Chapter Text
Sakura was a third year Academy student when she made a discovery. Her classmates were stupid, but they will live; She was not much better off, but she will die:
One of those Mondays, she got an assignment about shinobi life span. It was chosen for her by a teacher who took over Iruka-sensei for three weeks. A chunin, named one thing or another, a civilian born who saw fifteen children with his same upbringing and decided they should spend less effort, make less friends. He saw a girl with perfect grade reports and pitiful sparring matches that gives her best to everything and anything. He wanted her out. Contrary to popular assumptions, he did not hate her—that was why he wanted her alive. So he told her the mid-term grade essay topic was the mortality rate of the career she wanted so badly and hoped she could see what he wanted her to see.
That afternoon the green eyed child went to the library, the public one, where her temporary sensei asked her to search at. The librarian, Noriko, a retired Genin Corps kunoichi, took in her question and gave her a book she knew her teacher must have wanted the girl to read.
It was a thing between civilian born shinobi, retired or not. They try to nudge every child to pursue other interests, looking out for the girls, especially. Puppets on strings, donned with pink lens and half full glasses. Only when the children-turned-tool were neck-deep do they know the severity of it; some, never knew. Too many threats and a life lower than beggars, used not as humans but marked as numbers, never as names (that is the privilege of legacy children). With no status, they were the majority of the brawn, pulling weights the Akimichi couldn’t.
So every child that came and asked about shinobi, Noriko would lead them to better things. Happier lives. Merchant, writer, artist, baker, wife. But the librarian was once a kunoichi, one who fought as a disposable meat shield in the Third Shinobi Wars, one who died and returned with no merrymaking.
Noriko’s nation did not miss her, and she did not miss it. Years later, she made herself home in the library that guards nothing and everything at once. Nothing, because no shinobi that reads from there would be exceptional, a place that held no worth to the Archive of every village. Everything, because the shinobi that came and read found things others never mentioned, things only learned after a lesson they wish they could undo.
“What cohort are you in, sweetie?” The middle aged woman asked gently. Her wrinkle lines became more prominent when stretched. The dyed chestnut hair was tied up into a neat bun.
“C- cohort?” She felt like she knew that word, but the meaning was lost on her.
“What is the number of your graduating class in the history of the Academy? For example, The Sandaime’ graduating class is the third cohort of the Academy, meaning the third class ever.”
Sakura thought for a while. It had been sixty seven years since the foundation of the Academy. She will be graduating in three years. The girl looked up at the expectant gaze of the former kunoichi, “The seventieth cohort, then.”
The librarian stilled. She stared at the nine year old girl. “The seventieth?” Oh kami, Noriko needed to get the girl out of the system, quickly, at that.
“Yes. I’ll be genin in three years.” She didn’t say if she passed, and the hopeful green eyes made the woman’s heart break a little.
“Oh, honey.” A sad smile, Sakura didn’t understand. “Come on, let’s help you do your assignment. Shinobi live span, you said?” With an answering nod, Noriko continued, “I have the perfect thing. Chūnin clearance, but I can make an exception. How is your reading level?”
The pink head titled, “A grade, ninetieth percentile ma’am.”
At this, she earned another blanch, a downhearted smile and a wet chuckle, “I’ll be right back.” A civilian genius, but not genius enough to keep her alive out there.
The book that was presented to Sakura was very nondescript looking, blending right in with other dull coloured binds. Not many had borrowed it. Medium thickness and seemed to be binded in recent years. The end of the book had the publishing dates of just a year ago.
“Quite recent. All the statistics you need calculated out. It’ll help you plenty, but you need to read it here, love. I can still give you a shorter genin version to take home later.”
[ Below are the active duty shinobi mortality rate and major reasons in Konohagakure no Sato, notes for references:
- Academy freshers (graduates of approx. six to nine months) — 99% survival rate due to exclusive D-ranks and strict observance as well as protection from jounin-sensei. Only three deaths were reported in the village’s history, though there had also been presumed deaths which is not counted as valid data points. // See: drop-out rates for Academy freshers, pg.36
- Genin (above a year of field experience) — 95% survival rate due to accidents and unaccounted mission risks from D to C ranks, most deaths come from teams outside of the Debut Class of the generation.
