Hey! So, sorry it's not my usual ItaSaku, but I've gotten back into KakaSaku recently, so here's my take on how she's always the medic for every member of Team 7. It's kinda long and rambling...but I hope it's to your guys' tastes! ^^

Disclaimer: Naruto characters are not mine...no matter how much I wish they were.

Enjoy!

=*~*~*=

New Apartment

"Forehead, this is the eleventh apartment we've visited today," Ino groaned, wishing she had never agreed to this. "Can we please call it quits after this? Please?" Honestly, if she had known exactly how picky her best friend and rival was going to be when picking out a new apartment, she would have left the girl to take someone else. The image of Naruto in her position made her grin; the blond boy would be whining worse than her, and would probably have driven Sakura out of her mind.

"Okay, okay, sheesh," the voice of her best friend drifted down from a half-turn of the stairwell above her. "If I don't like this place we can call it quits for today and I'll drag someone else out next time!"

"Thank the kami," Ino muttered under her breath as she mounted the last of the stairs and followed Sakura down the outdoor hall.

"211…212…here! 213." There was a papery rustle as Sakura fished out the small envelope the landlady had given her, shaking it out until the key landed in her palm. She fingered the cool metal hopefully, and, inserting the silvery shard into the keyhole with a mental prayer for luck – she was just as sick as Ino of going through possible apartments – she turned the key. The lock slid back smoothly and the door opened.

It should have been unremarkable.

It was unremarkable.

It was a simple, two-bedroom, one bath, with a kitchenette and a living room, already half-furnished with some of the basics: a spare bed, a refrigerator, a washer and dryer set. The large windows were airy, letting in as much light as one could get on the second floor of an apartment in Konoha; the village had a surprising number of tall buildings in the residential district that restricted sunlight access to the lower floors on occasion. There was plenty of storage space available; the kitchenette had more than its fair share of cupboards and she could count at least two possible closets, not including the one right by the door that she figured was typically used for shoes. She'd fill them with medical scrolls and textbooks with pleasure. The living room had a wide, long sofa that looked immensely plush and was probably soft to the touch.

It was a simple apartment, and she loved it.

Turning to her best friend, she beamed. "I know we haven't seen the rest of the place yet, but I think I've found my new apartment," she announced, her emerald eyes shining with unadulterated pleasure.

"Thank you, kami-sama," Ino replied with a heartfelt sigh.

"What are you doing to this room?" the blonde asked a week later, leaning against the door frame of the spare bedroom.

Sakura had moved in the day after discovering her new place and taken a few days off from hospital work and missions to get her apartment in order. The kitchen was now stocked with food and drink, the bathroom occupied by her toiletries, and her bedroom dominated by Sakura's queen-sized sleigh bed and the handmade mahogany desk her former captain Yamato had given to her for passing the ANBU field-medic exams. The living room now sported several paintings, given to her over the years by various individuals, a small television, and a coffee table. But it was the spare room that had undergone the greatest change.

"Did you just dump all your extra crap in here?" Ino teased as her sky-blue eyes swept the room's interior. "It looks like you couldn't decide what to do with the place."

Sakura, shoulder length rose-petal hair tied back in a loose bun, wiped a light sheen of sweat from her forehead and pursed her lips in a wry smile. "Something like that."

She had to admit that it did look like some crazed interior designer had had a DID (dissociative identity disorder, Sakura couldn't help the smugness she felt at knowing the correct term for multiple personality disorder, something she had learned during her training with Tsunade in previous years) moment in her spare room.

She had planned on making it an extra bedroom for friends to crash when they needed someplace for the night, which happened with enough frequency to actually warrant putting some effort into the place, but with the discovery that she had filled all the available closet space with clothes and old mission logs and such, she had been forced to turn it also into an extra storage closet.

For once she wished she wasn't such a packrat.

Patient files dominated a small corner of the room, pressing against the three bookshelves she had filled with everything from casual reading material to heavy medical texts that hadn't been pertinent enough to keep in her own bedroom. That was a tribute to her short-lived attempt to turn the place into a library. Her spare desk, the one she hadn't bothered throwing away when Yamato-taishou had presented her with her new one, stood in a corner with several boxes of emergency medical supplies beside it, the desktop filled with a veritable army of distilling scrolls and potion supplies.

