In which Hidan is a cultist, Kakuzu is an eldritch horror, and Sakura is a doctor who is very, very tired and perhaps mildly intrigued.

When two men break down her the front door to her clinic exactly seven minutes before closing, Sakura very nearly screams.

One of them is tall, face obscured by a cowl and eyes almost luminous, and the other, apparently unconscious with an arm thrown over his companion's shoulders, is nearly covered in blood. It drips down onto the floor, a trail leading to the growing puddle on the pale linoleum.

"Fix him," says the one not bleeding out.

Sakura, largely buried under several layers of shock, says, with remarkable calmness, "He should go to a hospital."

"No time," he growls, shifting his grip, and some distant, dissociating part of Sakura thinks about the absolute bitch it'll be to get all that blood off of her floor.

She blinks. "This way, then," she says, and leads them to her largest exam room.

"On the table," she orders, slipping on her scrubs and snapping on her gloves. "What can you tell me about his injuries?"

"Lacerations," the man responds, dropping his companion none too gently onto the table. "He'll require stitches."

"Blood type?" Sakura asks.

"Unnecessary."

She pauses, staring at the blood dripping off her table. "Unnecessary," she echoes, half a question.

The man fixes her with a piercing look, eyes luminous under the shadow of his cowl. His sclera, she notes vaguely, are red.

"Okay," Sakura says. She tugs on her mask, grabs a tray of surgical tools from her cabinet, and hands the man a pair of gloves and a towel. "Anesthesia-?"

"Don't worry about it. Too expensive, anyway."

She exhales sharply and quietly wonders what the fuck is going on. "Okay. I need you to mop up the blood so I can see the laceration clearly, and then I'll work."

The man nods and immediately turns back back to the table, wiping one of the wounds with quick, neat movements. The first is of the injuries is a massive gash that starts from just under his right collarbone, crosses over his sternum, and ends at the bottom of his ribs.

Sakura sucks in a sharp breath and cuts away the remains of his shirt, which may or may not have been white at some point but is now so thoroughly drenched in blood that it's nothing but red, and douses the whole thing in peroxide before readying the curved needle and its holder, forceps in her other hand, and gets to work.

Forceps to expose the skin, needle sliding through, tug and tie the thread. Repeat. Blood streams steadily from the wounds, occasionally mopped up by the other man who stands patiently across from her. "Unnecessary," she mumbles under her breath, pausing after the ninth stitch to replace her blood-slicked gloves.

There's at least a dozen stitches for the first laceration alone, five more for the cut at the junction of the man's neck and shoulder, seven for the wound on his thigh, another dozen or so more scattered over the smaller but equally deep cuts on his body.

About forty stitches and an hour and a half later, Sakura stands, staring down at the man on her table that's bled out enough to lose his whole body's worth two time over, who's inexplicably breathing.

God, the blood on her floor.

"I- I'm done," she says. Then, with a little more energy, "What the fuck."

"Good," the man says stiffly. She looks up at him. His dark clothes are splattered with blood, his dark gray jacket made black and black slacks made blacker. He strips off his gloves and drops them onto the table, then reaches into the pocket of his jacket. "My card," he says shortly, handing Sakura a square of paper. "Send the bill to this address."

She takes it wordlessly. There's exactly two lines on it. The first simply reads 'Kakuzu,' and the second is an address. She doesn't recognize the street name or the postal code, but it's somewhere in the city.

The man- presumably Kakuzu- heaves his companion off the table and over his shoulder like a bag of rice.

"W-wait!" Sakura blurts. "He needs to come back in a week to have the stitches removed."

Kakuzu pauses. "I'll keep that in mind," he says flatly, and leaves.

Sakura stands in the exam room for a long time after that, staring blankly at the empty doorway, and finally sighs and rolls up her sleeves.

It'll likely take the whole night to clean all this blood off her floors.

Her receptionist nearly has a heart attack when she comes in the next morning, finding Sakura on her hands and knees scrubbing at a rusty trail on the floor, still covered in blood from the night before.

Sakura waves it off, and the poor girl seems all too eager to let go of the event entirely, but, at least, not before calling a cleaning crew to take care of the rest.

She quietly bills the mysterious address and then rest of the week passes like any other week, with a few people coming in with coughs and a broken bone or two, and a few casual check-ups. Most importantly, tall, terrifying men do not barge into her office and bleed profusely over her floor, and by the end of the week, she's almost forgotten about the odd encounter, barely registering the check written to her name that arrives a few days later.

Then they come back.

Her receptionist peeks into her office. "Doctor Haruno," she squeaks. "There are men here to see you."

Sakura blinks. There aren't any appointments scheduled for the rest of the day, and she's been taking the time to clean up some paperwork. "Is it an emergency?"

The younger girl shakes her head. "Something about stitches?" she says hesitantly, and the realization hits Sakura like a freight train.

"Oh," Sakura says. Then, "I'll be right out."

The receptionist scurries off and Sakura makes her way to the waiting room.

She can hear conversation as she walks down the hall, and she pauses just before the door to listen.

"I still don't know why you didn't just fucking fix me up yourself," an unfamiliar voice gripes.

"You know my threads aren't made for delicate work," Kakuzu replies, his deep, rough voice immediately recognizable. Also, 'his threads?'

The other man huffs. "Still," he says, voice a half whine. "Why'd we even have to come back?"

