Chapter Text
"Officially, you're cleared for another year of duty, Uchiha-san." Sakura said cheerfully as she reentered the examination room. She stilled her tapping fingers on the clipboard and managed a bland polite smile to hide her nervousness. She hoped he hadn't noticed as she looked at her quiet patient, Uchiha Itachi.
He nodded solemnly. "Thank you, Haruno-san." Itachi murmured politely and then slipped off the examination table and retrieved his jacket.
Sakura cleared her throat. "I said ‘officially’..." She clarified after a moment.
"Unofficially, you're going to get yourself and your team killed this way." She pursed her lips. Inwardly, she cringed and wondered why she couldn't have come up with a more diplomatic approach. Sakura detected a minute twitch of his eyebrow as he observed her, taking that as a sign to continue, she did.
"The problem with your eyes." She began to flip through the papers on her clipboard, hoping he wouldn’t raise an infamous Uchiha stink.
Itachi blinked at her and then spoke the most words she had ever heard come from his mouth. "You're not supposed to check on a clan’s Doujutsu, Haruno-san." He narrowed the eyes in question.
Most clans with Doujutsu guard their secrets tightly and none more so than the Uchiha. Though the Hyuuga were not much better, if someone were to ask Sakura.
"I’m aware. It wasn't intentional." She hurried to explain, barely managing to stop from shuffling in place. Sakura tried to read his expression, but it was closed off to her. To her displeasure, Itachi had much better control over his micro-expressions than his younger brother. She cleared her throat again when he remained quiet, his expression inscrutable.
“You must be using the Sharingan constantly on missions to make up for it.” She continued, as if she wasn't risking her entire career, “This will accelerate the deterioration, and it's affecting your recovery time.” She glanced up at him from over the clipboard. To her surprise, he was sitting back on the examination table looking at her steadily.
“How so?” He inquired, tilting his head with his long ponytail trailing over his shoulder.
“I noted multiple injuries that healed slower than they should have. I imagine overcompensating for your eyesight doesn't leave enough energy for the rest of your body.”
“And you somehow gleaned all this… unintentionally?” Itachi asked with a light twitch of his lips.
“Well, I’m very good at what I do.” Sakura sniffed. She took a pen from the desk behind her and signed the papers on the clipboard, before ripping off one of them and handing it to him.
“Your official paperwork.” Sakura explained.
Itachi accepted the paper politely and glanced down at it. He squinted at the characters and very quickly activated and deactivated his sharingan. To his relief he did not see any mention of what they had just discussed. It seemed Sakura meant it when she said off the record. Then again, she would get in trouble too, if anyone were to know about the breach of protocol.
He looked up at her again, studying her blurry features. What he knew of Haruno Sakura came from what his little brother had mentioned over the years and the occasional village rumor. None of which lined up with the rather audacious young medic in front of him.
“Unofficially, you need to do something about your eyes before the damage becomes irreversible.”
“It’s not already?” He folded the paper, lining up the edges perfectly. He flicked his long ponytail over his shoulder and tucked the paper away. For the second time, he jumped off the table.
“Not from what I sensed but I can't say for sure.” She shrugged.
“Thank you, Haruno-san.” He nodded and slipped out of the room.
Sakura sighed deeply as the door closed behind him. Her shoulders relaxed a smidge and she resisted the urge to run a hand through her hair, though she took the opportunity to roll her eyes. Uchiha. She shook her head.
One of the newer nurses entered the room with careful steps, a telling flush on her cheeks. “Sakura-sensei.” Yasumi said in greeting and began to clean up the room. “Thank you for taking over Uchiha-san's examination.”
Sakura waved her hand dismissively. “You’re welcome.” Then she lifted an eyebrow. “You’re going to have to learn to deal with this though. You can’t avoid all of the clan heirs.”
“Uchiha-san is just so scary!” Yasumi whispered loudly and pretended to shiver.
“He seemed perfectly polite to me.”
“But there’s so many rumors…” The young nurse whispered, a little fearfully.
“Not everything you hear is true.” Sakura responded sharply as she handed over the clipboard to Yasumi, and left to get back to her regular rotations.
Itachi blinked when he realized he stood outside the hospital and the usual hustle and bustle of Konoha went on beyond. He didn't even recall leaving and now he hesitated. Where to go?
After another moment, he turned towards home; the Uchiha district. He had walked these paths a thousand times, he could walk them in his sleep. He’d nearly had to a few times after particularly abhorrent missions.
When he could almost see the gates to the district he came to a stop. He knew his mother was likely waiting for him. She would scold him over his schedule, taking too many missions, and force feed him lunch. It was their usual in-between missions ritual. With his mind still reeling, he didn’t feel up to it and instead Itachi turned on his heels and sought out solitude in the woods surrounding his home.
There were no paths or trails in the woods, but he knew the trees and canopy as well as he did Konoha’s roads. As a child he had played and trained in the woods, practicing forms and jutsu to perfection, and oftentimes it was a retreat from the unrelenting expectations of his family.