From her vantage point from the door, Ino could clearly sum up the scatterbrained room. To her left was the bed against one wall, the far left wall cluttered by bookshelves. The far right wall had boxes of manila folders, neatly labeled in Sakura's elegant round hand; the desk to her right doing a fair imitation of a mad scientist's lab, with a sweaty medic going through a box of sheets sitting on the floor in the middle of it all.

"You really need to throw things away," was the blonde's only comment.

The flushed and irritable twenty-three year old paused as she pulled a ninja standard, shuriken-print sheets, from the box. "I happen to like keeping all my stuff. They bring back good memories," she said defensively, leveling a glare at her friend when the girl in question sauntered past her with a disbelieving smirk to the patient files in the corner.

"Yeah, Forehead, I'm sure," she flipped through the top file, "Kanazaki Ichizou's herniated disk makes you all warm and fuzzy inside."

The color of Sakura's cheeks darkened several shades. "Okay so maybe not everything in those boxes are good memories, but if I didn't keep all my files, I'd never have caught Yoshiko-san's brittle bone syndrome so early on."

"Doesn't mean you have to keep all your files here at your place. The hospital has a patient database for a reason."

Sakura stuck out her tongue childishly at the condescending comment. "Mou, if you're just going to run your mouth off at me, Ino-pig, I'm going to at least make you help me. Grab the other end of this sheet would you?"

The blonde chuckled as she rolled her eyes. "Slave driver."

"You're so going to regret decorating this room like this," she added as they finally smoothed the sheets and tucked in the edges neatly.

The rose-haired girl allowed herself a moment to raise an eyebrow. "And why is that?"

"Call it a hunch," Ino told her mysteriously, refusing to say more as they began to tidy up pillows and blankets for the bed.

The place could almost be a makeshift clinic…

The first time Sakura ever made use of the spare room was at 3:27 a.m., a requisite unholy hour for such a situation.

She was wakened by a crackle of thunder that refused to fade until her sleep-fogged mind realized that it was an insistent pounding at her door. Shinobi senses now fully alert, she darted through dark rooms to her front door, pulling it open just as the blond on her doorstep raised his hand to continue his demand for entrance.

"Sakura-chan!" he cried, before she could get out a greeting or even demand what he thought he was doing waking her up at such an hour. "It's Sai!"

And then she noticed the pale young man slumped against the wall by her front door, drenched in the rain that flooded the balcony-like hallway that ran the length of the apartment building.

He was paler than usual, and the liquid under him was tinted with crimson and violet.

In an instant she was in medic mode, ignoring the other's "Hey, ugly," greeting as she ordered their blond friend to carry him to the spare bedroom, darting into her bathroom to grab some towels.

"Naruto-kun, tell me what happened as clearly as you can, I'm going to get started drying him off, okay?"

The blond nodded as his mind reeled back to the last hour. "Sai and I were coming back from a mission, classified," he added in apology as an explanation of why he couldn't go into great detail about their whereabouts. "We were ambushed by a band of missing-nin and one of them must have been a medic or something before he defected. He got Sai with a poison-soaked kunai right before Sai finished him."

A delicate clink echoed through the room as he laid a cloth-wrapped parcel on the table beside the bed.

"Great job, Naruto," Sakura assured him as she toweled off as much rain water as she could get before tossing the terrycloth fabric aside to snip away the ruins of Sai's half-shirt away from the ANBU operative's body and place her bare hands on his chest. "I can probably figure out an antidote to this poison if it's a new one in a few days, but for now I'm going to flush it out of his system so that he doesn't suffer any lasting damage." Even with the dark frown marring her features, her chakra was gentle as it seeped into the now-unconscious male's body.

"Hey Naruto, if you were on a classified mission, you should probably inform Tsunade-shishou that you're back," she added presently when Naruto refused to quit pacing back and forth outside the door. "Sai's condition isn't going to change if you leave for an hour."

The look he gave her obviously said that he didn't want to do it, but he knew she was right, so he went, leaving her to her work.

It was then that she discovered just how handy the room was.

From here she could monitor any minute changes in Sai's condition while simultaneously being able to analyze the poison she collected off of the tainted kunai at the desk cum lab she had in the corner. Digging out her more esoteric texts from the bookshelf, she set about analyzing the poison components.

