Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Time moved differently in libraries. The concept of time seemed to evaporate when he stepped foot in there every morning, and it seemed to reform into the same viscous sap-like liquid surrounding him, rather than the breeze it usually was. Though he was aware that nothing had really changed, the absence of things to do, people to talk to and—most importantly—things that could get his blood pumping seemed to weigh his limbs down to a sluggish pace, but keep his brain painfully aware of any miniscule movement around him. He scoured the books for the sixth time that hour to make sure they were all in alphabetical order.

He supposed that was the purpose for his library delegation. On record, he had been assigned two months on this D-rank to help out the poor old librarian who’d broken his leg and couldn’t come in to watch the library, whilst Shiro himself recovered from a shattered hand and broken ribs. In actuality, this was as close of a compromise the Hokage and council could get between the council punishing his insubordination, and the Hokage deeming the case of insubordination as necessary for the success of the mission. Either way, he was stuck here.

The bell at the door rang and in came an unassuming little girl—his second visitor, right after a half-deaf old lady: a three and a half foot little girl, dressed in a pale green dress, brown sandals and a red bow atop her obnoxiously pink head of hair. Her manner was strange. A little timid perhaps with the way her hair fell over her face, but she clearly had a destination in mind as she zipped straight for some shelves at the back, notably far from the children’s section. How peculiar. But it was none of his business.

Not ten minutes later, the girl tottered back over to the desk, lifting a pile of books onto the surface. Five books, he counted, and not a single one he’d deem appropriate for her age group. She huffed the hair out of her face when she finished placing them. Book one, An Introduction To Physics; book two, Kagamori’s Encyclopedia Of Shuriken And Other Airborne Weaponry; book three, A History Of The Five Nations; book four, Distinctions of Jutsu; book five, The Bingo Book. Granted, it was an outdated version given its availability in the library, but he hadn’t been aware a child of this age could read anything more than a wordy picture book, much less comprehend the contents of it or any of the other books she’d picked up.

“Bit above your reading age, no?” he said offhandedly.

“I can read them,” she whispered.

“Maybe.” Shiro peered at her. “But are you allowed to read them? It's pretty high level stuff.”

“Dosato-san said it’s okay.” She seemed to ponder this. “Where is Dosato-san?”

“He’s a bit sick. I’m afraid you’ll have to deal with me for the next two months instead. Your name please?”

“Haruno Sakura.” She smiled.

He flipped through the record of borrowed books along her name only to find three books already checked out under her name from a week before, which was already one more than was permitted to borrow at a time. Two books on the geography of the Land of Fire and flora and fauna. He snapped the book shut.

“I’m sorry. You’ll have to return your other books first,” he said.

Her brows furrowed.

“Dosato-san lets me borrow as many as I want.”

“Well, I’m not Dosato-san, so you’ll have to return your books first,” he insisted, protocol rolling off his tongue like it was his native tongue, staring at where her head peeked out from in front of the desk. She wilted.

“But,” her voice began to shake, “I’m not done with them yet.”

“Uh-huh. I don’t care.”

And it was only when he saw her bottom lip tremble and her eyes begin to well with tears that he started to think that maybe, just maybe, that might have been the wrong thing to say. Her breaths came quicker and shorter, the water in her eyes welled up and, synchronized with the fall of her tears, she drew in a breath and began to wail.

A long, screeching, and—had he been a different person—heart-wrenching wail.

“Dasato-san promised,” she wailed, heaving and sniffling, “and he said he doesn’t break promises.”

“I’m sorry,” Shiro persisted. “I really can’t give you any books until you return the ones you have, and even then it’s only two at a time.”

She sniffed loudly, crudely, and seemed to gather herself.

“But I didn’t know, and now, and now I’m in trouble,” she mumbled, but this realization seemed to spark a new bout of sobs.

“In trouble? What? No, I–” Shiro struggled for words. “I never said that. You’re not in trouble, kid. You just can’t have the books.”

It was as if she didn’t hear him.

“Hello?” He waved a hand in front of her face, but it was no use. Her eyes were scrunched up like a crumpled tissue, or a prune and she did not react to his attempts.

He watched her for a long, uncomfortable moment. Her voice scraped against her throat and his ears like nails on chalkboard. Splotches of red inflected her face and her nose began to drip snot down onto her lip, all too quickly for Shiro to rationalize. Struggling for options, he racked his mind for any memory of himself as a child crying and how he’d been comforted but was met with naught but a blank wall.

So, like always when he was confused, he got irritated.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he huffed out. “Stop crying.”

The wailing continued.

“Please, stop crying.”

If anything, it got louder.

“What if,” he said loudly, a little insistently, interrupting his growing discomfort, “l get you a nice little stick of dango, hm? Take your mind off of books, and all that. Because you’re not in trouble, you know.”

“I,” heave, “love,” sniff, “dango,” wail.

“Okay,” he forced a smile. That made sense. He’d liked dango as a kid whenever he could find it. He could imagine feeling better after a stick. “You stay here, while I get you dango. Don’t leave yet, okay?”

Abruptly, the crying ceased. With a short cough and sniffle, she straightened up and looked at him through reddened eyes. She pulled a handkerchief out of her satchel and blew into it to wipe away the bubbling snot on her upper lip, all the while, her little pink head wobbled up and down.

He left and returned in less than a minute. He held out the two sticks of dango to her, which she accepted gratefully.

With one hand flipping the hair away from her face, she opened her mouth impossibly wide to chomp down on the dango and chewed frustratingly loud. She grinned and breathed heavily around the chewed up mass in her mouth. Shiro watched with a grimace pulling at his mouth. Loud chewing was more tolerable than loud sobbing.

“Thank you so much, shinobi-san!” she said, between mouthfuls, grinning cheerfully. “Have a nice day!”

In less than a moment, she bustled past him into the streets of Konoha with her satchel thrown over her shoulder and a newfound skip in her step—in a jarringly better mood than before. He gaped after her little trot down the road, and looked back to where she had just been standing. He turned to the desk—all five books, gone.

He grit his teeth.

“I can’t fucking believe it,” he ground out into thin air with great despair lacing his voice, “I’ve been—swindled.”

Of course, she had appeared again the next day, slinking in when she thought he hadn’t been watching. She had been wrong.

Shiro had two paths to choose from: one—ignore her, or two—impose upon her his wrath…

Someone had to teach her some manners, right?

“You,” Shiro seethed.

Her shoulders hunched and she whipped around to see his glare. He slammed the book he’d been occupying his time with on the desk so hard the walls trembled and rose from his seat, knocking it back onto the floor with a sharp clatter. The smile she offered him was shy but he couldn’t see it as anything less than scheming. He scowled back, yet she, apparently, was not cowed. He shoved a finger toward her face.

“How dare you show your face here again after stealing those books yesterday!” he hissed; her smile only got wider.

“But I didn’t steal anything—I just borrowed,” she said. He squinted at her.

“‘Borrowed’? Little girls shouldn’t lie, you know.” She remained unperturbed. “I should report you to the police!” (And yes, he did cringe mildly at the words that came out of his mouth and boomeranged solidly back into his ears, but he had a child to scare wits out of, so that was irrelevant.)