- Genin Corps — 72% survival rate due to misranked missions, low level combat abilities in face of threats, suicide and collateral damage. Considered low in comparison with other villages. // See: Five Great Elemental Nations’ statistic evaluation, pg.42
- Chūnin — 75% survival rate due to training accidents, misranked missions, protection attempts or suicide. More efficient chūnin may be deferred to an office job and thus livelihood could increase up to 100%
- Tokubetsu Jōnin — 80% survival rate overall due to training accidents, protection attempts or suicide. Variations can be accounted due to the specialization of each tokujō, i.e. a combat-oriented tokujō may have a lower livelihood than an office-oriented tokujō
- Jōnin — vast variations from below 60% to above 90% depending on specialization due to protection attempts and suicide. A genin teacher may have an above 90% survival rate while someone on the more dangerous rotation may take frequent suicide missions.
Notes:
1, Suicide mission is a form of suicide, these missions from A to S ranks have the livelihood of below 50%. In war time, these missions have less than 10% chance of surviving.
2, The Debut Class of the generation indicates same-cohort graduates seen once in fifteen to twenty years. Usually, this Debut Class will participate in the same chūnin exam and have the rare low number of exactly three genin teams with elite jounin sensei. Debut Classes are reserved for children who are clan heirs, prospective pillars and prodigies of their generation. If their age does not align, documentations will be changed in favour of constructing the perfect three man cell teams. The Sandaime, Three Sennin and the Yondaime belong to three consecutive generations of Debut Classes. The most recent Debut Class was Hatake Kakashi (albeit an early graduate) cohort.
Estimated the next Debut Class is the seventieth class of the Preparatory Academy. ]
Sakura knew she wasn’t an heir, much less a hailed genius. No one told her she was a genius. She was smart, and she had read enough to know the wars geniuses had fought at her age. First kill at four years old, Warring States. A rank missions at eight, First Shinobi Wars. Thirteen year olds ANBU, Second Shinobi Wars. Massacre before sixteen, Third Shinobi Wars. Sakura could do none of that. She might have been nine and taken two classes in higher level but she could not set off an explosion or gauge someone’s eyes out.
She visited the library more often, for her assignment. Every afternoon in the weeks her parents were out, she’d come and read that book until its very last page. [Civilians rarely make it past genin, half drop out in their first year of field experience due to incompetence and inability to catch up with their peers]
Sakura turned the page, [Overall shinobi female:male ratio is 1:3. For jounin, this becomes 1:6 as most elite kunoichi settle down into marriage or retire early compared to their male counterparts]
She turned another page, [Kunoichi deaths are more likely by suicide while male shinobi deaths are more likely during battle. This can be explained by kunoichi’s higher rate of being kidnapped and enslaved, even ransomed if proved a valuable asset (though no official ransoming of kunoichi had been paid by any of the Great Nations in recorded history).]
One day, the librarian eyed the girl in the dark blue dress contemplatively and approached with a card in hand, “Hey kiddo, your assignment is okay?”
“Yes, ma’am.” She nodded, mind racing towards the realisation of her demise. She was many things others wished not to be. The worst combination for a living being in a shinobi village. A civilian girl with exotic colouring and no real use talents. She hitched and with a wobbly grin, turned up shyly. “I mean, I might need some more books.”
“The highest level of clearance I could get you is chuunin. You seem to really like books, how about you borrow my card?” At the girl’s confused expression, Noriko went on, “Chūnin clearance books don’t have jutsu theory or anything dangerous, the main reason it was for chuunin was because of the slang words and more explicit details,” (She didn’t know then, that the ‘explicit’ things were much more than that. She was a woman hardened by war and grief, Sakura was not. Noriko misjudged the tenderness of a girl raised by a different time.) “So?”
“Ah– I– I would love to read more of those books.” Sakura needed to know more. See how she could survive. How to survive.
