Chapter Text
A mission request from a small town on the border had arrived and Tsunade had handed it to her after dinner, calling it simple and it was. It only needed a few medical-nin to come and the illness, water fever, is not hard to treat with only a day or so needed to flush out the illness infected wounds.
It was doable, Sakura had assured herself over fidgety hands. Up to this, it had only been practice and theory—what Sakura excelled at—so this, her first mission out as Tsunade’s apprentice, it was more pressure than she was used to. But, doable, because Sakura isn’t the type to back down anymore!
Thankfully a senior med-nin would lead it, and she would just follow along. It relieved her nerves briefly. Simple, it was going to be simple.
Bad surprise—it wasn’t.
And she is completely out of her depth.
Fire roars—she had never realized quite what that meant before, it had seemed like hyperbole or just a smart simile but it really does—and it roars wild and loose. Lashing out harshly, bright and hot, and it just can’t seem to be tamed.
The inferno reaches up making the twilight sky look hot orange and in all directions it seems unending and the heat is just inescapable.
She is sweating. Badly.
And she looks at the other medical-nin that scramble around to put out the fire joined by villagers that aren’t half as helpful as they want to be—she is uncomfortably aware that she is just like them—and thinks she isn’t even the one panicking the most. And she is really, really panicking.
The fire is—too strong. Too strong to be kept from reaching the village by them and too strong to be natural. This is the border with the land of Water, where the land is soggy and the air is humid, and so how does this happen here?
She flinches away from a burst of fire that comes from somewhere deep within the forest.
It’s all going so spectacularly wrong when she so badly wanted it to just go alright and there really seems to be nothing Sakura can do about it. And she has never felt so helpless—not in Wave, not when Sasuke left, though that one is close.
But she stares into heat and fire and people move around her and she feels so utterly useless and underprepared. Oh, she prays that she doesn’t start crying now.
The chaos started around noon.
It’s humid, disgustingly so when they arrive. Hot too.
She repeatedly pulls at her hair to try to keep it down but it’s already going frizzy. And this is the climate the next few days will be like—as the pink strands keep curling up, she frowns.
Pleasantries between the medical-nin team and the villagers are happening as she brushes her hair with her hands and she’s glad she’s allowed to just stand to the side but it does feel a little awkward. Some of the other medical-nin are doing it too though so maybe it’s just her civilian upbringing—that’s what Tsunade keeps saying though she’s pretty sure such excessive gambling isn’t okay even by ninja standards.
Her senior medical-nin who’s leading she had forgotten the name of, and she has tried to find an appropriate time to ask again through their trip but she chickened out again and again. It’s not that important anyhow, it’ll be just a few days and it was polite to just use honorifics to address her anyway.
The humidity is making her uncomfortably sticky and wishing for a bath, Sakura is glad she was at least allowed to keep her thin genin gear rather than the heavy white medical clothing.
“Sakura.” Her senior motions to Sakura to come then gives her the first set of basic orders. Just diagnosing right now, checking conditions, and Sakura is sent off with another of the medical-nin... Hana? Her nerves had completely wiped out the name-memory part of her brain.
Embarrassing, she tries to keep a straight face as they walk.
Hana—maybe—leads her with a villager to one of the houses and Sakura can’t help but worry over how rural this village is. Her Wave mission comes to mind for how rundown it was, but this place is just primitive with dirt roads and thatch roofing! It’s starting to become clear she’s not going to get that bath that she desperately needs.
The door of the house they stop doesn’t even swing open, it awkwardly creaks half open on some weird make-shift hinge then they shuffle in one by one.
Her face must show her thoughts because maybe-Hana gives her a warning look.
“Ah sorry!” Sakura bows a bit and pats her face, she doesn’t want to be rude and real ninjas don’t worry over small things like this. Get it together already!
They’re meeting the sick villager, pale and gaunt in the face and breathing like he’s half dead, and so she really can’t be so impolite. She puts on a serious face and thins her mouth, not flinching even when the pus-covered, bluish wound is revealed. A medical-nin would never flinch at the sight of a bad wound—and it could be way worse, her relief that it’s not keeps her from getting queasy.
