The Power to Heal and Destroy by Phoenixsun

Chapter 7: Lingering Bitterness

Naruto sat on a clearing with his back pressed against a tree. Just a short distance away, Sakura sat right next to the still-unconscious Sasuke, her eyes shifting nervously back and forth between her sleeping teammate and her blond one.

They were already on the second day of the Chunin Exam, yet after the bizarre incident with the notorious missing nin, Orochimaru, there had barely been any words spoken between the members of Team Seven. Instead, everything that she had witnessed in the past 24 hours had been left to simmer inside the pink haired girl's mind, where it had been progressively eating her up from inside since. The situation has proving too much for the Haruno to handle. In the back of her mind she briefly wondered if she was perhaps still on her bed sleeping through the actual Exam and caught in a dream that started with a completely changed and cold Naruto and ended with an unconscious and wounded Sasuke. A short, mirthless laugh escaped the pink haired kunoichi when she realized how much she wished she was currently dreaming.

For his part, Naruto rather liked the silence. After a close encounter with an S-ranked missing nin, it was the perfect thing to calm him down. For the past 24 hours, the conversation between the genins were limited to timid and hushed questions from Sakura, short and dry answer from the blond, and the occasional pained grunt from the unconscious Uchiha. The sudden sound of a chuckle from his teammate finally snapped the Jinchuuriki out of his thoughts. "I'm going to go look for the Earth Scroll." Naruto declared as he stood up.

Sakura was caught off guard by the mere fact that the blond had spoken with a complete sentence. "Wha... What...? Wait...!" She struggled to say, tripping over her own words.

"We can't wait any longer for Sasuke to wake up... The more time we waste the more difficult it will be to find one." The spiky haired boy firmly stated before starting to walk toward the edge of the clearing.

Having regained some of her composure, the young kunoichi stood up as well. "But..." Sakura tried to protest, wanting to say that it would be dangerous for the blond to go off on his own, but then she caught herself when memories of the fight she had witnessed the day before flooded back into her mind, showing the girl how wrong her assessment of her teammate was.

Naruto stopped walking for a couple of seconds and carefully looked back over his shoulder at the rest of Team Seven before returning his gaze forward and continuing on his way.

With each step that the blond took away from them and into the depths of the forest, Sakura could feel her strength being zapped away until her legs finally gave out and she fell down sitting on back on the floor. The kunoichi's gaze fell on her unresponsive crush. In the short time since the second part of the Chunin Exam started she had witnessed more unbelievable events that she ever had in her whole life. "And this is coming from a genin that accidently stumbled upon an A Rank mission..." The Haruno reasoned as she sat there almost by herself.

Unlike when she first entered, the Forest of Death now felt eerily quiet to her. In the silence, Sakura thought that if she concentrated hard enough she could still hear the echo of Naruto's fight with Orochimaru, but, when she closed her eyes, all she could see was Naruto's blue and white Sharingan glaring back at her. The mere thought made the pink haired girl shiver in a mixture of fear, confusion, and curiosity. She could not said that blond had gotten stronger, that word did not even begin to cover it, instead the former class clown, dead-last goofball had simply become powerful. More powerful than any genin Sakura had ever seen, and that list included Sasuke.

About twenty-five minutes had passed since Naruto left in search for an Earth Scroll and Sakura had been left behind to ponder on her thoughts. Unexpectedly, the kunoichi was snapped out of her deep train of thought by a sudden presence nearby. Looking around, the Haruno hoped to see her spiky haired teammate walking into the clearing with the scroll in hand because, if he wasn't him, the girl was unsure that she could protect Sasuke for whatever new horror the Forest of Death was about to throw at them.