The heart is a very valuable piece of equipment.

About one and a half times the size of an adults fist, it has the incredibly important job of ensuring the distribution of oxygenated blood around the body to keep it healthy, moving and most importantly, alive.

The heart is a muscle which compresses and expands in a pump-like manner at least 100,000 times a day.

35 million times a year.

2.5 billion times in a lifetime. Give or take.

Working twice as hard as any other muscle in the body, it circulates 5.6 litres of blood through every single vein three times in the space of one minute.

In one day, the bodys blood will travel a total of 19,000km.

Its engine; simply one huge ball of muscle located between the lungs in the centre of the chest.

The heart is a machine.

Machines do little else except fulfill the task they were created to do, until the day they can do it no longer.

Machines do not weep. Machines do not melt. They do not ache, they do not bleed, they do not sing.

But even so, as he saw his rival, his team mate, his friend, lying so still and pale on the chilly white hospital bed, Naruto felt his heart twist with empathy.

Too stunned to make his limbs function, he let his teacher quietly guide him through the doorway to the end of the bed. He stood, frozen in muted shock, arms unusually motionless by his sides.

Kakashi turned around and closed the door behind them.

The tableau was eerie. Too cold, too still - like an early hour on a frosted winter morning.

The room, decorated solely in toneless white, was stringent and uninviting. Its bleak pallor gave an air of inflexible discouragement.

This is a room for sick people, it seemed to say.

Although, funnily enough, the starkness of the hospitals' colour-free scheme tended to make the patients look even sicker.

Good advertising for the Gift shop.

Naruto longed to draw on the walls. Then at least his eyes wouldn't ache so much from the unnerving glare of the paint.

Soundlessly, as not to disturb the atmosphere, he shuffled closer to the bed - his gaze fixed on the figure lying in it. With each step, the lump of emotion that had caught in his throat grew larger - by the time he'd reached Kakashi's chair, he was close to suffocating on it.

"Sasuke..."

Save for his untidy nest of raven-black hair, the last Uchiha was doing a particularly good chameleon impression - blending in effortlessly with his colourless surroundings.

White, on white, in white.

His frighteningly thin face was ashen and drained of blood; dark rings encircled the deep, hollowed sockets of his eyes. The watermarks of previous pain and torture, both physical and psychological were, for once, clear for all to see.

His lifeless, dry skin looked itchy and raw. Chapped, cracked blue lips, visible from between the strips of tape that held the oropharyngeal airway in place, were devoid of any moisture - striped randomly with small red lines of dried blood.

His mangled left hand, thickly coated in plaster and bandages up to mid forearm, lay across his stomach. The right held two needles - one in the back of the hand slowly issuing clear liquid, one further up the wrist, dripping blood like an outside vein. Both were secured to his skin by clear plastic band aids.

Naruto shuddered at the tuneless melody of the heart monitor, feeling a dreadful sense of unease. He'd seen Sasuke unconscious in hospital only once before and although he had Tsunade to attend him; a woman so skilled in healing jutsu, she could fix just about anything, he couldn't help but screw his face up in anxiety.

Like he was doing now.

Kakashi watched as Naruto's features slowly defrosted. Bending at the waist, hands resting gently on the sheets, the child leant forward - carefully scrutinizing the others' face as if waiting to be swatted away.

"Ne," Kakashi heard him whisper hoarsely. "Ne, Sasuke. Wake up. Hey...."

The Jounin walked around the bed, opposite the blond. Naruto didn't notice him - his quickly moistening eyes fixed on Sasukes' closed lashes, trying to will them open.

"Naruto..."

"Wha..what happened to him? He'll be okay, right? Tsunade can come back and fix him, right?" The kid had already started hiccoughing, tears gathering like the clouds of an oncoming storm.

"Naruto.."

"I just...umm." A loud sniff indicted the onset of waterworks. Narutos' lower lip trembled, his brow pulsed a frown, trying hard to keep his emotion in check.