She had choices, be a civilian and get married off to a place her geography skills have never heard of before or be a kunoichi. The notion of heavy garments and tightened chest bindings and extreme etiquettes was not something she wanted to spend her entire life in. She had seen her grandmother. She did not want to become that—a teenage bride, beaten into submission, hands always cuffed behind long sleeves and tired, stupidly arrogant eyes that looked down on people and saw every woman as competition. Mother said once, and grandmother could only nick pride that was owned by her husband, so should you, one day. Sakura was too rebellious and stubborn for that.
“Thank you so much, ma’am.”
“It’s fine, do not fret. I’ve lived long enough to do more goods. You’d like aisle four to six, don’t wander. I’ll come with you but I still need to do my job.” One book was not enough. Perhaps two. The girl needed to be more scared.
“Hai. That would be more than enough.” With a smile that pleased her father, Sakura stalked behind Noriko to a more secluded section.
“Most active shinobi don’t read, anyway, at least not books from the library. They’ve got clan tomes and dictionaries. But we have things they thought were unimportant. Now, see for yourself, love, their scraps are our treasure.” The woman smiled and prayed to Kami that the girl would find any book, read it and never return. All for the best.
It was in the latter half of her fourth year that she stole a chuunin clearance book. Noriko wasn’t looking and Sakura was perfectly docile all the time.
After the assignment finished, she still returned, asking for more and everytime the woman would only frown deeply and then complied with her request. Sakura must not have hopes. Hope was not something she can pocketed and fish out in life and death moments to protect her from the luring hands of the Shinigami.
Noriko started talking about things, anything at all,
“Ne, Sakura-chan, do you cook? The new cookbook I just tried out had the best recipes. If you are good at it, just open a shop, I’ll be sure to come every week!”
“I don’t cook much, Noriko-san.” The pink haired girl pouted, if only a little, “Though I would like to ask about the Kunoichi mission type book?”
“Kunoichi takes normal missions, and honeypot missions, you must have learnt this from the Academy? Why read more? You know, I think those kunoichi classes aren’t so bad, maybe you could open a flower shop!”
“My friend has a flower shop, the biggest in Konoha. Yamanaka? I wouldn’t want to be enemies in business.” Noriko was not answering the questions and Sakura wondered why.
Yamanaka? As in Yamanaka Inoichi’s wife’s shop? “The friend as in Yamanaka Ino?”
“How do you know that?” She gasped and Inner even admitted how real the exclamation was. Sakura wasn’t an imbecile. But pretending to be one was very hard when starting out. Luckily, she had been doing just that for a while. “You buy flowers from them too?” No one in the village was ignorant of the Yamanaka-Nara-Akimichi Alliance. No one was ignorant of their heirs, either. It was an easy deduction.
“Not really. But she’s an heiress, have you heard?”
“Oh! She might have mentioned it before.”
“That’s right. When she ascends the title of Clan Head, your little friend would be too busy to operate a flower shop! You can even ask if you could work there.” She clapped her hands, slowly nudging the girl into the direction of hanakotoba and allergy-prone fragrances. Better than being killed. “Don’t you like flowers? I’ll give you a book on it, this way, the botany section.”
“But the kunoichi missions?”
“Flowers.” The librarian reminded her. “Same thing,” Maybe with a few books on flowers, the girl would come to love it. She was good at remembering things, Noriko noted, and tending to delicate things was better than war.
Sakura did not come to love flowers like she should have. Sakura stole the [Shinobi Conditioning] book, one stuffed in a dusty corner of aisle seven—an unpermitted area.
The day after reading it, Sakura became eerily silent.
[ Shinobi Conditioning takes many shapes and forms. The most important conditioning is on killing.
The first kill is extremely important and usually deemed the rite of passage for many shinobi families. Dated back in the Warring States, the average age for first kills was four to six.
If one can not handle killing, they do not belong to the ranks. Kill or get killed. Many Academy freshers drop out due to their psychological break and PTSD after their first. Some even retire early beforehand because of stress and the fear barrier.
People argue that their first kill was always unprepared and least expected while the next five kills were unprecedentedly easy. The breakdown between the first and second kill was almost instantaneous if the shinobi was fully conscious, as covered in elementary Academy conditionings. See: early-life conditioning, pg.29
Self-conditioning was valued in the fields, especially when training was unavailable. Some popular methods include comparative imagery, command-force autopilot/blackout and ethical manipulation.