"Hey, ugly."

Her eyes were beginning to blur from concentration but there was nothing wrong with her ears, so she suppressed the urge to plant a chakra-enhanced fist into her teammate's face, reminding herself that he was injured and ill, and turned around with a tired smile.

"Hey, Sai. I'm glad you're awake. You've been poisoned so I'll need you to stay here while I finish concocting the antidote. Go back to sleep, I'll be ready in a few hours," she said, fully in medic-mode.

"I'm completely immobilized, ugly. I couldn't move if I wanted to," he told her. He was getting better at sarcasm these days, though he was hardly sociable, even at the age of twenty-four. "I'm going back to sleep."

Rubbing her watering eyes she muttered, "Fine," as she got to her feet, disgruntled to find it was already seven in the morning. She didn't need to head in for work; Naruto had returned a few hours earlier with a note from Tsunade saying she was excused for the day under special circumstances, and to remember to note down any changes in Sai's patient file as well as monitor the poison's effects, so she was free for the time being. The only thing on her mind was getting herself a large glass of ice cold water and maybe some painkillers for the raging headache she knew she was probably going to have in a few hours, but all that was knocked clean from her mind at the sound of a few familiar voices floating up to her kitchen window from below.

"It was like she knew something like this was going to happen!" Naruto's voice insisted, bubbling excitedly in what she supposed he thought was a whisper. "The room was ready and everything!"

"I warned her," Ino told him; Sakura could clearly envision the grin on her best friend's face. "Sort of, anyway."

"It's like Sakura-chan has her own little clinic in her apartment!"

And as soon as the words left his lips Sakura knew she was saying goodbye to uninterrupted nights of sleep and free time as she knew it. A peek from her window earlier had told her that Sasuke, Naruto, Ino and her boyfriend Genma, Yamato-taishou, and Kakashi-sensei were all there, and she knew that four out of the five males would see this as an opportunity to bypass hospitals entirely. The fifth had already taken that route, seeing as how his girlfriend was a skilled medic. And Sai…well Sai was already making use of her home clinic.

Allowing herself another peep, she bit back a groan as she caught the contemplative look in her friends' eyes.

Goodbye time to myself…

The knock on her door wasn't unexpected. Some of her guys, she had gotten to calling her usual visitors "her guys", were returning from a two-week long mission in Yuki no Kuni, so she had been pretty certain she would be opening her house to someone today. She wasn't wrong, but the person on the doorstep was a little surprising.

"Yamato-taishou," she greeted, viridian eyes keen as they assessed the man before her.

He didn't look too much the worse for wear, though she could tell just from his stance that he was favoring one side. Other than that, he couldn't have been too badly injured since Sai, his teammate for the mission, hadn't come with him.

"Hello Sakura," he said with a somewhat strained smile. "How have you been for the past month?"

She raised an eyebrow. "Come inside, Yamato-taishou. And how many times have I told you not to bother with small talk if you're here for an injury?" she asked him as she let him in, a small smile playing about her lips as she noticed that he didn't need her to direct him to the right room. He already knew exactly where it was and what her usual procedures were.

"Classified mission with the ANBU, I'm fine but I took a bad hit to my left knee and I think my ribs might be bruised," he informed her, wincing as he sat on the spare bed.

"I'm glad the ANBU uniforms are standard issue, replaced by the squad," she teased, lightening the mood, "Or I'd feel guilty always cutting these off all of you."

Yamato chuckled weakly as he let the young medic cut the outfit off him.

Her brows knit together as she observed the livid bruise spreading across his side.

"I think this is a little more than some bruised ribs," Sakura commented as she focused, concentrating as she let her chakra sink into his body.

He stiffened under her touch, the tenseness of his muscles the only sign that he was in pain. Her chakra was cool and soothing, flaring up in hot flashes as she healed his side.

"Mmm, yeah, I thought so. Your ribs were fractured," she informed him as her touch smoothed away his bruise into nonexistence under her fingertips. "They're healed now, as is the bruise, but you'll still be sore for the next two or three days so I'd advise you to take it easy."

"You seem so professional here," the brunet wood-user chuckled, suppressing the urge to ruffle her hair. Sakura generally bristled when people treated her so childishly. "You're really in your element."