“Because my name is in the book, see?” She strode past him to the desk and hefted the book open, running her fingers along until she found her name and tapped on it twice. Beside it, the names of the books filled the lines and the date was written neatly in the corner. Of course, he hadn’t noticed this because he hadn’t opened the book since she had arrived. “Along with all the names of the books I borrowed. So it’s perfectly legal.”

“Legal, my—” He took a moment to breathe in through his nose and out through his mouth. “I didn’t write that so it’s still stealing.”

“The police won’t know that. The hand-writing is exactly the same, see?”

And to his eternal dismay, it was. The handwriting matched his own from when he signed a book out for that little old lady he saw before her. She scratched the hiragana and kanji in the same rough, ugly way he had and even had the courtesy of recreating a few of his signature ink splotches along the way. He grimaced.

She was good. Very good, even. So good, in fact, that he wasn’t all that mad about it anymore because, maybe, if this kid could outsmart him, then she deserved to have them. If Shiro had been a little more honest of a person, he might’ve begrudgingly admitted he was impressed. But he wasn’t, and so he didn’t.

“Then, I’ll just have to explain what happened to them and they’ll figure it out. You really think they won’t see through your little lies?” He also neglected to suggest that the Uchiha police force had already banned him from the station for various reasons but that was a bridge he’d cross if it came to it.

“Well, that’s only if they in-ves-tuh-gayt, and I don’t think they will. Why would they believe a poor, little civilian managed to steal books from under a shinobi’s nose? No, I think they would ignore you. Sorry, shinobi-san.” Disconcertingly, the sparkle in her eyes betrayed the sincerity of her voice.

“If it’s any concul-'' she frowned, “con-sul-ay-shun, I finished all the books already and I’m ready to give them back. They were very good.” She hefted the books one-by-one out of her satchel and stacked them neatly on the desk, including the two she had borrowed previously. “And I brought you candy to make up for it.” She pulled out a half-crushed lollipop and set it on top. At least it was still in its clear packaging.

Shiro was by no means a trained child… discipliner? Carer?--whatever, but he got the sense that he wasn’t getting anywhere with this. Whatever. At least he wasn’t responsible for raising her, Sage bless her parents.

“Thanks, kid,” he grumbled, dropping his glare and falling back into his seat. She won this time. “What’d you want the books for anyway?”

“It’s research.”

Shiro stopped.

“For what?”

“For when I become a ninja, like you.”

He laughed involuntarily. If he had a ryo for every time some kid declared they wanted to be a shinobi without knowing what it entailed, he’d be rich enough to buy out the daimyo’s palace. Unfortunately, money didn’t miraculously fall out of the sky—or, in this case, a ceiling—into the hands of shinobi whenever little kids pestered them, and so he was left miserably empty-handed.

“Trust me, kid. You don’t wanna do that.” He started to turn away from her in favor of unraveling the candy and putting it in his mouth. Cherry flavored. How ironic.

“Yes I do,” she spoke with unexpected vehemence. She rounded his desk so that she could fit herself within his line of sight and fold her arms. “I’m going to become the greatest kunoichi in the world, better than all shinobi, ever.”

He was struck. And suddenly exhausted. In her irises, he saw his silhouette.

“What for?” The words that escaped him did not seem to be his own.

“It’s a secret.”

He sighed, mouth dry.

“You really sure about it?”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck me,” he muttered under his breath and hoped a little too late that she didn’t hear it. “You want any more books, or what?”

The day after that, she had started on the second installment of a book called The Fundamentals Of Unlocking Tenketsu. Again, she was severely out of her depth, but he didn’t really want to argue with that little kid. He had barely looked up when she tottered through the door and bee-lined straight to the back shelves, scoured the books and plucked one off the shelf to read through in a little leather armchair in which she’d taken near permanent residence. Instead, he busied himself with incessantly flicking a hair elastic he found on the ground against the wall.

Some hours past noon, he heard the gentle creak of the chair and ruffle of fabric as she ambled towards him with the book open in her hands.

“Shinobi-san?”

“Yes?”

“What does chakra feel like?”

This confused him.

“What do you want to know that for?”

“It says that it feels like a warm pool in your gut. I don’t have that.”

She turned the book towards him and it dropped with a thump on the desk. He followed her finger with his eyes towards a sentence besides a diagram of the chakra network in the head.

“‘Chakra’… blah, blah… ‘manifests in a body as a pool in the base of one’s gut, and should feel as though it is gently vibrating when one attempts to call on and direct it through the chakra network.’” At the back of his mind, he vaguely recalled being taught this in his first Academy year, in not so many words considering his abridged wartime education. “It’s more of a… general guideline. In my experience, my chakra reserve was more like half a glass of water when I started working on it. But, yeah, it typically feels like it's gently vibrating when you move it around your body.”

“Okay…So how do I find this glass of water?”

Shiro narrowed his eyes.

“Don’t you have a teacher to teach you this stuff?”

“No.”

He looked her up and down, in her green sundress she’d worn for every day he’d seen her. No uniform for the civilian schools and certainly not dressed as if she went to the academy. Perhaps, her education was a homemade one, or maybe she was a budding apprentice to a family business. He wouldn’t know, because the Konohagakure council thought it was good enough for a kid to read, write and maybe count to ten, and there were no legal obligations. He supposed it was more of a social one—after all, it was not a good look to have an idiot dunce for a child.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“No. I’ll go in September.”

“What? How old are you?”

“Five years and three months and six days.”

“Huh.” Well, color him impressed. To him, she looked at least six, and acted at least eight when she wasn’t crying—but what did he know about children, besides the fact that they cried and dribbled and blew snot bubbles? Or, in some instances, made fantastic killers?

“So, how do I find my chakra?” He waved her off.

“Ahh…Don’t worry about that for now, you’ll learn it in the academy.”

“Please, would you help me?” she said.

“No,” he was quick to answer. Her eyes began to well up and his eyes narrowed further. “And don’t go crying about it either. You won’t fool me twice.” The tears dissipated and she groaned.

“Okay then.” She snapped the book shut and slid it off the desk, making her way to her corner again, strangely quiet.

“And don’t even think about trying to use chakra in here! It’s strictly a no chakra zone.”

Naturally, Shiro didn’t trust pink little girls further than he could throw them, which was admittedly far, but not far enough. So, with a twitch of his fingers and a pull at his reserves, a copy of himself synthesized at his side leaving an unnoticeable pop in its wake. The clone knew to dart through the library and circle to the bookcase behind Sakura’s chair and supervise her from the shadows. A perfect, foolproof plan of keeping a silly little annoyance in line. In turn, the real Shiro got to relax at the front of the library and all but ignore her presence.

Only, of course it wouldn’t work out that way. No, not for poor old, tortured Shiro. Every so often, she would leap off the chair, amble towards him and open her mouth to interrogate him on the chakra network, trying to squeeze as much information out of his pursed lips as possible.

At first, he had ignored her. Tuned her out and focused on the regular ticking of a clock in the corner, which despite it being in this little library’s relentless pocket of time, decided it was going to keep ticking anyway. Shiro found he admired that sort of stubborn attitude and resilience to pursue your own ambitions despite your circumstances. He also found he liked the perfect roundness of the clocks. Reminded him of kunai targets, actually. And he would kill to be training right about now.

