The nurse sitting behind the reception desk barely glanced at Kakashi before jerking her thumb toward the corridor over her shoulder. "She's in room 309."

Kakashi contemplated playing dumb, asking who she meant and why she assumed that he was looking for them. But he suspected that it would only cause him further embarrassment. It seemed the copy ninja, with his famous aversion to hospitals, was spending too much time with a certain medic to escape notice.

That probably didn't bode well.

He knocked softly on the door to 309, and whoever was on the other side called out, "come in!"

Inside, Haruno Sakura was bandaging the upper arm of a young girl who couldn't have been more than seven years old. She glanced up briefly and smiled at Kakashi.

"What's up?"

"We've been summoned to the Hokage's office."

Sakura returned her attention to the injured girl. "Sure, I'm almost done with this. Don't worry Satoko-chan, it should be good as new in just a minute. But as a tip for the future, don't let your brother use you for target practice."

The little girl nodded solemnly, but as the bandage was drawn tight and held in place with a clip, she gasped aloud and her eyes filled with tears.

Kakashi wished he'd just waited outside; crying always made him feel awkward. But Sakura's smile never wavered. "There now, it's not so bad. It will heal up in no time, you'll see. But to help it on its way I'll give it an extra bit of healing magic if you like?"

"He-healing magic?" the girl looked dubious, but was no longer crying.

Sakura nodded, and pulled a tube of lipstick from her pocket. She carefully applied a layer to her lips, and then gave a gentle, maternal kiss on the top layer of the bandage. The kiss left an imprint of pink lipstick lips behind.

Kakashi had seen the trick once before. Sakura infused the kiss with a little chakra that numbed the pain temporarily. Usually she wouldn't bother using chakra at all for such a small cut, but she said it made children feel better about their first brushes with injury.

Satoko left smiling, and Sakura collected her things.

"She was almost better behaved than you were."

Kakashi blushed, grateful for his mask. "Her injury was also considerably less severe than mine."

Sakura shrugged, smiling. "I don't discriminate based on the pain of my patients. Or the age."

Naruto was adjusting poorly to his role as Hokage's apprentice.

The desk was cluttered with scrolls and files, with no semblance of an organisational system. Naruto sat behind it all looking decidedly overwhelmed. Shizune was no doubt helping as best she could, but it was clear to Sakura that her friend was still coming to grips with just how much paperwork was involved in running a country.

Tsunade sat behind the main desk, scroll in hand. Sai was also there, waiting for Kakashi and Sakura to arrive. Beside Tsunade's desk stood a portly old man in reed hat. Presumably he was the client.

"C-rank mission in the Hidden Sound." Tsunade wasted no time getting started. "Reed Village report that a group of bandits have been sighted on the forbidden mountain, where it seems one of Orochimaru's abandoned labs is located. The village has no shinobi of their own, so they've tasked us with cleaning up Orochimaru's mess before the bandits do anything dangerous. Bunta here," she gestured to the man in the hat, "has come as a representative of Reed, and will guide you back to his village. Naruto will be remaining here to train, but I have every confidence the three of you can handle this mission. Any questions?"

Naruto sighed miserably from behind his paperwork, and the others shook their heads.

"Very well. Make your preparations and move out at once."

The trip to Reed Village would take one and a half days, and so the team had packed bedrolls for the first and last nights on the road. While at the village, Bunta assured them, they would be well accommodated.

"We don't have much," he said, "But if you truly can remove the scourge of that lab and those bandits, then what's ours is yours."

The going was always slower when escorting by a civilian, but the weather was spring beautiful and the road was wide and clear for most of the way to Sound. Sakura raised her face to the sun that filtered gently through the leaves. What with the relative peace that had swept the world lately, it had been a little while since she'd gone out on a mission, and she missed the feeling of freedom and camaraderie it instilled. Of course she'd seen plenty of her teammates around town in less formal settings. Now that everyone was old enough to drink, they could be found at the bar often enough.

In fact, she thought as she walked, that was probably the reason her and Kakashi had become so close of late. They had run into each other one night when Sakura was trying to forget an operation that had been a tragic failure. Nobody's fault, but the patient was quite young and every medic had been affected by their death. Kakashi had taken one look at his old student drinking by herself with unhealthy determination, and offered to buy her a drink. "Sure," she shrugged, and Kakashi disappeared to the bar. Hazy though the recollection was, she could still remember the way she'd blushed at the romantic cliché of a handsome man buying her a drink. Do I consider Kakashi a 'handsome man?' She had asked herself, and in hindsight that was probably the first time she'd allowed herself to think of her sleepy-eyed captain as a man at all.

Glancing over at him now as he plodded languidly along, chatting to Bunta, she couldn't help but smile. He had been a good teacher, in his own way, ever since she'd graduated the academy. He had been an excellent team captain, and during the war he was the sort of commander you'd be happy to die alongside. And now, ever since he'd offered to buy her a drink, and come back from the bar with a glass of water and the promise that he'd get her drunk arse back home in one piece, she had considered him a friend.

Kakashi seemed to notice her looking at him, and shot her a brief, eye-crinkling smile over Bunta's shoulder. She returned it, a half-second too late for him to notice, and returned to her reverie. Two questions had burned in her mind for a while now, ever since they had started getting closer.

Did she see Kakashi as something more than a friend?

And could he ever see her the same way?