Once he came to a more desolate part of the woods with thick underbrush, Itachi jumped up to one of the tall trees and sat on a sturdy tree branch, leaning against the rough surface.
Someone had found out.
A part of him was still in utter shock and disbelief. It had been so long since the issues with his vision started he had begun to believe he would simply get away with it.
I'm an idiot, he thought with a grimace and bumped his head against the trunk with a sharp thud. The bark bit into his scalp and prickled.
Desperation had made him stupid, he realized. If he had to guess who would have been the most likely to find out, he would have said Shisui. Maybe someone from his ANBU team- or- or- Sasuke, at least? Not an unknown outsider… with pink hair.
He wondered how long Haruno’s discretion would last. As the Hokage’s apprentice, she could get away with a slap on the wrist, if she spun the story the right way. He could hardly ask Sasuke about the trustworthiness of his teammate without tipping him off that something was up. Itachi sighed.
She had called him a liability.
A proud voice inside him scoffed at the very thought. He had been an ANBU captain since he was twelve! His track record was exemplary.
While it burned to admit it, he knew deep down that she was right. He was not at his best and he risked the lives of his teammates every time they set out beyond the gates of Konoha.
Itachi sat on that tree branch, his thoughts churning, until the familiar feeling of Sasuke approached. The way the light filtered through the trees had changed without him noticing, hours had passed. Sasuke landed none-too gently on a branch perpendicular to the one Itachi was sitting on causing the tree to sway as if there were a stark breeze.
“Brother,” Sasuke tilted his head curiously as his eyes glanced over his brother’s form. “You missed lunch and Mother is wondering if you'll be coming to dinner.”
“Sorry, Sasuke.” The familiar words felt easy on his tongue. “I'm coming.” He climbed back to his feet and looked around the woods before he and Sasuke headed home.
“How is your team?” Itachi wondered but then for the life of him couldn’t remember a word Sasuke said.
Later that day as the sun slowly made its way down the horizon Sakura sat in her office on the top floor of the hospital. A stretched out green hair tie sat on top of a stack of paperwork. Several pink strands were twisted around the elastic from when she'd forcibly pulled it out of her hair.
Sakura sat slouched in her office chair, slurping on a cup of instant noodles. Her tired thoughts turned to the strange interaction from earlier in the day.
Uchiha Itachi.
She didn’t really know him personally. They’d met at a team 7 dinner once, and otherwise Sakura only knew hearsay. While Sasuke clearly idolized his prodigious brother, he hardly shared anything about his home life.
Then there were the village rumors; Uchiha Itachi, one of the youngest to join ANBU in the history of the village, a cold-hearted killer. One look into his eyes meant death.
Sakura rolled her eyes just as a splash of the noodle broth splattered onto her chin. Konoha’s rumor mill was hardly accurate the best of days, or Sakura had a doppelganger who was dating every man she’d ever talked to. Her eyebrow twitched in annoyance at the reminder of the village’s gossip regarding her love life. Who even had time for that much romance anyway? She grabbed a tissue and dabbed it at her chin, eyebrows creased in annoyance.
The rumors about the Uchiha clan heir certainly didn’t align with the polite and soft-spoken man she’d met in the examination room that morning.
She pulled up his medical file, which she hadn’t returned because of completely innocuous reasons, of course. She leafed through it quickly, her eyebrows raising as she read through the few details that weren’t blacked out.
“Well, at least he’s punctual about his yearlies.” She mumbled, then quickly put the file down. She wasn’t even supposed to have it in the first place. Correct protocol would have been to return it right after the examination. She pushed a hand through her pink locks and massaged the sensitive skin of her scalp.
All the clans were secretive, but the Uchiha tended to take it to an extreme. There were several medics over the years who’d been fired for daring to touch their Doujutsu, especially after what was known around the hospital as ‘the Orochimaru disaster’.
The damage to Itachi’s eyes was so severe though, her Internal Harmony Technique had easily picked up on it. She contemplated the few times she had participated in eye-related surgeries but the Sharingan would likely be much more complex. The chakra pathways needed to support such powerful techniques would be exponentially… Humming to herself she approached the floor to ceiling bookshelf groaning under the weight of the medicinal scrolls and tomes loaded on its shelves. She pulled out a scroll concerning the anatomy of the eye and then froze, glancing at the door of her office guiltily.
“No.” She said loudly, shaking her head, and quickly shoved the scroll back in. “It’s no business of mine.” She took the folder with Itachi’s medical files and with a decisive move dropped it on the filing stack with a thump. One of the clerks would pick it up and file it in the morning. Then she sat back down and slurped on the chicken noodles some more.
Then, with an irritated huff, she got back up, picked up the file and quickly shoved it at the bottom of the pile. Out of sight, out of mind. She nodded and hummed, determined to banish Uchiha Itachi from her mind.