Unfortunately, this little girl shared those stubborn attributes. Every time he attempted to swindle his way out of answering her questions, she had persisted by his side, only rephrasing her questions to try and talk circles around him to trick him into answering. She talked so fluently for a child so young, even when she had to sound out the words mid-sentence, and her strings of sentences left his head spinning and his mind reeling because he was fairly certain that should not be able to research the anatomy of the chakra network within a day and then inquire about the genetic attributes of different clans and how they could contribute to the construction of the chakra network. If she was attempting to wear him out, it was working. This was too much for his little brain to work through on a Thursday morning.

“And if chakra network structure and the size of chakra coils are based on genetics, and we know that DNA can be mutated, does that mean we can man-u-a-lly change our chakra network and chakra coils by changing our DNA sequence?” she finished with an expectant smile.

Shiro blanched.

“What?”

“I said, ‘If cha—”

“I know what you said,” he interrupted, breathless, “but I’m still trying to figure out how you reached that conclusion. Did you learn all that today?”

“No,” she thought aloud. “I did some of it last night. And last week.”

“Huh.” He slumped in his seat.

“Yeah. Can you answer my question now please?”

“Uh,” he stalled. “In theory, it’s definitely possible, but it would be incredibly hard to do. I mean rearranging DNA seems like an impossible feat in itself, especially if the aim is to reconstruct an entire part of your anatomy. Not to mention, a slight mistake would probably be lethal.”

“Oh.” Her face dimmed. “Has anyone ever done it before?”

“No.” He considered this. “Not in this village, at least. It’s not quite ethical.” He didn’t stop to explain the word to her. She didn’t complain. “Did you bother Dosato-san with this many questions?”

“Okay.” She shrugged, ignoring his last question. “Thanks, shinobi-san.”

“No problem.”

She walked away without another word.

Shiro watched her more closely after that.

A week of this calamity went on before Shiro had noticed she didn’t really have friends. He noticed this, of course, entirely accidentally, upon asking whether she’d ever like to leave him alone and play in the park with the other little kiddies, as he did habitually when she asked one too many questions. “No thanks,” she’d said nonchalantly. “We don’t like each other.” He’d stopped taunting her summarily.

It was right after that, when he’d noted she’d not had any parental supervision in regards to visiting the library at all. He’d noticed this when she’d accidentally stayed after dark, too engrossed to look up and see the sun dip below the horizon, and Shiro himself was too busy flicking rubber bands at walls to notice she was still there. In fact, the clock had struck ten in the evening, closing time for the library, before he’d taken the effort to look up and zero in on the girl in the corner, who was still hunched over a book, reading a deceptively uninteresting volume on chakra theory. His hand clasped over her shoulder, making her jump, as he told her it was closing time.

“Now?” she’d said, somewhat uneasy.

“Yeah. It’s ten o’clock.”

“Oh.” He could see the gears turning in her head.

“What’s the issue?”

“I have to walk home.” She gulped. “At night.”

Oh. He couldn’t see much of a problem with that—it was a lovely night out, a cool breeze disrupting daytime humidity—and it wasn’t as if Konoha was particularly unsafe at nighttime, considering where she must live. But, he sighed as he looked at her expectant face, he supposed it would be the morally upstanding thing to do to walk her home, especially considering her age.

“How far do you live?”

“Not that far.” She grimaced.

“I’ll take you home. Just let me get my jacket.”

She waited outside as he locked up, clicking the doors shut, double-checking all the doors and windows and flicking all the lights off, before turning to her, her with a little satchel over her shoulder stuffed full with two books and an empty bento.

“Lead the way.”

She turned on a heel and skipped her way down the street, with all the confidence of a little king, in the complete wrong way. They made it two streets before Shiro decided he was sufficiently amused and he raised his voice.

“Are you sure you know where you’re going?”

She looked back at him.

“Uh-huh.”

They carried on.

The tenth minute had passed and they were well away from the library and where he had once thought she’d lived. As they turned directions, weaving through back alleys, he saw her move her satchel to her front and walk faster, not skipping anymore but turning her head left to right in a searching, focused manner. Her eyes were narrowed, squinting at the shadows between every step. He caught up to her, matching her little swift strides and cleared his throat.

“Hold my hand,” he said. Stretching out his arm, she grasped it with a sure grip.

He smelt the district before he could see it. As the first neon red light passed over their heads, Shiro grimaced at the smell of cigarette smoke and stale beer, as well as the stench of old piss staining walls. He pulled Sakura away from the open door leading underground and kept her towards where the moon shone brightest on the streets, all the while, she led the way. Her navigation, sure and practiced, sent them round the corner of a bar of some kind, or, more likely, some sort of illegal brothel, swooping her away from when she walked precariously close to a leering man, green with alcohol. At long last, she pulled him towards the base of a set of concrete steps leading up an apartment block.

“This it?”

“Uh-huh.”

She counted each grimy step as they climbed four sets of stairs to the third floor and she pulled him along to the plywood door with a rusted number ‘36’ bolted into it.

“Your home?”

“Uh-huh.” And then she started to thud on the door.

On the third bone-rattling thud, the door flung open with a wild, swine-like squeal revealing a pale, and slightly manic, woman dressed in common medic garb and glasses atop her head. She had a sallow look to her—sallow yellow hair, sallow skin, and bruises under her eyes. A panicked ghost, who swooped, to sweep little Sakura into her embrace.

“Where have you been?” she all but wailed. “What happened to our agreement? There’s no reason to leave unless it's an emergency!”

“Sorry, Kaa-san,” she grumbled from the crook of her mother’s neck. “I just wanted to read.”

The woman pulled away from Sakura just enough to see her face.

“That’s not an emergency! You already have books.” The girl’s face puffed up a bashful pink as she huffed accusingly. The woman frowned as she put her down, kneeling with her in the doorway.

“They only have pictures. I want words!”

“I’ll get you words. All you had to do was ask.”

“I do ask. But you always forget.”

“I’ve been busy with work. You know that.” She sighed.

“You’re always busy.”

Their eyes met in a stalemate.

“Go run a bath. I’ll meet you in a minute.”

Sakura twisted immediately to frown at her mother, and cross her arms, face growing redder.

“But—”

“Go on, Sakura.”

She nudged Sakura into the home by leading her elbow inward, and Shiro watched her trot away, disgruntled down a hallway, turning into the second door on her left. The apartment was dark inside, but he could see in the dim twilight the splinters in the floorboards and the leak in the ceiling just above the front door. He considered a doctor’s salary for a moment before turning to the woman whose eyes bore into his temples. She frowned.

“Who are you?”

“Konoha Jonin, Nakamura Shiro,” he rattled off dutifully. “Currently stationed at–uhh, working at the Enkita Public Library. I walked your daughter home today.”

Together, they shared a moment of tense silence, disrupted only by the thunderings of activity in a bar across the street and an uncomfortable banging overhead. He studied the fine lines around her eyes, and the deep grooves in her forehead.

“Kaa-san.” Sakura peeked her head out of the bathroom door and spoke. “I can’t reach the shampoo.”

The woman hummed distractedly, turning her head slightly over her shoulder but keeping her eyes on Shiro. “I’ll be right there.” Sakura ducked back into the bathroom.