Hana raises an eyebrow at her and she quickly snaps back into doing her job and opens up the med kit she was lugging around. Handing over the appropriate tools at appropriate times is not really the kind of work she’s wanted, it’s nothing she can prove herself with, but shadowing is important.
This way, she can see what to do for next time when she’s in charge. The thought makes her heart flutter—her, Sakura, in charge of a medical team.
A bulb syringe is pushed back into her hands.
“Here, take care of the patient for a moment.” Hana says as she gets up and leaves and Sakura doesn’t even realize what is happening until she is gone.
The syringe sits in her hand. Oh — she is not ready. The fluttering quickly turns queasy as she tries to think of what step Hana was on, drainage probably, she thought she was paying attention but it’s all becoming a blur in her memories. It’s temporary, it’s likely temporary, because she wouldn’t be left to deal with a patient on her own right?
It’s like a pop quiz.
Sakura looks closer at the wound and begins to go through drainage steps to clear out the pus, it’s easier once she really focuses but still — still, Hana where did you go and why did you leave her alone?
She’s sweating a little but at least her hands aren’t shaking.
The villager’s labored breathing fills the air, and suddenly it stops—she has a mini heart attack that she killed him somehow before he breathes out a word. Something muttered. Then he starts to move.
“Ah sir, please keep still while I’m working on your wound. You could agitate it, really.” She rushes out quickly but the man isn’t listening. His face is tense, staring out the window like something is going on but Sakura looks and it’s just the wooden and straw houses of the village.
“It's that man. It has to be.” He mutters, eyes wide and yellowish from illness.
Was there something going on? Was that why Hana left? Sakura can’t tell, her senses haven’t been all that trained and while she thought that wasn’t a big deal, they are apparently pretty bad if even a civilian villager could tell before her.
It’s likely his feverish brain. But, still, she glances out the window a few more times before unsteadily standing.
“Please wait, sir.”
She leaves her post, and while she could get reamed for it, she really can’t deal with this on her own. Her hands fidget, she needs a superior.
The town is loud, a stark contrast to the quiet dreariness when they arrived. It’s chatter filled with fear as people rush about.
And even louder than the chatter is the roar of a fire.
Fire, encasing the forest, blazing so much larger than she ever imagined a fire could get, and approaching the village, the smoke has already reached them and villagers cough. She gets thrown into a coughing fit too and what the hell happened? The heat makes the air suffocating, the light illuminates the town in reds and oranges, and its enormity seems impossible yet there it is and with the terrible, impending danger.
She stares, slack jawed, until a villager grabs her by the shoulders and tries to usher her away.
“Child please. Go to safety.” The older woman pleads to her, pushing at her back to move. Child, she says, and at first it doesn’t ring as wrong but then it does. Sakura is not a child—at least not by ninja standards—she is one of the few ninjas here and so her responsibility is clear. She has go up against that fire, that huge fire. And protect these people.
Her stomach squirms but she starts running anyway.
Her team is doing what they can with heavy water jutsu and even wind jutsu to divert the path of the fire but Sakura has none of the skills that could help here and it makes her feel oh-so-horribly useless. She doesn’t know how to put out a fire this big—she has only seen one house fire in her life and this and that are incomparable. Where to go, how to help, what she can even do, it’s all coming up as blanks.
A new blast of fire and heat comes from somewhere over the yards and a new section of forest is engulfed, she flinches and stares wide-eyed. A teammate calls it out and she realizes what they are talking about quickly.
Someone’s still fighting in there. In the fire.
How is that possible? Her heart thuds.
A blast of heat leaves her arm singed and she flinches back again. When she gets a glimpse of her senior in the middle of a water jutsu, she immediately starts her way over there with a wave of relief—someone who can help her by telling her what to do. That’s all she needs right now.
Sakura pants—inhaling way more smoke than is healthy and feeling a cough surging in her throat.
“Please. What’s going on?” She asks, raspy, feeling so utterly lost. In the middle of all the other ninjas working against the flames, she feels even more like just a child. And she can’t be like that, she can’t be so useless. A coughing fit starts to overtake her and she does all she can to suppress it. “What should I do?” She begs.
Her senior, white uniform singed and coloured all in hot orange light, finishes the water jutsu that doesn’t even seem to put a dent in the lashing flames and breathes as hard as Sakura is, looking just as hopelessly unsure as she feels. She glances at her, then back around the rest of her team, and swallows.