In comparative imagery, one where not many could achieve, uses the shinobi’s ability to visualise and overlay their actions, (i.e. beheading someone could be compared to cutting off a butter cube while baking; certain kata movements could be interpreted as acting in a film or performance.) This method helps ease the mind and draw it to more satisfying imaging in the mind, distracting itself from the task at hand.
In command-force autopilot/blackout, the shinobi psychologically disengage and let their muscle memory act on its own accord. This is most applied by suicide mission personnel and experienced jounin, either as a natural defense mechanism or with chakra interference to the brain
In ethical manipulation, it is the most valued method and can be seen as idealistic by most Hidden Villages. This is the personal reminder of what someone was fighting for, fighting to protect. This makes the brain focus on a single, simple command like ‘kill’ or ‘survive’ and excuse itself of any consequences that would be caused in order to achieve it.
Note:
- Most Hidden Villages force its genin to make the first kill before their first mission. Reports showed Konohagakure had banned this practice decades ago and moved on to replace it with animal killing instead. Sixth year Academy students would kill from rat, rabbit to deer. These however, does not fully desensitize killing.
-Nuke-nin and nefarious shinobi could kill for pleasure. It can be a choice developed in shinobi-hood or a born instinct coupled with early-childhood drive for bloodthirst. Most of those in S-rank, or, Red Coded and above had admit to their enjoyment in taking a life at one point or another in an anonymous study. They described it as an inevitable step to accomplish their titles.]
Sakura was nine, still a third year student, when she caught her first rat near her house and didn’t tell anyone. She killed it with a sharp stone and a cage for the hens her family used to keep. The carcass of the rat smelled like dead things with decaying substances covering its matted fur. She felt quite sorry for it. But it didn't plead, it didn't have the power to, and she finished it quick.
The next time, she tried without a cage and it took her several hours to get her hand on one. It was plenty of fun, killing them. The other kids never wanted her with them and Ino sometimes looked at her strange, too. She found company in hunting and heard it's a good adult hobby. Now she have a purpose, an activity to do instead of sitting in the corner as if she was a crazy kid like mother had said.
On her fourth rat, Sakura brought a proper knife, one stole from the kitchen, small but sharp. She tried to skin it the way the books on survival told her how to. She did not eat it. The skin flailed and flopped in her dirtied hand with mangled organs and blood. She spent thirty minutes to wash the blood from her body and face. She took notice of how hard it was to get rid of the solidified liquid on her hair strands. The times after that, Sakura brought a hair tie and a hat.
She was two months shy of ten years old when Noriko gave up on pushing Sakura to different career paths.
Instead, she told her of med-nin. Hard, just like a challenge the girl would love but safe, banned from the frontlines. The woman gave her a book on animal biology, said it was much easier and she could be a veterinarian if she wanted to, treating nin-animals. "Iryo-nin are nin too, you know. They might be weaker, but so is anyone that's not clan children! Come on, I have a friend that works at the hospital, I can ask her for the best books in the subject."
"That's wonderful, Noriko-san. I was trying to read more about anatomy."
"Good idea. You will be such an amazing doctor," The brunette beamed and pat the little girl's back in approval. Then she whispered with hardened dark irises, "Leave the frontlines to them, you could never be half the shinobi they are."
Sakura loved the [Illustrations and Essays of the Anatomy: A Treatise]. It was the thickest thing she have flipped through. An in-depth collage of dissected humans, notes compared to those of Tsunade-hime, Tobirama-sama, Chiyo-sama and unsourced specialists. Revolutionary nervous system breakthroughs, relationship between tenketsu and blood veins as well as the cardiovascular network. Things she had never thought the body contained.
The flesh and bones and things that control them is an intricate design as much of a mystery as the realms of summons. The books estimated in twenty years the medical field could advance pivotally at a pace unimaginable if a second coming of the Slug Princess was born. The woman herself had fallen from grace, her last quantum leap invention was to do with bone regeneration using chakra. She was the greatest, the first woman, the first true medic who wrote the four clauses all villages abide. There were glory in that, Sakura thought, and dreamed of being someone good enough to sit on the throne the Senju woman sat.