"I wanted to fight him. I just wanted him to see my Rasengan. He didn't say anything when he was mad at me before. I dunno why. Why was he, Kakashi? I wanted....He-he would've said....He'd think it was cool and...and...He wanted, he.."

The lump disintegrated. Salty rivers overflowed their banks and cascaded down Narutos round, tanned cheeks.

He was blabbing, unable to staunch the torrent. But in between the hiccups and sniffles was the sentence Kakashi knew he couldn't bring himself to say.

The Jounin let his gaze fall to the blankets, absentmindedly making patterns out of their folds and creases. Although not entirely devastating in the long run, the solemn news would not be welcomed by Naruto.

Sasuke, on the other hand, may already have accepted it.

"Naruto, what Sasuke would want is for you to train hard and reach your goals. Don't ever let fear or hatred in because it will, in turn, destroy you. He's had to learn this the hard way."

Narutos' swimming eyes widened in shock, the tears still streaming unnoticed down his face.

"You mean he.."

"...Will have to think about what he said when we all met as a team that day - and modify it a little." Finished Kakashi.

Naruto gulped.

The sun had by now, risen a little higher in the sky, happily brightening they day. Outside, Konohas' stomach rumbled, its people flocking through the streets engaged in their business for the day.

It was a happy, technicolour picture which did not register to the young Genin who looked as though the huge burning star had fallen from the sky completely. The room, glowing with the days warmth, just seemed as blank and dull as it always had.

Kakashi cleared his throat.

"Umm, I've got to go now. I think I'd better get some sleep before I have to start a report on this." Among other things, he thought as he headed across the room.

"Will you take over for me?"

"Aa," Blond head slowly nodding in reply, Naruto found his eagerness to leave the hospital had expired.

"He will wake up, won't he Kakashi? What should I say?"

The Jounin stopped short of the door.

"Just be yourself."

********* "You....Don't die" *********

There was blood everywhere.

Darkness everywhere.

And a pregnant silence that was becoming more and more irritable as the time wore on.

A single naked bulb hanging from its wire swung about crazily, throwing strobed shadows about the room at random.

Figures stood around a chair in the centre of the floor. Their faces illuminating and vanishing as the light touched them, then swung away.

ANBU faces.

Angry ANBU faces.

Not the best type of face be angry - especially when one is on the receiving end. Perhaps the teenager strapped to the chair knew that now, for they'd finally stopped giggling like a maniac.

"We asked you a question." Came a stern voice from the gloom.

"And I gave you an answer!" The reply was thin and reedy - possibly a girl. She had an annoying singsong tone and a defiance that had not yet even begun to crack.

"I don't believe 'Shove it up your asses, you Konoha rat-bastards' is the answer we wanted to hear." Another womans' voice. Rather than singsong, she had a more symphatical edge. One with lots of crashing cymbals and drums.

"Oh, I thought it was a good one.."

"Anwser.The.Question."

"Isn't it irritating when you've captured an enemy clan that are immune to all kinds of truth-revealing jutsu? I bet that must really piss you guys off, huh?" The girl grinned, her breath whistling through bloodied teeth as she stifled yet another laugh.

"And we're all like that. Whoever you've got in those other little rooms there," She swung her head in the direction of the door. "Won't tell you nothing!"

Something hard crashed against her face and she grunted, taking the force. Turning back around, her curling smile was now decorated with a small trickle of blood at the corner of her mouth.

She spat.

"How's the little Uchiha boy? Has he stopped crying yet?"

"Shutup,"

"Did wuu kiss it and make it bedder?"

"SHUT up"

"I really wanted to ask him something, you know. I've done it with Io heaps of times, but I've never known what it feels like to be taken from the backdoor..."

There was a scream and the light fizzed out.

As Anko was dragged, fuming, from the interrogation room, the waves of hysterical laughter began again.

Drifting out the grills of the door, and up through the pores of her skin to her bones.

**********************

team seven
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