The woman, not that much older than Sakura herself, has suddenly aged deeply in the eyes.
“You’re going to go back to Konoha.” Her senior says, and before Sakura can even react she is dragging her away from the fire by the arm and calling over the rest of the team. She orders up who is leaving. “Get to safety, report to the Fifth on everything, and come get us in a few days with backup. We’ll be alive.”
They’re being sent back. When the village in this state, they are being sent back to warn Konoha.
Sakura’s nails dig into her hands and she tries not to look back into the fire as orders are divided up.
This is what ninja do after all, they have to prioritize their loyalties over anything else. But—if Naruto were here, he wouldn’t leave just like this. And if Sasuke were here—maybe he would, but it would be based on his own choice. Just thinking of him makes her feel smaller.
There are only seven of them total, all going back except her senior and another, they’ll stay and watch what happens. And try to take care of the villagers too, of course. Even Sakura can feel the falsity there.
She searches her senior’s face to see what she is seeing, the real thing that is happening right now—this village will burn so that Konoha medical-nin stay safe and a few will stick around until after to get information on who had the power to create a fire like this.
“I want to stay, I want to help.” Sakura says sharply and she knows that she could leave, if ordered too, she would put her head down and run with the others but it would haunt her. She just knows, it would show up in her nightmares and make her queasy at breakfast. She doesn’t think she could look Naruto, or her family, or anyone, in the face after that.
“Someone is in there, this whole fire,” Her senior glances back towards the flames and the pure heat that are undoubtedly growing closer, “is someone’s fight. We do not want to be involved more than we have to.”
Her throat feels tight just trying to imagine the person who created those full blasts of flame. The non-Konoha nin she’s met so far—none of them have been even close to stable or friendly, and even just not slightly murderous.
“They’re not after the village, they’re not after us.” Sakura reasons while the other medical-nin are gathering and moving, only her senior watches and listens. The worries and early on-set guilt are starting to spill out of her, “I can’t. I can’t, I really can’t.”
She’s getting embarrassingly incoherent and emotional and it’s in no way how a ninja on a mission should act. She swallows and tries to keep her tears back. “I can help with the fire, I can do something. Please let me do something. I can’t just walk away when these people are here.”
Her senior narrows her eyes, and sighs a bit but relents.
It’s a high stakes position, with an unknown possible-but-unlikely threat—after all who goes after medical-nin and random small-time villagers—and seemingly its more important to make quick actions then it is to insist on Sakura going back.
Her senior orders to the others, “Go.” And then when they have fled off into the expanse of the not burning side of the forest, she gives out orders to Sakura and the one other medical-nin left on what they need to do and she takes it all in like her life depends on it.
Her senior gives her a quick warning before soaking her with a medical jutsu—and she understands the usefulness but it doesn’t feel good being soaked to the bone.
“Be careful. We need to split to cover ground.” Her senior says. “Just focus on breaking the flow of the fire. Even if you put it out at the bottom, the tops will still spread the flames. Use wind jutsu and push it away.”
Alright, maybe — maybe she can do that. Hell, she hopes. Sakura is shivering as they split and she is running down the line of fire to the other side. The whole thing is so enormously large, consuming a forest the size of Konoha at least, and even if it’s seeping towards the village from one side, that she is completely alone when she gets to where she needs to be.
Alone, she tries. She tries hard.
Her chakra has never had big reserves but she tries to dig for more as she makes another hand sign for wind release. It doesn’t do much, not half as much as is needed, but the change in airflow keeps it from coming further in her direction.
Well, somewhat—she takes a step back when embers leap forward to the grass at her feet.
The problem with fire, as she is learning, is that it’s not in a linear line. There is no border to fight against. And so it is easy to get lost or stuck in the spaces of curves and indents of the growing flames.
She’s not lost, she’s not lost though, and she keeps herself checking back to make sure of that. Even in the darkening forest, she can see the outlines of the village—and that can’t even scare her anymore, how close it is. She is at her limit of panic and stress it seems.
That is, until she sees a man’s silhouette in the fire and her heart jumps like someone tried to rip it out.