The snorted laugh was unladylike but carelessly amused. "You guys forced me into my element here," she replied without any enmity. "I didn't mean to turn my spare room into the Team 7 clinic!"

Yamato nodded sagely, grimacing as the rose-haired woman clinically sliced away a chunk of his ANBU pants to inspect his knee. "We are forever in your debt," he told her, dark eyes filled with serene amusement, obviously teasing.

"Yeah, and that's one debt I'll never get payment for," she teased back under her breath, ignoring his offended reply in favor of patching up the strained tendon in his knee.

"When Tsunade-shishou gets back from those chuunin exams in Suna, she's so going to call me out on why none of the boys ever seem to need to visit the hospital any more," Sakura muttered to herself as she levered herself out of bed to get the door. "Maybe she'll even force them to leave me alone and I'll be able to get some uninterrupted rest."

This was rather unfair, seeing as how she hadn't actually fallen asleep yet and had instead been curled up in bed with a book, debating on how long she had to read until she really had to go to bed before work. And she really didn't want them to be ordered to the hospital. It was probably better for them all around, she may have been second to none but the Hokage but she was only one person and might not always have enough chakra to deal with their injuries, but the way they always came to her was endearing. She didn't want to give that up.

So she was in a rather amenable frame of mind when she pulled open her front door.

The coppery tang of blood filled her nose immediately, making her tense in an unconscious reaction to the scent.

The slouched figure in her doorway was unmistakable.

"Yo. Most if it's not mine," he added, seeing the stormy expression that flashed across her face. But then it was gone, buried under her usual medic-mode calm as she gave a quick nod and let him in.

Sharp viridian eyes took in the tatters of his clothes as he stepped into her place, swirling with the tiniest tint of worry, all that she allowed herself as she followed him to her clinic room.

A number of lacerations criss-crossed his arms and torso, but from what she could tell, they were superficial. She would easily be able to patch them up with salve and bandages. It was the dwindling level of his chakra that worried her most of all, as well as the ashen pallor of his skin that told her he had been overusing his sharingan again.

"I hope your opponent looks in worse shape than you," she said, forcing a lightness into her tone that she didn't feel, "or people are going to think you're getting too old to work."

She placed a jar of ointment in his hands with a too-calm smile. "Take off your shirt and start applying this where you can reach without difficulty, I'm going to give you a chakra scan and then get started on anything larger than a kunai cut."

Kakashi's one visible eye crinkled in response. Sakura, too focused on setting up medical scrolls she might need if she found any internal bleeding, didn't notice the mixture of emotions that wryly quirked her former sensei's lips under his mask.

She was being strong again, pushing away her feelings of worry and concern to dispassionately deal with the situation. As a fellow shinobi and her one-time sensei, there was pride in watching her behave so, but the emotion was tempered with pained sadness. He could imagine what it cost her to push away her compassion. He could tell she was holding back her questions, wanting to know what had happened. But she was pushing her personal desires aside for the sake of healing him.

"If you're not going to do anything with the salve then cap it and put it down, Kakashi-sensei," she said briskly. "It's less potent when it dries out."

His visible eyebrow quirked as he dipped his fingers into the cool, gel-like substance. "When did you and the others stop respecting me?" he wondered out loud, gently teasing. "It seems so long since you guys used to hang on my every word."

The rose-haired girl laughed softly, sending a cool pulse of chakra through his system that made him stiffen, the pleasant sensation quickly sweeping through his body to his extremities. "Kakashi-sensei, we haven't done that since we were fifteen."

The eyebrow wrinkled. "Don't say that Sakura," he admonished. "You're going to make me feel old and how terrible would that be?"

"Thirty-seven is old?" she muttered as she helped him bandage the last of his cuts and then leveled him with a serious look. "Now take off the hitai-ate. I need to make sure your eyesight hasn't suffered any lasting damage."

"Sakura, I think this little home clinic is making you bossier than ever."

The frown flashed through her emerald eyes at the teasing, but she replied with audacity, "It is my house and if it's going to get used as a clinic, that makes me the head medic so it's my rules."

The hitai-ate was pushed up, though not without a low chuckle at her dictatorial statement.

This was the part of any healing that he liked least.