Sakura began her little notebook of ideas on biology.
Genes, DNA, the atoms and cells and other units of the body. The book contained not what she had learnt, but rather what she thought would be possible given the explanations of those texts. Her theories were wild and doesn't hold back on any laws of science. She never dissected anything before, and that was becoming an issue. She can not look at pictures and figure out something so labyrinthine. An image frozen in time was not the key to the living.
She would have to fix that.
[ Surgeons were so revered and rare in the medical field due to several reasons, two of them being lack of precision and inexperienced anxiety, inability to cope with high-stress situations.
A surgeon never started out as a surgeon, instead as a practitioner and provider of healthcare, focusing on things that are more bearable and ethically rigid.
Some people agreed surgeons are heartless and traded their humanity to be able to give life to the dying. "This is not entirely true" said Senju Tsunade in the Third Shinobi War, "It is the equal respect we give to the study of anatomy and the abstract life force...There is no successful surgeon who haven't been a murderer and harbinger of ends. To the left of a surgeon' morals is a psychopath and to the right, shinobi. They are separated by invisible borders. In the end, fear most the ones who mastered all three grounds."
//
Surgeons make sacrifices, like any other career do. The most successful surgeons Konoha (the most medically advanced village) produced were forged in war where they must perform fast and effective sessions. This can only be achieved if they have a complete understanding of the anatomy and kill more than they have saved. They must devote everything to perfect their craft and rehearsed performances yield optimal results, similar to a musician.
Dr. Kinamoto, under the Nidaime's reign, revealed, "You need to make mistakes to learn and it does not need to be human, but the amount of rabbits and cats I've dissected can fill The Valley of The End. I will never be able to make up for it. It is the reality of the profession."
Another person, Dr.Tetsuki wrote in his controversial memoir, page fifty one, "An adequate surgeon use cattle or hunted animals to sharpen his skills. A good surgeon use dead humans as tester bodies. Corpses in hospital morgues wheeled in the dead of midnight to be excoriate and study. But the best surgeon use living specimens. That is where he no longer have the rights to decide where the line of sanity draws. He will not be call the best surgeon, he will be the devil reincarnated."
… ]
It was the frogs behind the alleyway that gave her the adrenaline those non-fiction recollections of soldiers described. The exhilaration that jolted her arms and ran down her calves. The blood on the ground and specks of it on the green green grass.
The creatures were ugly and brownish in colour. She squeezed them and watched in satisfaction as they pop and roll them until the liquids drain out like a sponge. It was a fun game of killing, but she needed to do more. Killing when unnecessary is evil, she remember Iruka-sensei's words. But in the books she read it said the more exposure with killing, the better, especially for non-clan children.
Sakura caught her first rabbit behind the Hokage cliffs. She skinned it, although harder than the rats, it was absent of the smell of rotten trash. Death dyed her hands but she did not mind.
She liked the notion of being a surgeon, more so the notion of uncovering things even the greatest did not understand, experimenting what many were scared of to then see it come to fruition. Sakura wondered about the tens and hundred methods no books said was ever tried out that she thought out. Why don't they cauterize wounds with a refined katon? Why can't suiton users force blood flow? Would a zap of controlled and low voltage raiton be able to revive the heart? Can chakra become invasive and replace poison? Questions, questions no one had asked. Sakura wanted answers, she will find them herself.
She pulled at a tendon, the borrowed book and her notes laid beside her on the ground. At each pull, the muscles moved and the rabbit’s limbs retracted, then as she released, it eased out. The girl tugged on different tendons, then she caught another one, now knowing how to sharpen a kitchen knife with her mother’s cooking lessons, and experimented on the blood vessels. The arteries were easy to locate, the blood squirting out in swift succession, but smaller vessels were accidentally cut by her more often than not. She poked at its eyes and with a pinky, pushed it out from the socket. The sound was equally nauseating as when she gutted it. The eyes were tiny and slippery, Sakura thought maybe cows' eyes would give her a better look.