It pounds in her chest and she can hear it in her ears as she tries to make sure her eyes aren’t tricking her like they often do when she’s scared after a nightmare in her bed. But no—this isn’t her brain making nightmares look real, it is there. And that’s so much worse.
A silhouette through the fire, and he’s walking closer.
She needs to report—right? Yes—get her senior over here to deal with this person who is likely not friendly and definitely not on their side. The actual chance that he would be here, at the edge of the fire that spans over almost an entire forest, had seemed impossible that she hadn’t even worried over it but now she definitely is. And so she turns and runs.
The fire is biting at her clothes and she flickers her chakra desperately, the way she was shown how to by Tsunade—who had thought it was ridiculous she didn’t know before—and thankfully, so thankfully, her senior appears in front of her with a body flicker.
She ushers her into a stop and glances over her with tense eyes.
“Are you okay? No injuries right? Tsunade will really kill me.” Her senior says worriedly, patting at her singed clothes.
“There was a man in the fire.” Sakura rushes out, knowing that it’s the most important information right now.
Her senior’s face goes blank and pale, but she just mutters and moves. Sakura hesitates but a split-second of the thought of being alone here where she could possibly run into the other guy from the fight, because if it was possibly once then it must be possible twice, brings her to follow.
She almost trips while running, having missed a root in the dark illuminated by fire, but her senior pulls her up by the arm before she hits the ground.
“Keep with me, just stay safe alright? And be ready to run if—” Her senior stops when she sees him, eyes catching on a figure that Sakura quickly searches out as well from between the trees—a man, in non standard clothes that leave him practically shirtless, and cast in dangerous orange from the flames that lick at his feet. He’s not in the fire anymore, wandering out onto the grass.
“That’s him, isn’t it?” Sakura asks quietly, but apparently not quietly enough because her senior glances at her harshly. There’s a distance, but her senses are weak compared to some ninja who can hear across full cities and if he heard her—oh, she hopes not.
“You are too young for this.” Her senior pushes her back slightly and the sight of him from between trees is once again hidden. “Stay here, do not make yourself obvious. Just — stay safe. Prioritize yourself.”
And when she says that, Sakura feels like the weights of anxiety are getting heavier and that this situation, this mission, is not anywhere near as simple or easy as she had hoped.
The thought that death is possible, because of course it is, keeps her watching through trees holding her breath.
The fire roars and hopefully it is loud enough to hide her jackrabbit heart.
She thinks, as she watches, he's muttering somestuff as he looks around like crazy. He doesn’t look stable, and the heat of the light doesn’t help making him look any less vicious.
“Where are you!” The man shouts with bared teeth and she can hear it over the crackling, through the trees, and it holds such an intensity and brazenness that she has never seen in a ninja, except maybe Naruto but this is so much more bloodthirsty. It’s a call to fight that holds nothing back.
There’s a flash as her senior steps in close, and he swings around.
They pause, it’s an odd pause, her senior in a tense stance ready to fight and the man not, almost in a curious posture, and she can’t hear the questioning even as much as she strains her ears and senses—she so wishes she were a better, stronger ninja so this kind of hiding off to the side wouldn’t be her place
The man is looking around, and he glances over Sakura for a second then turns back — sharper. He points at her and asks something and Sakura doesn’t know if she should move or not.
She — she didn’t think he would see.
Even by ninja standards, those must be commendable senses leveling near a bloodline. Maybe it is a bloodline.
Sakura is already shifting from her little shadowed spot behind the trees because it’s not enough, yet she doesn’t know if she should run or approach. He said something about her—what did he say? The possibilities, the thought of his attention, make her shiver and want to hide.
Her senior makes a decision—the thing that Sakura was just pondering herself—and decides to fight, making an attack that is grabbed and stopped by the man easily. He asks her something with a toothy smile, and it's the first thing that Sakura can make out the lip reading of something — something ending with: ‘You wanna fight?’
She isn’t going to be helpful, not at all, she already knows. But that doesn’t mean it’s any better to stand and hide in the back. And so she approaches on quick but shaky legs.
“Hey!” The man exclaims at an attack by the senior medical-nin.
Her senior shouts and pushes at her to go when they meet eyes, but the fight doesn’t stop. The man matches her attacks one to one, and sparks emit from his mouth with a growl.
Sakura backs up until the flames are at her back.