Like this he was vulnerable and, as of a year or two ago, he'd realized another aspect of the sharingan that he was finding increasingly frustrating. Most of the sharingan memories, those copied unscrupulously by the eye that he had received years ago, were of death and battle, jutsu and hand signs. But since the advent of some very advanced medical jutsu developed by Tsunade and Sakura, the viridian-eyed girl had been able to assess and mend the chakra lines that circled his eye, keeping him from blindness and other side effects of his friend's last gift.

Amid the strings of hand signs engraved in his mind were images of bright emerald eyes, filled with concern, triumphant when she managed to restore another chakra line, proud and relieved to find he had returned from a mission without complications due to his sharingan.

And more than the other images, these haunted him.

He had known for some time that these feelings would eventually surface.

She may have been his student at one point, they might have fourteen years between them, he couldn't deny that he had once upon a time ignored her chakra control in favor of training the boys, and truth be told she had been childish and naïve many years ago. But she was also the girl who knew him best; the one who, regardless of how he had treated her when she was twelve, still respected him no matter what he'd earlier said. And in turn, she was someone he had come to respect as well. As a shinobi, as a person, as a woman.

Her hands were trembling minutely against the bridge of his nose.

"Sakura?"

"So are you really suffering from old age? You must be slowing down to get this beat up."

But her heart wasn't in the teasing. His sharingan-sharpened sight caught the telltale twitch of her lips that plainly told him she was both curious and distressed.

"Sakura."

"Okay fine," she muttered, knowing from the way he said her voice that she might as well drop a little of her fake calm. "Just…tell me about the mission a little while I work. It's awkward healing in utter silence."

That probably wasn't the entire truth, but he would analyze that later. "The information received by the village was faulty," he told her as her fingers gently traced the edge of his eye. "The mission was easy enough to accomplish, it was on the way back I ran into a group of ninjas that decided to attempt collecting the bounty on my head," he said cheerfully. "You are right though, they're probably in worse shape than I am."

Sakura felt a mix of emotions; a medic's prerogative was to heal, but she was terribly glad to know that it was Kakashi rather than the other shinobi who had survived.

"And you didn't go to the hospital because…"

It was a comfortable topic to fall back on, an easy argument for them to make while she patched him up. It was surprisingly soothing to go back and forth about how he, and the rest of the guys who visited her in the evenings like this, had a distinct aversion to hospitals.

"A golden bird that could talk asked me to…" he quipped, the words delivered with serious humor.

"Save it," she interrupted, rolling her eyes. "Your weird excuses are getting more outlandish with your old age."

"Sakura, I am not old."

She giggled and fell silent, pouring a slow stream of chakra into the socket of his eye. Her fingertips were gentle as they kneaded the corner of his eyelid, and suddenly she was too close. Warm breath feathered across his cheek as her limpid emerald eyes filled his vision.

"It's…easier to see you. Than go to the hospital," he supplied, finding himself strangely short of breath as he tried not to concentrate on how her knee brushed the outside of his thigh as she leaned towards him, her weight dipping the bed.

Coolness soothed his sore eye as her lips curved into a small smile. "Well it can't be because I yell less than the nurses do," she teased.

"They're actually quite amor-OW," Kakashi winced as her fingers, no longer glowing with healing chakra, closed around his ear like a vise.

"Pervert."

Between them there was mostly silence, and a quiet humming as Sakura filled the emptiness with her own background noise.

"There…don't pull your headband down, just close your eye," she instructed when her chakra finally pulled away. "It just needs to rest now. Your low chakra reserves will fill again in a few days. If you have a mission report I'll go turn it in for you this once; as your medic I'm advising bed rest for the next eight hours at least." But even as she said this, her fingertips lingered against his cheek for moments too long before they finally pulled away.

"I think," Sakura said, not looking at him as she spoke in the hope that he wouldn't have noticed the uncharacteristic almost-caress, "that most ninja have seen too many of their comrades admitted to the hospital not make it out the front door."

Keen eyes swept his face, taking in every nuance of his expression. She knew without words that she was right.

"I guess I can underst-,"

"There is some truth in that," Kakashi interrupted as she dropped to the chair at his sudden announcement. "But it isn't the only one."

He swung his feet to the floor, silencing her with a look as soon as her lips parted to reprimand him for trying to get up. He hadn't been trying to leave, merely getting into a position where he could talk to her more easily.