She looked back toward Shiro.

“Good evening, Shinobi-san. Watch your step on the way down.”

With a metallic screech, the door slammed in his face.

When Shiro appeared the next morning to open up the library, it was his own surprise that Sakura had made yet another appearance, clearly unswayed by her mother’s wishes with a firm set to her shoulders and furrow in her brow. Each following morning he grew more surprised that she’d still turn up. Shiro did not question it. Instead, in the evenings, he closed up earlier and followed her home at a distance again to an empty apartment. It became a routine he never spoke aloud.

In the third week, Shiro noticed her sulking in her corner, head in a book as usual but grumbling some nasty choice words for a five-year-old (a varied selection of stupids, idiots, dimwits and blockheads) at a book. She continued her curious assault on the pages, slamming it shut causing a plume of dust to eject into the air, before slumping in her seat, more indignant than he’d ever seen her.

“If you damage that book I‘ll have to bill you,” he called back to her. She slumped further. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I can’t find any jutsu in these books,” she spluttered as if she’d been waiting for him to ask, with a timid flush to her face.

“Of course you won’t. Jutsu scrolls aren’t available in public libraries for little kiddies to read.” Shiro almost went back to minding his business before he did a double take. “What do you want it for anyway? Not like you can learn it on your own.”

“I can’t learn it yet but I can study its hand signs, app-li-ca-tions and go through si-tu-a-tions where I would use it.” Ever the studious child. He rolled his eyes.

“Not at your age you don’t. Wait until you get into the Academy.”

“But that’s the thing, shinobi-san. I can’t get into the Academy without taijutsu but I don’t know any kata, so I have to know ninjutsu.”

“The Academy has been accepting civilians who don’t know taijutsu or kata for years. Just ace the written exam and you’ll do fine.”

“But I don't want to be in the other classes, I want to be in Class A, so I have to be really good.”

From Shiro’s ever fading memory, he had only ever made Class C which hadn’t mattered much by the time the war started as teachers grouped students into one cramped classroom for safety and staff shortages. He knew that was when he met Kurenai and Genma who had been cooped up on a back desk.

“What’s so good about Class A?”

“It’s where all the clan kids are, and the place where students get taught proper stuff, and the only place where civilians don’t always get dumped in the genin corps. If I want to make it to jonin, I’ve got to be in Class A.”

Shiro considered this: a product of natural divisions on skill based on background, perpetuated by political and social divisions in the Academy. Of course this would've been scrapped during war time where every body was another tool in the arsenal, but perhaps Shiro was naive in thinking that always relegating the civilian born children to background servants was a bit—primitive.

“How do you know that?”

“I heard some older boys talk about it in the park.” Now, Shiro knew the exact type of boys that hung around in civilian parks to terrorize civilian children, more than familiar with the type actually, which was to say self-important clan boys. Perhaps he could sympathize with her plight. But only a little.

“Look, trust me, if you score a hundred in that written exam, you’ll be in Class A.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just do. Adults know a lot of things, haven’t you noticed?”

He did know a lot of things and he knew better than anyone the probability of making it pass chunin for a civvie-born like Haruno Sakura.

Being born and raised in war-time, he had been forced to sharpen himself on the battlefield out of necessity, as would a rat when cornered by a snake. Shiro had been one of the few to fight past the precedent of civvies being dumped into the genin corps by instead being dumped into the battlefield alongside the other too-young academy graduates, both clan and civilian. All of this to test his mettle against the enemy forces who were indiscriminate in their onslaught. This was perhaps the only instance in his life that the playing field had been somewhat leveled.

Shiro was well aware that the war had been a curse, a chance and a lesson equipping him with the skills to be a shinobi that couldn‘t easily be taught, setting him a cut above any regular shinobi, and without it, he knew he would have been stuck in the corps, or retired somewhere as a merchant taking after his late father. It was the war that had been the only teacher he had, teaching him to sink or swim, and he was one of the very few civilians who had the wit to adapt to the ocean that was the battlefield. For his impossible feat of survival he had been field promoted to chunin by the time he was fourteen. And following that, he had been field promoted to jonin to fill the missing ranks, only recently growing into his boots.

However, for better or worse, Sakura would not get a war to prove herself—or to sink if she couldn’t swim—and so the chances of her progression were slim.

As he studied the girl, he considered all he knew of her: whip-smart, well-articulated and sly, probably had no friends considering her time in the library, and completely dedicated to her research to become a shinobi. A prodigy? In the intellectual sense—maybe. If she did get into Class A, and landed herself a team worth their salt, she just might make it to jonin too, without a war.

But, he thought wistfully, perhaps he would have been better off without the war, being dumped off into genin corps, shielded with a clear conscience, even if afflicted with boredom. Perhaps, that would be best for Sakura too.

Chapter Text

The first week of July presented new problems to Sakura, ones that seemed beyond her power to solve. For example, even after scraping through all the back ends of bookshelves and stealing things out of packaged boxes at the back of the library, it seemed that security was quite adequate when hiding interesting books from ambitious girls, such as herself. This, as well as that shinobi’s following eye, meant that it was near impossible for her to formally begin her training, in terms of the physical and ninjutsu, in time for the exam.

In fact, the furthest she had gotten was discovering that she did possess chakra as she meditated on her futon. At first, she had felt nothing in her gut. No pool. No glass of water. Nothing. And so, she theorized, that if she could not find it, but it must exist, then it must be hiding from her, or her body hiding her from it. This could have been for a number of reasons: for example, a survival mechanism to protect the infant body from the side effects of the incorrect use of chakra which were more lethal to a young body than an old one. And then, she theorized, she should pretend she’s found it, until she fooled her body into letting her have it. And it worked.

But that was it.

She could not yet move it, nor unlock tenketsu, or use it in any way. Nor could she find a way to do so. And so, she theorized, she was stuck.

Stuck. Huh. She resented that word.

As she recited her issues to the shinobi behind the desk, he did nothing but look at her with raised eyebrows and pursed lips.

“Didn’t I tell you not to do stuff like that without supervision?” he uttered.

“Yes, but I needed to do it.”

“What for?”

“To train for—”

“No, nope, forget I asked, I already know,” he muttered, not unkindly, but certainly with some measure of scorn. “The point is you could have gotten hurt.”

“I know,” she conceded, averting her gaze, “but it’s my only option because I really need to get into Class A.”

“Okay,” he grimaced, clasping his hands together, “has it occurred to you that they won’t be testing you on jutsu in the entrance exams?”

“I know that,” she huffed, “but you have to spar there, so I can use it then.”

“They don’t allow jutsu in the spars.”

Sakura fell short, faltering in her conviction. Perhaps, she supposed, she hadn’t done enough reconnaissance on the Academy entrance exams. She should rectify that after she’d finished sulking. And she was going to sulk.

“You’re better off learning kata,” he muttered offhandedly.

“I can’t do that though.” Feeling the beginnings of a tantrum bubbling up in her throat, she strangled it down into a tiny ball of despair, rolling down in the pit of her stomach. She could not stop the fierce heat from blotching her cheeks.

“Can you throw a punch?”

