furthest from the frankly terrifying thing on the slab by the door. He brushes Itachi's hair out of his eyes, even though Itachi's dead, even though Itachi definitely doesn't have eyes anymore.
Sakura opens cabinets and looks under the counters until she finds the equipment she needs, and sets it down, loudly. Kisame's still staring at Itachi's face, his hand resting lightly on Itachi's hair, tangled and frosted grey on the metal slab. It makes Sakura's heart twist in her chest, a twinge of really inappropriate empathy lancing through her.
"So like. You might not want to watch, it's going to be sort of gross," Sakura says. (She found a lab manual in the corner that laid out the steps, and she'd actually forgotten a few. Or Orochimaru added a few.)
Kisame steps back, but he doesn't look away.
Sakura takes off her bathrobe and slides into a brand new lab coat she'd found with about a dozen others on hooks by the door. Whoever worked in the lab clearly didn't usually bother, but she liked her bathrobe, and her pajamas were not winning in the coverage category.
Cute? Yes.
Sleeves and long pants? No.
Another thing she'll change when she gets home. Sakura's going to sleep in full mission gear for the rest of her life.
She grabs a face shield, too, and picks up a second one and offers it to Kisame. "You might want this?"
Kisame looks a little pale, but the morgue lights make everyone look like shit. "Splatter zone is that bad?"
"He's pretty frozen, so probably not for most of it, but, like. Sometimes." Sakura wobbles her hand. "Uh. You know?"
Kisame clearly does not know, but he nods anyway.
Sakura nods back, and picks up the big fucking scissors. "Well. Sooner begun, sooner done," she says, trying to put a positive spin on it.
***
By the end, Kisame looks extremely pale, and he's gone to poke at the horrifying mutant on the other side of the room rather than watch her.
Sakura is reasonably sure that she should probably take the opportunity to try to escape rather than taking careful notes about Itachi's lungs, but there's only one door, and she's kind of curious. Also, maybe if she just gives Kisame what he wants, he'll let her go. That'd be great.
Shit, maybe he'll take her home. Sakura has no idea where she is, outside probably Lightning country or maybe Earth because of the cold.
There's a copy of the same medical encyclopedia set that the Konoha hospital keeps in the staff room. Sakura leaves bloody fingerprints on the pages as she searches for the tables in the back. The tests on his liver came back positive, but she doesn't want to commit to it without double checking.
She traces a line across the page, finds the values she's looking for, and nods to herself. Yep. That was probably it.
Sakura cleans up, putting Itachi back together and stitching him shut, covering the autopsy cuts with another lab coat draped over his chest. The morgue has no sheets to cover bodies. It's a little freaky, though not as freaky as finding the button that made restrains pop out of the autopsy slab.
Kisame wanders over as she's washing her hands, a bit more colour to his face. It's been about four and a half hours, by the lab clock. (It's probably accurate, even though no one's bothered to change the calendar since she was twelve). He's been surprisingly patient. "So?"
"Poison," Sakura replies. "Long term. Ashpodiasis , from Rain country, usually. It was probably administered as a contact poison, because he managed to actually die of something else. If he'd eaten it he'd have died in twelve to twenty-four hours." She holds out the encyclopedia, opened to the right page. "Maybe his clothes?"
She feels his chakra ripple and boil, and then surge. Kisame takes a careful, slow breath, "Could you detect it in whatever it was in?"
"Sure, there's plenty of the reagents here."
Kisame unseals a pile of clothes, nail polish, bandages, kunai, books on one of the unused slabs--the detritus of a life that Kisame decided to carry with him. It's kind of romantic. And sad. "Start with this," he says, holding out a bottle of nail polish.
Sakura snaps on a pair of gloves and gets to work.
***
It's not the nail polish. It's not the bandages, the cloak, his underwear (sampled as Sakura fights to control her expression because it seems like Itachi was a boxers kind of guy, and not like. Plain, boring ones. Kisame handed her a pair of heart-patterned ones, and she's pretty sure she saw some with cats on them under the pile of other shit).
It's not any of the products in a surprisingly extensive skincare collection, nor is it Itachi's eye drops, lip chap, tea collection, camp cup, camping chair, hammock, futon, favourite blanket, or toothbrush.
In the end, the poison's hidden inside a tiny trickle mechanism, tucked inside a heavy, ugly ring. It was the third thing Kisame handed her, but the tests took about an hour to develop, so they did a couple extras.
Kisame looks furious. Sakura tries to be inconspicuous, and edges as far away from him as she can get inside the lab.
"Could you have healed him?" Kisame asks. "If he hadn't died, could you have taken care of the poison?"
Sakura worries her lip between her teeth, and eventually just answers honestly. "Yeah. It's a really well known poison. It's pretty easy to treat. He would have needed parts of his lungs regrown, but other than that, pretty simple stuff."
"That's good," Kisame says. "That's good."
"So can I go home?" Sakura asks hopefully. She shucks off the now much less white lab coat and puts her bathrobe back on for lack of better options. "Since I figured out what was wrong with him?"
Kisame's eyes slide away from the ring, and he abruptly looks slightly...guilty? "One last thing, first."
"You want to test your ring?"
"Not a terrible idea," Kisame says, sliding a very similar ring off his finger and handing it over. "But no--"
The door to the morgue shifts ever so slightly, and Sakura sees a deep red eye in the crack. Her heart stops in her chest, and Sakura darts behind Kisame, perfectly willing to use him as a meat shield against his apparently alive and terrifying partner.
There's a blur of motion and the air is abruptly drier as a whip of water tears the door from its hinges. A flick of Kisame's water whip drags a silently struggling Uchiha Sasuke inside the morgue, but he's all wrong--nothing like he was the last time Sakura saw him.
Sasuke goes still as he stares at the corpse of his brother, his eyes nearly glowing red. That’d be fine, except this Sasuke is a little baby genin, no older than thirteen, too thin and too pale and way too young. Sakura immediately wants to wrap him in armour and take him home.
"First I'd like you to heal Itachi," Kisame finishes as Sakura's stomach drops into her boots.