"How far would you go to heal one of us?"

Emerald clashed with obsidian.

"What kind of a question is that?" Sakura asked, a little more fiercely than she'd intended. "You, of all people, should know that I would do everything I could."

"And that is exactly why."

She blinked, the affronted tirade dying on her lips.

Her former sensei's messy silver hair covered his scarred eye, leaving the dark one to fix her with a serious look that sent tingling thrills down her spine. Goosebumps erupted all over her arms.

"Every one of us who comes here trusts you, explicitly. It isn't that we trust the hospital medics any less, but that we trust you more. You know us, as we know you."

Her heart was hammering inside her ribcage, pulse fluttering like the wing beats of a hummingbird as he edged closer to her, eyes – now both of them visible – trained on her face.

"To all of us, before we set foot in a hospital, or even let another medic look to us while not on mission," his hand slid across her cheek, gently tangling warm fingers into strands of her rose-petal hair, "we would come to you."

It was too warm; her cheeks flushed crimson under his touch. "I…"

Her hands fisted the flannel of her pajama bottoms as he leaned towards her, as she leaned towards him, until their breath mingled, warm and sweet.

It made no sense; he was too close and maybe he was suffering from sleep deprivation and he was acting out of character but she didn't want to stop him as he drew nearer.

Her emerald eyes fluttered closed…

"Sakura-chan! Sakura!"

She stumbled back, suddenly on her feet as she started at the sound of Naruto pounding on her door. "Kakashi…"

He smiled up at her, his eyes crescents of mirth, his warm fingers having somehow wrapped themselves around her wrist in the last three seconds. "Don't run," he said quietly, mismatched eyes far from calm despite his tone of voice.

And because he was the one man she…because he was Kakashi… Her hand came up involuntarily to touch the same locks of hair he had just caressed. Her nod was almost imperceptible, but he caught it, and the thrill that flashed through his eyes set her heart pounding all over again.

She was across her apartment in seconds, wrenching her front door open before Naruto broke it in half with his pounding, trying not to think of how her relationship with her former sensei had changed in the space of maybe fifteen seconds.

"Naruto!"

They were covered in mud and dirt, cuts and shoddy bandages, tired but cheerful, one blond and two dark-haired boys.

"Sakura-chan, is that your blood?"

"Kakashi-sensei's," she said, briskly, smiling at them as she beckoned them inside. "My clinic doesn't have enough room, but Kakashi-sensei should be fine in a few hours…come on…"

She probably wasn't going to go to bed for another three or four hours, but she really wouldn't have it any other way. She was probably going to get an earful from Tsunade when the Hokage came back from Suna, but she'd deal with that then. From a cursory glance, she had enough to deal with right now to make sure none of their patchy attempts at bandages got infected.

Tsunade was glad to be back home, striding into Konoha halfway through the morning with a bounce in her step that probably had to do with the rare, aged sake resting at the bottom of her bags. Suna had been a decent vacation, but it couldn't compare to the lovely green that was her home village.

She was greeted by happy and cheerful subordinates at the Hokage tower, so she was especially surprised when her former apprentice, the girl she hadn't seen in nearly two months, said hello to her looking like death warmed over.

The girl had huge bags under her sea foam green eyes, pallid and looking like she hadn't had enough sleep. Or even any sleep at all.

Tsunade raised a quizzical brow at her pale and tired-eyed student. "You look like you've been through a wringer. What in the world is getting to you? The new work schedule?"

Sakura shook her head until the strands of her rose-petal hair brushing the desk under her arms made a quiet, but frenzied, susurration. "No," she groaned with a wry chuckle, "new apartment."

I'm pretty proud of myself ^^ I wrote this in three days XD

Please do leave comments and criticisms; it's been such a long time since I've written Kakashi that I feel like I might not have done him justice, and Yamato and Sai...etc etc. The muse likes cookies and will pester me to write more when she's happy ^^;

IF it wasn't obvious, no they didn't kiss. I know...sorry, I couldn't just do that...I feel like their relationship should be taken slowly and sweetly (at least in this tale...other stories however...^^) sorry for the very serious part in the middle. I'm not usually that kind of a writer but I was feeling very serious when I was writing that scene and it just bled into the story ^^;

Thanks for reading!