“I… ” Her embarrassment trounced despair. “I don’t know how yet…”

“What do you mean you ‘don’t know’?” She shrugged, reluctant to speak. His subsequent heave was loud and telling—mocking—to which Sakura, against her better judgment, teared up. “That’s your problem then. Shoo.”

As she retreated to her corner to sulk, she dragged the hem of her dress to dab at the tears collecting at the corners of each eye, taking no interest in the sour old lady who wobbled through the door whose scowl had already formed. Neither did she take any notice of Shiro’s sneaking glances as she scoured the shelves once more for a book of diagrams of the standard Konoha kata.

At last, she came upon a book of kata. It was a dusty book whose pages were sealed together with something smelling of ramen and chicken. The kata inside were carefully circled and doodled on with a glaringly red pen and made it almost hard to see the diagrams beneath. Though, she could just about make out a chain of images detailing a sequence of positions and steps. Many steps—almost too many—but she could do them. She was sure she could do it. Certainly.

This sparked a new hope for her as she tucked the book away in her bag and bid the shinobi farewell to which he stiffened and scrambled to follow. Hours earlier than she would usually leave, she watched the shinobi shadow her from behind through the reflection in the puddles of last night’s storm and proceeded with a bounce in her step. It had once occurred to her that he was trying to be inconspicuous and she briefly wondered how he would feel if he figured out that she knew he was there.

The path was long and winding. Midday sunlight illuminated the cracks in concrete and rot in wooden houses as they passed. The business lights were mostly off though some doors were wide open still, and some old man was asleep half in a bush, hand still wrapped around a spilled beer bottle. Stale cigarette smoke lingered like some phantom fog. She knew some of these people from her building, recognised the old hobbling woman exiting a convenience store with a new lighter in hand as a neighbor two doors down from her. Sakura knew she would make a stop by the market before going home to feed her yowling cats who would be waiting by her door. If Sakura focused, she could have probably recited the daily routines of all the neighbors on her floor relying on memory alone. The worst ones came out at night, according to her mother, and they weren't women.

Reaching home, she slid in through the propped open kitchen window and shut it behind her, watching while the shinobi darted out of her periphery just a millisecond too late and disappeared entirely. She waited a minute, two, in the kitchen before she slid back out again.

Only that old woman had made it back to her apartment and stood in her doorway giving her a toothless smile whilst she smoked. Sakura smiled back when she walked past her toward the stairs. Of their neighbors, Sakura liked her best since she never asked her any questions. Whether that was due to old age addling her mind or her degrading eyesight, Sakura didn’t know and didn’t care to know.

Her next dilemma was location. She couldn’t train in the nicer park she knew about (it was much too busy), she couldn’t train in any training ground (she's tried before; she’d been unceremoniously thrown out) and she couldn’t train at home. That left one undesirable location: the local park.

It was a small enclosure behind another apartment building towards the edge of the akasen complete with a bench, rusting climbing frame and a set of swings. Sakura had never personally seen any children turn up here, back when she used to wait around to try to make friends, but she had, on more than one occasion, seen older teenage boys gathering around the swings with their hoods up. They were not here now, and she would leave before they would catch a glimpse of her.

She put her satchel down at the foot of the climbing frame, eased the pages open and began her training.

“One,” she whispered, and positioned her body in such a manner that her limbs burned and trembled.

“Two.” She moved her arm up and forward, with a clenched fist. She wasn’t sure that she was clenching her fist right.

“Three.” Her leg shook as she kicked and held it high in the air.

“Four.” Her leg came down as she turned her body another way. Sweat trickled down her forehead.

Five, six, seven were no easier than the rest, and anything that came after felt twice as hard.

Coming to the end of the sequence, she knew she had not completed the katas with anywhere near good enough form, but it wasn't as though she had anybody else here to tell her how to correct it. So, frustrated, she started again.

And again.

And again.

By the end of the hour, she’d realized she’d forgotten to do a warm-up, gave up and went home.

To Sakura’s credit, she did not immediately have a tantrum upon arriving home. No, she read through more of the book (which she should have done at the start, really, she shouldn’t have let impulse take over) and found suitable warm up, cool-down, and advice for completing the kata adequately. Go through them at a painstakingly slow pace, focusing on maintaining the center of gravity for balance and on engaging the core muscles, and don't take breaks by placing a raised limb on the floor between movements. Only after reading all of that did she have a private tantrum, because this seemed unduly hard for her. However, she seemed to only have two choices for physical training: run in circles all day at the park or work through the kata. She would choose the kata, thank you.

She felt her muscles burn the next morning as she avoided the library altogether and headed toward the empty park. The warm-up was simple enough, the worst of it was three arduous laps of the park, but made her muscles burn fervently nonetheless. She did not like the awkward movement of her legs and arms which she couldn't seem to synchronize. She did not like running. Her sandals must have been at fault.

When she moved to the kata, she began slowly, focusing on the line of her limbs, keeping them as steady as her trembling limbs would allow, and engaging her core to keep balance. She held it for a minute, two, then moved slowly to the next position of the sequence. She thought, if this was possible, she could feel individual muscles tear apart and regrow as it happened. Her balance was imperfect, as the entire sequence was, but it was better than yesterday’s attempt and that was all she could ask for at the moment.

When she repeated the cycle, she was a little better, then a little worse, and then a little better again. It took her two hours to tire to the point she could not continue, although it felt closer to four hours. Time, after all, did move slower when one was counting the seconds.

She went home, narrowly avoiding the group of boys who occupied the park in the evenings, before her mother was due to arrive, and went to bed for a long nap before lunch which she ate alone at the kitchen table. She bathed after and returned to bed to read a book she found hidden away in a closet that she had not yet found the time to tell her mother about.
The Tale of The Utterly Gutsy Shinobi: she didn’t much identify with the main character, but, if anything, it was something to read.

Later, if her mother noticed her tired appearance, she didn’t say anything. Instead, she asked her if she’d completed the writing, reading and arithmetic exercises she set aside for the day. Sakura said yes, but didn’t mention that she had completed this entire week’s worth last week, lest she become curious as to what else she’d been doing in the day.

The next day’s training was exceedingly excruciating as yesterday’s pain caught up with her along with today’s aches and agonies. She found she could train for less time before she tired. Conversely, the day after that found her training for almost three hours and it was then she’d noticed an improvement in her balance and strength. Her limbs no longer shook within the first few minutes, and she didn’t feel so close to tipping over as she moved. She considered this with growing approval.

Not everybody seemed to share that approval, however, since, the day after that, she was met with a familiar face scowling down at her at the park.

“Imagine my surprise,” she began in her scratchy voice, “when I turn up with groceries and poor Tsugi-san mentions off-handedly that she’s been seeing you wander off toward this here park.”

Sakura wanted to say something but instead deferred to silence. Her first thought was that Keiko looked more tired than normal with the usual purple under-eyes poorly concealed in such bright light, but comparatively her skin was perfect, porcelain, and her hair like box-dyed black silk. She couldn’t decide whether she looked twenty-two or forty-two. Her second thought was that the old lady—Tsugi-san—was no longer her favorite neighbor. Sakura didn’t even know she could talk.

