Entropy

Chapter 4 Maiden Flower

"Are you intoxicated yet, Sakura?" Sai asked. Grinning over the rim of her glass, Sakura shrugged.

"Why? Are you drunk yet, Sai?" she queried right back. There was a rosy flush to Sai's pale face that answered for him even before he shrugged too.

"I'm not sure. I've never been drunk before so I wouldn't know what it felt like." Sai peered carefully down at his drink as he spoke. Puffing out a big breath, Sakura leaned back against the sofa.

"Then you're definitely not drunk enough," was her solemn reply. As she reached over to refill her cup, she felt Sai's finger poking her shoulder.

"Sakura?"

"Yeah?"

"Happy birthday, okay?"

Laughing, she snorted out one word: "Okay."
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ENTROPY
Chapter 4: Maiden Flower
"Sakura. Sakura, wake up."

Sakura groaned as she squinted in the darkness. She knew it was Shikamaru not just from his chakra signature but from the stench of smoke rolling off of him. Even though her tired body protested, Sakura sat up.

"Naruto's back. He sent a runner ahead to alert us."

At this, Sakura dragged her hand across her eyes to clear them. She nodded sleepily before Shikamaru slipped out of her small room in the back of the clinic. Her apprentice was snoring away at her desk, an encyclopedia of poisons open in his lap. She spared a moment to throw a random cloak over his shoulders so he wouldn't catch a cold. Fumbling around in the dark for her shoes, she found them thrown in a sad heap near her desk. Her clothes were sleep-rumpled. She had collapsed in her bed right after returning from 1 the night before. After seeing the pattern of continued poisonings, Sakura had deduced that something had been contaminated. Though they had fanned out to take samples and test everything from all major sources of water to the air itself, nothing had been found. So, though there were still many men left to care for, Sakura had been forced to return to care for her own. Kurenai had sent a wire a day before to report that several soldiers had gone missing a few days earlier. Naruto's urgency couldn't be a good thing.

Just as Sakura crammed her feet into her boots and exited the clinic, she sensed Sasuke and Naruto in the distance. It took an extra second to notice the men with them and her heart fell when she counted one less than they had left with. She quietly skirted past the tents of sleeping shinobi. Her internal clock was muddled from exhaustion but she guessed that it was sometime around 3 am. When she made her way to the central tent, she found Shikamaru sitting, his ear glued firmly to the radio. The runner Shikamaru had mentioned was standing stiffly at the tent's entrance, his hands clenching and unclenching.

"Who's missing?" Sakura demanded. She watched Shikamaru chew angrily on the end of his cigarette before he spat out an answer.

"Kiba. Kiba's gone."

"Shit," she swore, collapsing into an empty chair. Her fingers twisted into her hair as she stared off at the distance, tracking Naruto and Sasuke through the winding paths in the forest. She barely restrained herself from running blindly into the woods to meet them. Her gut burned and clenched as it always did when she knew that she was relatively safe while Naruto was not. Sasuke added to the mix really did not help lower her stress levels. Gnawing on her chapped lower lip, she stared vacantly out at nothing until she heard the crunch of feet on fallen leaves.

"We were ambushed," Naruto hissed as he pushed past the tent flap and threw himself into the chair next to Sakura's. Their eyes met for an instant before her gaze turned restless, searching for blood, for cuts and bruises. It was only when Naruto reached over to pat her hand with his scarred fingers that she stopped chewing on her lower lip and turned to look at Shikamaru.