The man sees, knocks her senior away and coughs out a few flames before facing Sakura—she is frozen still and it feels like her first mission all over again. He breathes in, and it can only be described as inhaling the flames as wind rushes back to him and the heat in the rush leaves her hair dry and frizzy.
The light of the little clearing dims considerably.
She stares blankly at him for a moment longer before looking back. The new scene is burnt black from the trees to the ground, with a long line of almost half the fire gone.
“You gotta be careful.” The man says and she has no idea if he’s even talking to her because that wouldn’t make any sense. But his eyes are on her, his face—he’s younger than she would’ve thought, than his strength and presence suggested. “Didn’t expect there to be other people hiding around in this forest. It kinda seemed like it just went on forever.” He continues, almost like chatting.
Her senior is backing up, glancing between Sakura and the man who stands in between them. And Sakura can guess what she’s thinking, what she’s considering—about if it's possible to save her. If it’s worth even trying.
She’s not even thinking about that though, she wants to glance back again, at the scene of burnt forest that goes at least a mile out, because the fire alone was insane but to be able to take fire, fire that is so uncontrollable and all consuming, back—that’s really, really insane.
“Can you—” Her voice breaks first but she’s got all the adrenaline and dumbstruck awe needed to push through it. “Can you do the rest? To the fire, I mean. Get rid of it, like that. The village hasn’t burnt yet.”
Where she got the balls to ask questions to this man no one will ever know.
Her senior takes a few steps back, then disappears. And the weight that she is alone crushes any confidence she had. She tries to breathe through it.
It’s not a betrayal, and it shouldn’t feel like a betrayal. This is just how ninja work, prioritizing the best course of action.
Still, it’s just her and this man, who doesn’t have a hitai-ate but does have very sharp eyes and scars across his chest and some kind of ANBU-like marking on his shoulder that she can’t recognize no matter how much she strains her eyes. The flames illuminate his harsh edges and make the colors hard to make out.
“A village?” He asks lightly, ducking a bit to her height. Her throat has choked her words so she tries to point to where, past the trees, the village sits. And he looks there with narrowed eyes and apparently really good eyesight. “Ah. A village! Wow, I didn’t see that. What a tiny village. I thought it was nothing but trees.”
He scratches at his jaw thoughtfully looking off into the distance at it.
“Then—could you?” Her voice is so weak.
The man almost starts to nod then stops. “But right now,” He punches his fists together and snarls, “I'm in the middle of fighting some asshole.” And he turns back to the flaming forest inferno, that she can’t believe they are chatting right next to.
There's a cut in his abdomen, bloody and long and her medical training says should probably be keeping him from moving. Yet he seems plenty animated.
“Without the flames, um, won't it be easier to find him?” Sakura tries to propose. This guy, this person, he seems careless to anything other than the fight and his objective, and that works fine as long as he doesn’t kill them. And it seems like he’s leaning towards not doing that. Great.
He scratches his head. “Yeah, you’re smart.”
A compliment. Wow. It’s weird, undoubtedly, yet it still makes her flush even though it's from this person.
How is she not dead yet? She wonders.
Sakura stands obediently and passively to the side as he inhales more of the fire, and it's quite a sight. Intimidating even. In a few minutes, half the fire that they were proving impossible to put out is just gone leaving blackened ground and trees. He glances around glaring, probably for his opponent.
At least, the already-well-burnt earth will keep the remaining fire from reaching the village.
“Lost him.” He huffs. “I wasn’t planning on putting fire to the whole forest. Never been around so many big trees, it makes it really hard to fight.”
Maybe Sakura is overthinking this, but how do you use such large fire attacks in a dense forest and not expect it to light? She glances at him and knows she will never be able to ask.
“Natsu.” He says—an introduction. “And who’re you?”
In the lack of fire light, he’s got pink hair. It’s odd to her—has anyone other than her family had pink hair?
“S- sakura.” She bites her tongue in the middle because, really, is she supposed to give her name out? Probably not but she can’t take it back now.
She’s shivering now as the heat has died down.
“Pretty name, Sakura.” He says like he’s tasting the name. He’s not that tall yet he looms over her. There’s a few moments of silence that she is extremely aware of, yet he doesn’t seem at all bothered by.