“Why won’t you give your mother a break, hm?” Keiko grabbed her upper arm to jerk Sakura into looking at her. “She works so hard for so long at that hospital for a pittance of a nurse’s wage so that you can have three meals a day, a warm bath and clean clothes. And this is how you repay her? By wandering around a place like this? If something happened to you, it would kill her. You know that, right?”

Sakura’s only defense was: “Well, I was training.”

Keiko snapped. “There’s no use in training if somebody snatches you up in the night before you ever see the academy.” Keiko pulled her arm leading her away from the park and back toward the apartment block.

“But it’s daytime, Keiko-san.”

“Quiet.”

As they half ran, half stumbled up the apartment stairs, Sakura could see Tsugi watching from an open window, still smoking and smiling aimlessly. Sakura fought back a scowl.

“You know, I don’t think you realize how much of my sleep you cost me when I’m running around looking for you in the daytime, hm? Only last month I’ve had to go looking for you twice, once lingering by the dango stall like some stray for scraps, and once in some alley doing who-knows-what where who-knows-what could’ve gotten to you. You’re lucky your mother refuses to beat you. With a mother like that, I can’t believe you’re not groveling.” Keiko got out her key and jerked the door open to her apartment.

Keiko’s apartment, Sakura noted as Keiko corralled her inside, was much more intact than hers and a lot more bare. It had the faint scent of something sweet and floral, much like Keiko’s perfume. Nothing much had changed since the last time she’d been here. The full grocery bags were new, perhaps that box of mysterious balloons on the shelf had been replaced with a newer one and maybe the table cloth was different, but the sandwiches Keiko dished up for her were the same, as were the plate of sliced apples.

“Here’s the deal: you stay here, eat, drink, whatever—you know where things are—and if you need something cut up, I’ll be in the next room asleep. You get the picture. Otherwise, only wake me up in an emergency, and certainly when your mother comes knocking.”

“Why can’t I wait at home?” Sakura asked and had a brief sense of deja vu.

“Because Tsugi-san also mentioned that you had gotten out via broken kitchen window.” Keiko fixed her with a look. “I’m not stupid, Sakura. But I will take pity on you. If you look in the drawers over there, you’ll find paper and some pens. Draw something nice for your mother and maybe she’ll accept your apologies.”

As it turned out, Haruno Mebuki was not amused by Sakura’s stick figures. When Keiko opened that door, she looked closer to furious than concerned with Sakura’s wellbeing. She apologized profusely on Sakura’s behalf and stepped into the apartment to confront her.

“How dare you?” Sakura’s mother croaked hoarsely. Her white nurse’s garb stood out against the orange backlight of the sky. “I can’t keep chasing you around like this, Sakura, I can't miss work just to make sure you aren’t running amok in such dangerous areas, doing dangerous things like ninja training. Why won’t you understand? Why won’t you listen?”

Sakura swallowed, averting her eyes.

“I… I drew you something.” Sakura’s proffered hand was pushed away quickly. Her drawing floated to the kitchen floor.

“You think that’s what I want to see right now?”

Tears finally broke through as she reached to grab Sakura’s arm, like Keiko did earlier, and pulled her toward their own apartment, her shoes lying forgotten in Keiko’s genkan. Sakura thought she saw Tsugi watching by her door again. Her mother dragged her into the apartment with a splinter almost getting caught in Sakura’s shuffling heels and shoved open their only bedroom, depositing Sakura inside before locking it from the outside. She could hear Mebuki storm away to shut their front door with the same slam and vigorous handling of locks.

“Kaa-san,” Sakura whispered at the door when she heard her come back that way. “I haven’t had dinner yet.” She heard the woman stop and turn to the door.

“No dinner?” she mused, the muffled sound vibrating against the wooden door. “There was dinner waiting for you here, in the refrigerator. Maybe next time you run about the streets, you scavenge for your food like every other stray.” Not long after, Sakura could hear the bath start to run.

Sakura supposed she deserved it. Or, at least had it coming to her for a long time. She’d been stretching her mother’s patience thin, pushing because she wanted to do more, wanted more than what this home, this kitchen, this room could do for her. Sakura supposed she was lucky the only consequences were a locked bedroom door. Still, whilst she laid out her futon, changed into a nightdress and tucked herself in, she mourned the loss of that book she’d found but left in that satchel by the climbing frame, the loss of her drawing as her mother bathed next door, the loss of that cold dinner, and cried herself to sleep.

The sound of a voice at the door woke Sakura up, along with the light turning on above, a warm, dim yellow. She blinked blearily at the figure at the door who carried a platter with some bowls on it.

“Dinner.”

Sakura winced at the light before shuffling to drag the kotatsu to the middle of the room. Her mother settled the platter down before sitting. Sakura muttered a ‘thank you’ and tried the rice. It was warm.

Mebuki watched her eat, only eating a few mouthfuls between careful stares. At one point, she got up and returned with Sakura’s lost satchel. Sakura muttered another ‘thank you’.

Long after Sakura finished eating, Mebuki watched her with a considering stare, not quite hard, not quite soft. Sakura had the idea she was being scrutinized. Sakura scrutinized her back. Mebuki had prominent frown lines, and Sakura’s own eyes, she thought. Permanently pursed lips and steady fingers. Her pajamas were ill-fitting and worn, the same pair she’d been wearing for four nights now. It was Mebuki who broke the silence.

“You haven’t apologized yet.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t bother,” she sniped.

Sakura’s eyes drifted. The room they were in had pink walls, painted before her birth to prepare for a daughter. It was only a coincidence it matched the shade of her hair. The clock on the wall said it was quarter to midnight. Sakura’s exercise books sat untouched on the dresser in the corner and, beside that, lined up neatly on the floor, was Mebuki’s books and Sakura’s specially chosen children’s books. In the mirror above the dresser, she could see the reflection of the ceiling light hanging low over their heads. Eyes sliding back to her mother, she noted the assessing look in her eyes.

“You’re just like your father.” Mebuki’s voice didn’t betray much but Sakura tried not to squirm under the weight of her gaze. “You know, he never had listened to me when I tried to talk him out of his choice years ago, when we were your age. Not even the matron could get him to listen.”

A pause. Sakura didn’t hear much about her father. He passed after she was born though, so she must’ve met him, and she supposed it was a little nice, if unsettling, to have at least one thing in common with him. Matron, however, she’d always heard a lot about.

Mebuki seemed to weigh her next words.

“We never could stop him from doing what he wanted.”

Sakura’s breath hitched.

Her mother moved swiftly, pulling a folded collection of papers folded repeatedly from her pant pocket and undid the folds, flattening it out on the table. Sakura sat up straight, peering at the title. ‘Academy Student Application Form’, it read across the top. Her name slotted nicely into the ‘applicant’s name’ box, and she wondered when she’d had the time to get this form. Mebuki’s stare became hard when Sakura looked back at her.

“You know, I’ve never liked shinobi.” Curious silence. “Is this what it will take, Sakura?”

(Is this what it takes, she asks herself years in the future, to become—)

She swallowed, and nodded.

“Are you sure?”

Nodded again.

Eyes not leaving hers, Mebuki got a pen out and began to fill in the rest of the boxes. She watched, even as the hour hand shifted and her eyelids grew heavy. The pen scratched at the page with thin ink, a slow pace, punctuated by rhythmic breathing. It was nearly one o’clock by the time the form was filled and the woman tucked it away.

