Despite unspeakable headaches and the persistant feeling that she was going to be sick (which remained just that, a nagging feeling), Sakura somehow had managed to slip out of Kakashi's room before he awoke, had found her way home, where she took an excessively long shower and stared at her mirror-reflection for some time, trying to figure out how she had ended up in his bed, before she got dressed. She vaguely remembered them kissing, but what ever followed after that had slipped away into blacked out oblivion.
At least, she tried to ease her conscience, they had both been dressed when she woke up. She knew this did not necessarily account for anything, but she had to pretend it did.
She very much wanted to crawl into her own bed, pull the blanket over her head and stay there forever, or at least untill both Kakashi and Kiba would forget that she so much as existed. Maybe then she would dare to meet either of them again.
However, her naturally strong sense of responisibilty and obligation kicked in quickly, and before she knew it, her feet carried her – not a minute behind schedule – to the academy-building, where she nodded her good-mornings to other chunin and jounin from the administrative, and then, with a growing feeling of queasiness that was not due to her hangover, she pushed open the door to the Hokage's office.
She was greeted by a vacant room, left in the same not-quite-orderly state she had left it in the day before. It shouldn't have surprised her at all. There hadn't been a single day on which she had not spent at least two hours each morning with nothing but pacifying anyone who dropped by and still bothered to feel offended by the Hokage's lack of punctuality. Today, however, Sakura felt that it was her fault he wasn't there.
She slouched down behind her desk, waited for her body to assimilate to the slight change in gravitational force, before she forced herself to pull out one of the files she had left untouched yesterday.
Sakura stared at the document for a while, watched the dashes and lines that made up the characters sway in and out of focus. She turned a few pages without reading any of them, then found a few photos attached to the written information. A girl in a hospital-bed, looking more dead than alive. Somthing about her seemed oddly familiar to Sakura, but she could not remember where she had seen her before. Judging by her age, about fifteen, it was quite possible that she had been at the academy with Konohamaru. Maybe, Sakura thought, she had seen her during the last chunin-exams?
The file gave no name, stated just that the girl had been submitted to hospital about four weeks ago, and had ever since stayed comatoes. Her identity was yet to be revelead, and given recent events and the fact that the girl appeared shortly after Uzuki Yugao had gone missing, she was labeled a suspect.
Maybe this was a good thing, Sakura wondered. Afterall, the sooner the case seemed to be solved, the lesser the were chances for Kakashi to be discovered. But... Sakura swallowed. The girl was only fifteen. She looked so helpless, so innocent in the photographs. And she was. Or at least she was not the murderer of Uzuki Yugao. Having a fifteen-year-old killed in combat, or as punishment for a crime they actually had committed was one thing – but to have her put through the torturous process of interrogation, when she – that is Sakura – and Kakashi both knew that this girl had nothing to do with the crime she was accused of, to have her, in a worst case scenario, put to death for it...
Sakura covered the document with her arms, rested her head on them and closed her eyes. It wasn't up to her to make such decisions, she reminded herself.

"Had you asked, I might have given you the day off..."
Sakura rose with a start.
"I'm wide awa-", the words spilled out of her mouth in reflex, but ceased the moment her eyes found Kakashi, sitting behind his own desk, reading his Icha Icha and surrounded by an air of nonchalance that made Sakura want to send him crashing through the next wall, or, preferably, the window. (The fall would serve him right) Sakura took a deep breath. The longer she'd wait with this, she decided, the more awkward it would get. And so, her voice higher than she had planned, she asked what, if anything, had happened last night.
Kakashi lowered his book and gave Sakura a quizzical look.
"I...", Sakura felt her face growing hot "I don't really remember much, but... uhm. We didn't", she bit her lip, unsure what action she intended to refer to and what word to use for it.
She heard the book's cover on the desk's wood, heard Kakashi's chair squeek as he leant back and quickly returned her attention to the unknown girl's photos infront of her.
"Didn't what?"
Sakura gave Kakashi a quick side glance. How could act so... normal?
"We... I, mean.. I … remember we kissed, but..."
"Hmm..."
From the corner of her eyes she saw him get up.
„I'm flattered, but you must have dreamt that", Kakashi said, as he walked over to her.
If Sakura had felt uneasy before, she now was falling into a bottomless pit of uncomfortable awkwardness.
"But, today... morning, you"
"You were in a pretty bad shape and I didn't want to leave you alone."
Sakura opened and shut her mouth a few times, trying to figure out if she should feel relieved now or embarassed for ever assuming that they – Still trying to disentangle her confusion, Sakura realised that Kakashi was no longer looking at her. He stared right past her, his eye wide and displaying a degree of discomposure Sakura had never before seen in his face.
"Where did you get that?"
It was with a mixture of astonishment and concern that Sakura noticed Kakashi's hand shaking as he reached out for the file that still lay open on her desk, and even Pakkun seemed fazed by it, stopped cleaning his hindlegs and looked up, his furrowed pug's face furrowed even deeper in concern.
Sakura explained the report had been among other documents regarding Yugao's disappearance, as matter-of-factly as Kakashi's untypical demeanour admitted, she told him about the girl, as far as she could from what she had read so far.
Kakashi didn't take in one single word.