"If you want to tear the stitches out and make everything worse, suit yourself. But if you bleed on our furniture, I'll kill you."

Sakura chooses this time to step out. "Kakuzu?" she says cautiously. "I'm Doctor Haruno."

Kakuzu looks up from his seat- his face is covered again, this time by a plain black surgical mask, shaggy dark hair falling past his shoulders, and his clothes are nearly identical to the ones he wore a week prior, dark and practical- and the silver-haired man next to him is unmistakably the one she stitched together a week ago.

"Holy shit," says the man who, by all accounts, should not be alive. "That's the bitch who put me back together? Fuck, I wish I was awake for that."

There are so, so many things wrong with that, and Sakura struggles with a response for a moment before settling for, "Excuse me?"

"Ignore him," Kakuzu says coolly. "Hidan is an idiot."

"Fuck you," Hidan responds eloquently.

Even seated, Kakuzu finds a decent angle to land a sharp kick to Hidan's shin, and the man swears again.

"Okay," Sakura says, despite the fact that everything about this situation is decidedly not okay, "follow me, then."

She takes them back to the same exam room, now spotless once again, where Hidan hops onto the table and Kakuzu takes the chair by the door.

"Shirt and pants off, please," Sakura says crisply, pulling on gloves.

"All you had to do was ask," Hidan purrs.

Sakura pointedly ignores him, and, behind her, Kakuzu heaves a sigh.

She gathers materials as Hidan strips, tossing his shirt to the ground and kicking off his jeans carelessly. He's wearing a pair of plain black boxer-briefs, and his pale skin is striped and pocked with various scars. Some of them look suspiciously like gunshot wounds.

Sakura douses a cotton pad with alcohol. "Look straight ahead," she orders, approaching his side. "I'm going to clean the wound, and then cut the stitches. If they start to hurt coming out, tell me."

Hidan, thankfully, obeys wordlessly. He's surprisingly docile once she gets started, breath hissing quietly through his teeth as the alcohol stings as she gently cleans the cut on his shoulder.

She gently pulls one of the stitches up with a pair of tweezers, slipping her scissors through the loop and snipping them before gingerly tugging them free from the skin.

"Fuck," Hidan mumbles, "that feels weird."

"We wouldn't have to do this if you hadn't picked a fight you couldn't finish," Kakuzu growls crossly.

"And if you weren't such a fucking piece of shit-!" Hidan starts.

"Stay still, please," Sakura interrupts as she finishes up his shoulder, applying a line of antibiotics and an adhesive bandage to the half-healed wound.

Kakuzu scoffs, and Sakura pauses for a moment to glance at him. "Please don't instigate him," she says flatly.

She moves onto the wound on Hidan's chest, the metal tray next to her slowly filling with lengths of thread. The work is repetitive and methodical, and there's little distraction other than the steady rise and fall of his breathing.

She's since moved onto Hidan's leg wound when Kakuzu breaks the silence.

"The bill," he says suddenly.

Sakura blinks, standing straight and turning to face him, "I'm sorry?"

"It was low," Kakuzu elaborates.

Sakura huffs and turns back to Hidan, leaning down to to carefully pull a stitch from his thigh. "It was," she says. "I try to keep my fees affordable."

Kakuzu hums thoughtfully, and she feels his gaze boring into her back.

"You're work was clean," he continues, unprompted. "Especially given the circumstances."

It sounds… vaguely like praise. She's not entirely sure. It's either that or a threat.

"Thank you," she says diplomatically.

Apparently done, Kakuzu stays silent as she takes care of the last of the stitches scattered on Hidan's body, bandaging each cut neatly.

Sakura stands straight, stretching and rolling your neck. "All done," she says, patting Hidan's shoulder. "Go ahead and get dressed."

"The bill-" Kakuzu starts.

"I don't charge for follow ups," Sakura says.

"Fuck's sake," Hidan says, hopping off the table and yanking on his pants. "You're a fucking saint." The way he says it doesn't particularly sound like a compliment.

Her teeth worry her bottom lip. "Should I ask?" she says to no one in particular.

"What?" Kakuzu says.

Sakura grimaces and bites the inside of her cheek. "How he-" she waves in Hidan's general direction- "is… alive."

"Pact with an old god," Kakuzu says casually, the same time Hidan cheers, "Fucking Jashin, that's how!"

"I… see," Sakura says slowly, (She does, in fact, not see.)

"If that is it, we'll be taking our leave," Kakuzu says as he stands.

"Thanks, Doc," Hidan says with crooked grin. He doesn't bother putting his shirt back on, instead tucking it in the waistband of his pants like a rag. "Maybe I'll stop by. You can give me a physical any fucking time you want."

Despite her best efforts, the snort that escapes her is horribly undignified. "Unlikely."

Kakuzu inclines his head, pausing at the door and letting him companion exit before him. "Doctor Haruno," he murmurs, "I have a feeling our paths will cross again soon enough."

And then he leaves.

Sakura stands in her exam room and stares at the door for the second time in as many weeks.

"Well," she says. "That wasn't ominous or anything."

A/N: Or, the one in which Sakura is distressed, and absolutely nobody is of any help whatsoever.

Welp. I got steamrolled by inspiration after thinking about VesperChan's work, and this happened in about two hours. Is it shippy? Honestly, I'm not entirely sure myself. I'm just the writer, these things are entirely out of my control.