As she turned to collect the dishes, Sakura stopped her with a question.

“Who will train me? For the entrance exams.” Her voice showed too much of her exhaustion.

Eyes flickering back to her, she paused, thinking, considering, considering, thinking. A clash of teeth. She opened her mouth—and paused again.

“Get some sleep, Sakura.”

She turned the light off on the way out.

The next morning, Sakura was pleasantly surprised that Mebuki was still around, rather than having left her breakfast on the table. Today, she had made an effort to create a bigger breakfast, with eggs, rice, and some assortment of fruits that Sakura didn’t know they’d had. She’d figured if she’d stuck around more, she would’ve noticed. They ate fast and dressed fast. Mebuki was the one to strap her sandals up today, tuck her bento into her satchel and lead them out the door.

Together, they walked in the quiet just earlier than most places began to open, but just after some places closed. Mebuki held Sakura’s hand close to her and looked around corners before they passed alleyways. They made it to the library in no time and waited for the shinobi to arrive and open it. Together, they watched the people on this side of the village rise and get to work under a clear sky. She hadn’t yet figured out what the occasion was.

When the shinobi arrived, he seemed just as confused as she was to have her mother with her at this time, even as Mebuki ushered her in the library doors whilst holding the shinobi back. Sakura entered the building and refrained from the temptation to eavesdrop, thinking that she’d pushed enough buttons recently and took her seat in the back corner. She pulled that book out of her bag and resumed her reading, picking up at the part where the hero fought a seemingly undefeatable threat and came out on top through some combination of hard work, perseverance and luck. She thought it was a stupid story only boys could believe.

The shinobi eventually made his entrance, dazed, holding a bag of something that clinked when it moved. He sat at the desk then stood again, watching the clock, as she watched him, growing bewildered. She’d seen a number of odd behaviors from him, but not like this. His gaze snapped to her and narrowed. She froze.

He ran through a series of gestures and something popped into existence. A replica of him blinked at her, at him, and sat at the desk silently. This was the first time she’d ever seen a jutsu in action. It intrigued her.

The shinobi approached her.

“Pack up your things. We’ve got places to be,” he said, scrutinizing her. She was getting annoyed at how often she was scrutinized these days. And she certainly did not like the way he presumed she would follow him anywhere like a lost duckling.

“Says who?” she said, scrutinizing him. He still seemed a bit confused, but he now looked like he was about to laugh.

“Your mother, that’s who,” he said, huffing out something disbelieving. “Now, gather your things. We’ve got to beat the crowds.”

“To where?” He looked at her as if she was stupid.

“The training grounds. I get the feeling we have a lot to do.”

Chapter Text

It was sunny, as per usual, and warm, and although he often felt and acted much older, Shiro’s insufficient age of nineteen made its presence known when they dawdled in the field unsure of what to do next, after finishing a warm up.

When Mebuki had left them back at the library, she left them with only Shiro’s quick agreement to the deal and his polite insistence that she didn't need to pay him anything, to which she’d scoffed and told him she did not need his charity. She’d left before he'd had the chance to explain that it was her doing him a favor by giving him an excuse to leave the library and something mildly interesting to do. And by ‘mildly interesting’ he meant something that wasn’t watching the clock tick all day.

It should’ve occurred to him that training a child, meant, like, actually training a child, an act in which he had no experience besides occasionally showing some new chunin the hand signs to a menial jutsu in passing. Training a child, an actual snot-nosed child, was in a totally different realm of experience and meant he would have to start from scratch to train her. The whole run-through-your-katas, one-two-three-wrong-start-again, what’s-the-largest-species-of-edible-beetle spiel. Still, he supposed, anything was better than a desk chair where that clone of his was currently sitting, likely ripping its hair out in clumps. And a new experience meant a new skill, so he was not technically losing anything being here.

Shiro glanced back at the awkwardly standing girl, and looked toward the sky. How to start? How did he start school?

The basics: endurance, strength, speed. A few laps should sort that out. When he said as much out loud, she began to pale.

“How far do I have to run?” she said.

“Until I say stop, or you hear me whistle. And by laps, I mean around this entire field. No cutting corners. Ready, set…”

“What if I collapse?” she stalled quickly.

“Of what? Exhaustion?”

“Yes.”

“Alright, lesson one: unless you're fully unconscious, you get up and keep going. Shinobi don’t have time to rest.”

“Children do,” she murmured.

“Not here, they don’t,” Shiro said as he felt a slow sadistic smile arrive.

“On your mark, ready…” She hurried into position. “Get set…” Her breathing quickened. “Go.”

And—And… Oh.

Sakura…

Sakura took off in what could no less be described as a flailing gallop.

She must’ve been pigeon-footed, right? How else could she have managed this? Shiro watched in utter bewilderment as she made it through half the field in twice as long as he’d expected her to take for one lap. Seriously, he’d seen two-year-olds run with more grace than this.

The sun grew hotter, her face grew redder, and he began to consider that maybe she wasn’t cut out to be a shinobi anyway, if she couldn’t figure out how to run. Most people weren’t ever ‘cut out’ for it, but maybe she was especially disinclined for field work. He at least knew for a fact that if this were war time, she wouldn’t even make canon fodder. Not like it mattered—he was getting paid for this.

As she made the circuit, she passed him with a crimson face and stumbled on a rock heading straight for the floor. When she landed with a thump, Shiro decided that was enough embarrassment for one day.

“That's enough,” he said, hauling her up. “You know, you never mentioned you didn’t know how to run. Did you miss that stage of your development? Because that’s not normal. I’ve seen three-legged dogs sprint at higher speeds. You’re not flat-footed, are you?”

“I can run,” she argued. “It’s just these stupid sandals.”

He looked between her red face and her brown sandals blankly.

“Sure it is.” Before she could protest, he led them toward the center of the field. “Look, I think I’ve been approaching this a little wrong. See, what I’m thinking is, you should show me what you already know and we'll work from there, yes?”

“How do I show you?” she said with some apprehension.

“Here,” Shiro said, making the signs for a clone and transformation to produce a little replica of Sakura. She startled at the resemblance to herself, looking curiously at its forehead. “Your objective is to make this clone disappear, meaning, you only need to hit it hard once. Got that?”

She gulped noisily. He didn’t think she’d thrown a punch at anything before, let alone do something like this.

“Okay, shinobi-san.”

“Just call me Shiro-san.”

“Okay, Shiro-san.” He frowned. She was being deceptively obedient.

“You may start.”

As Sakura attacked and fake-Sakura dodged, Shiro made note of what he saw.

Her form was hardly passable, even for a five-year-old. As it was, it looked like a poor imitation of some Academy kata, clearly self-taught. Evidently, he was too acquainted with child soldiers, because he had at least expected some sort of physical competency. Her limbs were held well enough and her core was somewhat engaged, but her aim was off, there was no power in her attacks, and her movements too slow to be anything but a weakness for fake-Sakura to exploit.

And that, she did. Fake-Sakura knocked real-Sakura off kilter at least three times in this pseudo-spar, and drove her into the ground once already, despite it only having been forty-two seconds since commencement. Though his little minion pulled its punches and only hit using the flat of its palm on the soft parts of the body, Sakura was wearing down quickly, something like a wheeze climbing out of her throat. It must’ve been her first time being hit by anything.

