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Sakura’s pretty sure her patient is Anbu. This mission was the first time she’s seen him without a mask, but his chakra is familiar and so is that rib—it’s been either broken or partially healed the whole time she’s known him, not always in the right order, and he’s always avoided her offers to fix it. Well, she understands paranoia as well as any ninja, but she takes the opportunity to knit the bone together properly this time.
It’s not the only old injury, either. Lacerations, burns—those are torture wounds, self-healed with half-competent medical jutsu—or at least, she hopes self-healed, because otherwise someone is going to be in trouble for doing a hack job on a comrade and then failing to bring an actual medic in to fix their mistakes. As it is, he must have been keeping these wounds secret, or he’d never have been allowed out into the field.
(It could have been someone else—there are a lot of half-trained, unsworn medics in Anbu, and especially under the Sandaime they might have chosen to keep a teammate’s secret instead of obey Tsunade’s rules regarding medical treatment. Especially a teammate who’d been captured and tortured. But the Sandaime is dead and Tsunade is Hokage now, and neither she nor her apprentice will stand for this in the future.)
Luckily for Sakura, he’s unconscious now, unable to argue with her medical authority. Unluckily for everyone concerned, that’s because someone set off an explosive seal practically under his feet—and literally underneath a very large boulder, which is now in pieces all over the battlefield and, of course, inside him.
It’s a wonder he’s alive at all.
(Most of their teammates for this mission weren’t so lucky. Sakura knows the two of them may not be long for the world either—she could run and flee if she was alone, but as Hatake Kakashi’s student she can’t abandon a teammate and as Tsunade’s apprentice she can’t abandon a patient. Either they both live or they both die.)
Rather than move him, Sakura has surrounded them both in a genjutsu. The enemy has already checked their false corpses and been satisfied, and is avoiding the patch of swampy ground that wasn’t there before the explosion. (Suna missing-nin, Sakura guessed, wouldn’t know how to deal with deep mud, and she was right.)
She’s already cleaned his torso wounds with chakra, already bandaged them. The shrapnel she leaves in place for now. It’s not ideal—if he heals like this those shards of metal and rock will impede his range of movement at best, and at worst they could migrate towards organs. But out here, at Sakura’s current level of skill and without a full medical team to back her up, pulling them out would just mean he’d lose more blood—with a side chance of doing further damage to the structures that house his kikaichu.
She’ll just have to do it later. Tsunade can show her how, and the Aburame clan will just have to like it. Tsunade has never been one to let clan secrets stand in the way of saving Leaf lives.
Sakura’s patient is bleeding through the bandages already, just in the time it took her to assess his older wounds and deal with the rib. Sakura resists the dual urges to curse and pray—her genjutsu is weak when it comes to auditory effects. Instead she focuses her chakra on his wounds and discovers the problem: her original repairs had trapped kikaichu in place, and they had reacted to that. Stupid, stupid—she should have remembered that complication. This time, she does, leaving them routes back to the main hive.
His core stabilized, Sakura moves outwards. His legs are surprisingly intact—she’s getting more and more certain that he’s his own medic, and though she wouldn’t call him competent she upgrades her estimation of him upwards, just a little, because he did manage to save his own legs when the explosion went off. She takes one rock shard out, sealing behind as she goes, and leaves the rest in for now. His right arm is mostly fine; the left, however, is definitely not salvageable. It took the brunt of the damage—there’d been ricochet off another nearby rock, and that he hadn’t seen coming like he somehow had the initial explosion. From the elbow on down it’s mangled flesh, pulverized bone, and mashed insect corpses. It’s not the worst injury Sakura has seen on a living ninja, but it’s definitely a close second. She’ll definitely have to amputate.
Her control makes forming a chakra scalpel easy, and she takes the arm just above the ruin of his elbow. (His shoulder isn’t undamaged, but it’s largely intact—and it’s the one with the Anbu seal tattooed on it. Those can cause issues if separated from the body without the proper precautions, which Sakura has not yet learned.)
She gets out a storage scroll for the rest of the arm. It’s a bloody, useless mess—reattachment completely nonviable—but she’s not saving it for medical reasons. Her patient is an Aburame, which means there could be political ramifications if she left bits of him on the battlefield. (She makes sure to pulse her chakra through what’s left of it before she triggers the seal—she’s fairly sure any that his beetles wouldn’t survive being sealed up, and sure enough a few of them vacate the premises before she stores the wreckage of their home and shoves the scroll into one of the pouches on her belt.)
And then there’s a sound like a clap of thunder as her shishou arrives in the battlefield like an avenging god.
Sakura doesn’t falter in her work—she wouldn’t disappoint Tsunade like that—but she allows herself a moment of relief and pride as the Godaime Hokage starts punching her way through this miserable battlefield.
Konoha—Tsunade’s Konoha, at least—takes care of its own. Her shishou must have started running when she sensed the explosion.
They’re saved. And perhaps more importantly, she won’t have to figure out on her own how to safely transport her patient.
“Good work,” says Tsunade, walking through Sakura’s genjutsu as if she hadn’t noticed it and patting her head with a bloody hand.
Sakura grins back at her, triumphant.
Then she looks down at her patient, and asks how they’re going to transport him, considering the extent of his injuries and especially that shrapnel.
“Just watch,” says Tsunade. “I’ll take it from here.”
Sakura nods and focuses on her shishou’s chakra as she holds the man and his inconveniently internal rock shards in place—oh, so that’s how it’s done!—and painstakingly slides a chakra-enhanced stretcher beneath his body; listens as Tsunade explains the importance of keeping it steady as they run him home, and demonstrates for Sakura the jutsu that will keep the stretcher level even if one of them stumbles. Sakura commits it all to memory.
After all, Tsunade is the best medic nin in the world. And someday—someday soon, Sakura vows—Sakura is going to be just like her.