It was fascinating. Sakura did not have an obsessive love for anatomy as she did with history or psychology, but it had a special place in her heart.
Some rabbits after that, she tried to douse them with the little chakra she had (the first time she almost fainted) and they fell unconscious but remained breathing.
Cutting them open and alive was hard, the little creatures always bleed out in less than five minutes. Sakura worked faster. She was over her seventeenth rabbit when she could open and close the wounds with needles and stitches before it die of infection.
On her twenty ninth rabbit, Sakura got bored of it, thinking she might need to open a rabbit farm at that point. She usually fed whatever remains of her dissections to the murders of crow near the Naka river. The dead Uchiha did not seem to mind.
Two days later, she found a lost kunai in the area and brought it with her.
She caught a neighbourhood stray cat one day, it was weakened and skinny. Its ribs poking from its empty belly. It could not run. She killed it at once.
Sakura started to catch a homeless cat or dog a month. The white, brown, black rabbits were forgotten, devoured by black birds.
She stole chicken feet and sheep’s hearts at the market while buying her mother’s groceries. It took her several tries to get only a few of what she needed, incase of raising suspicions. The chicken feet were unsurprisingly tedious, the tendons were studied with the rabbits, after all. The sheep heart, though, looked very similar to the rarely depicted drawings of the human heart in the chuunin medical textbooks. The first time she tried cutting it open, she failed and slashed the wrong opening. The chambers were bloodier than she would like, considering it was supposedly cleaned by the butcher. It was a mess and it took her three more months to acquire another heart, unprocessed, with lungs intact—even if it was not a stable or popular ingredient, the owner noticed things. This time she was much more careful and aware of the lines of her little kitchen knife. Some parts, like when separating the heart and lungs, she had to make use of the kunai. It was blunt, but reached deeper than her small blade. The tip was good to make pre-cut lines for the knife, too.
When Sakura graduated from the Academy, Noriko looked somewhat sad. Then she told Sakura about a boy named Riku,
“He graduated from the Academy and his class was a Debut Class, same one as the Third's son and that Hatake monster. He was fated to an early grave. Three months after his graduation, he got a misranked mission, from D-rank to B-rank. He gave his life for it. The kunoichi from his team dissapeared into the shadows, the other one suicided. They were the last team Mikoto-sama took on before she retired.” The woman looked solemn as she took in the hands of the girl she had come to know three years ago, “Sakura-chan, you may be from a Debut Class, but you are civilian, like me, like Riku. You will die, sweetheart. I, we tried to tell you, but you never listened. It is never too late. You can decide to back off before the team assignment day.”
“Noriko-san…” Sakura wanted to say she had perfect understanding of chakra theory, of everything shinobi, of survival tactics and anatomy and she even practised on how to desensitise from killing! But Inner demanded it be kept secret, Sakura laughed inwardly and agreed. “I– I still want to be a kunoichi.” She lowered her head, partly out of shame and definitely out of avoiding the confrontation of a loving mother who lost her son in a genin mission.
“Sakura! You’d get killed! You will fail the chuunin exam and your life would be for naught. They kill each other there.” There was anger, there was pain and there was the understanding of a civilian. That was why she never made it to chunin, Inner commented. "I have been too lenient with you, and the shinobi world will demand its prices paid."
“And?” She asked with no heat, green clashed with brown, “I’d prefer that than marriage. At least it postponed my shipment until I turn fifteen.”
Noriko looked at another kid she’d failed.
They never meet each other again. The librarian was killed during the Konoha Crush, during the exam that Sakura failed.
Sakura had long since conditioned herself not to mourn, after that Waves mission. Because if it was her body mashed to a pulp beneath the tonnes of debris, she knew no one would mourn.
Hope was a dangerous thing you could have, Noriko told her so, You can not hope anymore, you will be delusional and get yourself killed.
Yet Sakura had it clutched tightly, suffocatingly in the embrace of her ribcage. If she die, she will take the world with her, and hope is dangerous only to the people who are not on her side.
Sakura hoped a hope that others wouldn't call it one.