“You got food at the village?” The man—Natsu—asks, and she nods shakily.
With trembles in her legs and a blank mind, she leads him back. He follows behind her.
Is it a bad idea to take this man, who is undoubtedly dangerous and uncaring towards them, to the small rural village? Yes — well, maybe, probably. But there’s no way she can refuse and he will do what he wants anyway, literally anything he wants because no one around here will be able to get even close to stopping him. Not her, not her senior, not the villagers.
Oh she hopes backup comes soon but she doubts it because the only report they’ll get is the fire. Not the real danger, the real source of concern—this man.
The villagers are frightened, some near petrified, when they get back together, and she can really relate.
Sakura, apparently the easier one to talk to, tells them he wants food and all of them start rushing to treat the man like their lives depend on it. It’s possible.
They ask him what he likes and he starts chatting away about plenty of rich, tasteful foods that these people definitely don’t have. In the middle of it, her senior appears discreetly and pulls her aside, taking her to one of the little rural houses quickly. And just being out of his presence, Sakura feels like a weight has lifted.
Her senior grabs her at the shoulders and arms and pats at her face, checking. “You’re okay? Yes? You’re okay.” She glances over again, then thrice, like it’s unexpected. Then a moment and her face tenses a bit again. “He didn’t touch you did he?”
Sakura shakes her head.
“I’m not going to apologize, because it was in my duty to leave at that moment.” Her senior says, her mouth thinning.
“But I promise you it won’t happen again, alright.”
Sakura nods, she thinks she gets it even if it leaves a bit of a bitter taste in her mouth.
The other medical-nin that stayed behind is here too, and glances out the window to the village that is treating Natsu like a king before prompting them all to talk about the plan. Sakura also, very much, hopes there is a plan.
“There’s only three of us left here. But we can likely finish the job since the fire won’t be a problem anymore. Since it’s just water fever, it shouldn’t take more than a few days and we can use that time to gather information. This is something Konoha should know.” Her senior asserts.
“It isn’t our job to do stuff like that.” The other medical-nin glances to the window again, a flickering caution in his eyes. “None of us are trained to even know how to. And this kind of person—he could kill us.”
“Medical-nin courtesy is generally respected even by missing-nin. And this is a chance, as Konoha shinobi. It will help the village and that’s what matters.” Her senior responds firmly shutting that down. “You can mainly focus on work, and just use the extra time to observe the unknown.”
The unknown.
“His name—it’s Natsu.” Sakura interjects with the information she had already gotten out of him—well, that he gave to her. It still counts.
A pause.
“He told you that?” Her senior turns more directly, face going tense with a grimace. “Does he, uh, seem to like you?”
The other medical-nin keeps his silence and Sakura shifts her feet awkwardly, feeling like she took a misstep. Whatever she had just implied that warranted that reaction, she hadn’t meant to. Natsu, thinking back on it, he had seemed not that unfriendly. Well, overall.
“It could be a kinship thing, um, senior. I've never met someone outside my family with pink hair, he probably hasn’t either and was curious.” She tries to reason with the idea that her brain has been putting together. It’s plausible, she thinks.
He was friendly towards her, and maybe it was because they had a connection.
“It's not that rare.” Her senior says grimly. Sakura doesn’t say anything more of course, but in her head, she kind of doubts that—after all, she really has never seen it on anyone else but her own father before.
The other medical-nin asks if Sakura was told anything about what he’s doing. She can only shrug really.
Her senior rubs between her eyes like this whole thing is a huge headache. “You’re not going to be able to avoid him if he’s staying in the village, especially if he has an interest in you. But, try to keep a distance. Or, at least, don’t be alone with him.” She orders Sakura seriously, eyes glancing over her face.
She exhales a tiny breath. “I should’ve sent you back.”
“It’s okay. I can handle it.” Sakura tries to assure the woman. Afterall, she’s a ninja too and to be treated like a delicate thing with gloves is starting to miff her a bit.
“You remember kunoichi training from the academy? He’s underestimating you, use it as an advantage. Try to,” Her face grimaces a bit, “play nice.”
She nods all the same but. Underestimating her—that sticks in Sakura’s mind. Because when the man is as strong as he is, and she is as weak as she is, can she really be ‘underestimated?’