Easily winded, slow moving, can’t punch, not much control on her limbs, especially her feet; but—quick on the uptake, since she noted the constructed weakness of the clone on its left side and directed most of her attacks there. And, even though she had no chance of winning, she was tenacious.

Shiro dispelled the clone once it became clear she wouldn’t be able to fight any longer. She collapsed in a heap onto the ground.

“Well, Sakura-chan,” she lifted her head from the ground to look at him oddly, “I can tell you for sure that we have a lot of work to do before your exams.”

“How much?”

“Uhh…” Bad stamina, bad strength, bad form, bad speed, very clever, moderately tenacious. They had a month to fix up her physical strength, including getting her katas to a point where she could use them in a spar effectively. Considering her natural disposition, that was a pretty tough ask. “A lot.”

She groaned loudly.

“Brighten up, kid. At least you’ve got me around to help. I’m a great guy.”

She frowned at him.

“Why don’t we start by learning the Academy kata? Or, uh, re-learning it?”

For a week, they continued training by forcing her into running laps and by Shiro reteaching her the katas she had attempted to teach herself in the proper way, and she’d complained the whole way through. Now, Shiro himself wasn’t exactly an expert in the Academy kata, not remembering ever being taught it in its entirety before being shipped off to a battlefield. In reality, he only used taijutsu when forced and, when he did, he used some mutation of fractured katas he’d picked up off enemy and allied shinobi alike, hammering them together into some deformed puzzle that somehow seemed to work only for him. It was something he’d suppose Maito Gai would be repulsed by if he ever had the misfortune of witnessing it. He didn’t expect she would benefit from such a highly personalized style, and thus kept it to himself. So, in true Shiro fashion, he scoured his brain for the memories of it, merged it with what the book said, and pushed forward.

Of course, he’d started by commending her ability for having already memorized the sequence, but the execution had been entirely lackluster. He corrected her form in several seemingly minute, but significant, adjustments, and told her she’d know she was doing it right if her muscles were burning more. In the end, the goal was to perfect her form so that, in the long run, her body would not be harmed by the practice, but rather be bolstered by it. Before lunch on that seventh day, they’d only just finished learning the correct form for the katas ready for practice and perfection. But not today though, he’d regrettably informed her.

“Why not?” she inquired rather perplexingly considering her aversion to physical exercise.

“Training for four hours every day is long enough for a kid like you, like I keep telling you. I mean, seriously, you’ve asked that same question every day now. And anyway, I need to get back and take my clone’s place. There’s only so long I can hold something like that for.”

“Why? You never said so before. Are you running out of chakra?”

“Uhh…No, it’s just difficult to hold control for so long and for such a distance.”

“So it’s a continuous process.”

“Yeah, it is. And it’s a difficult one. Come on, get up. We’re leaving now.”

He picked her up by the scruff of her dress (and, really, he should’ve told her to dress in something more practical) and she landed on her feet, satchel already on her shoulder. They passed several genin and chunin on the way out who didn't so much as bat an eye at the strange duo. They made it to the library in swift timing, despite her continual interrogation regarding his clone technique.

“I can assure you, Sakura-chan, the bunshin I create are exactly the same as every other shinobi in Konoha. I’m not doing anything magical, I’m not doing anything innovative by using a bunshin and a henge in tandem—yes, that has definitely been done before—in fact, I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single shinobi who hasn’t done that at least once—and, no, I’m not teaching you that,” he finished with a deep breath out. He finished dispelling the clone in the empty library, who’d surprisingly, hadn’t dispelled itself.

“Why not?” she asked.

“‘Why not?’ Oh, someone save me—we’ve been through this before,” he paused to stare her down. “No jutsu until you’re in the Academy. This is stuff you’ll for sure be taught before you graduate anyway.”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

“Fine,” she said. “But I know Kaa-san is paying you and she doesn’t like it when we don’t get our money’s worth.”

“Uh-huh.” Shiro approached the desk and attempted to settle into the wooden frame to no avail. The back of it dug into the space above his hips irritatingly. One of these days, he’d have to start bringing in his own chair.

“Yeah. She’s scary when she’s mad.” Sakura’s voice disappeared behind the bookshelves. He sighed. This would be his home for—he looked at the clock—at least the next six hours.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” Her voice drifted closer until she was in sight, having deposited her things on her armchair. She stopped at the desk to look at him. He had a suspicion she was attempting, and failing, to scrutinize him.

“Well, if she really has an issue with it, she can take it up with me tomorrow, bright and early, right in this very spot.”

“You know, Kaa-san tells me there’s no way to stop a kid from doing something, because they’ll do it anyway. The only thing you can do is teach them to do it safely.”

“You’ll learn it safely in the Academy.”

“I’m not going to wait that long.”

“Okay.” He snapped the book he was holding shut. “First of all, patience is both a virtue and a very useful skill. Secondly, and here’s the thing, there is no point in trying to teach you a jutsu because first I have to teach you to move your chakra. That takes months. There’s no way we’re getting anywhere useful with it in time for your exams. My answer is no. That’s final.”

“Can we at least try?” Shiro briefly wondered why it was him she chose to be annoying around, instead of the other little kiddies who she seemed to shy away from.

“Do you know what?” He faked a smile and leaned forward, feeling not a thing about tricking her. “Yes, we can try.”

“Really, shinobi-san? Really? Thank you—” Hope grew in her wondrous, childlike eyes only for him to continue.

“If, and only if, you manage to beat my little clone in combat by the end of our time together.”

“But…That won’t give us any time to try.” It was as if Shiro could see the cogs turning in her brain as she began to get upset.

“Well, I guess you’d better beat my clone as soon as possible so we can get started, shouldn’t you?” He saw his own smug smile in the reflection of her watery eyes.

“But that’s not fair!” she exploded. “You train me now so you know all my weaknesses and you can make it so I’ll always lose.”

“Tough luck, shithead–” and that was a slip of the tongue–“Life isn’t fair so suck it up and train harder when I tell you to.” She shuttered and she looked for something to say, only to come up short. She stormed away, stomping as hard as she could, which was laughable when he’d seen mountains shake from the force of armies, and disappeared into the shelves as per usual. “And—lesson two—combat isn’t all there is to a fight, remember that.” he’d called after. He figured a tip or two wouldn’t hurt, especially after securing an afternoon where she’d be too frustrated to pester him. That was what the common people called bliss, he assumed.

The next day, Sakura approached with an embarrassed Mebuki in hand. Gone was the green dress and in came the strangely cropped nightdress and pair of similarly cropped leggings and new miniature ninja sandals shoddily made. He could immediately tell who it was that had wrangled custody of the scissors that morning, and that news of his potty mouth had been lost to the void.

“Ah. Really taking that challenge in stride, aren’t you, Sakura-chan?”

“I’m afraid she insisted,” her mother cut in.

“Yeah, that much is obvious…” She looked around awkwardly, but Sakura only seemed to grow more inclined to glare. “It’s probably more practical to train in. And she would’ve grown out of that soon, anyway, so it’s for the best really.”

Her glare had abated by the time they’d reached the training grounds, despite them walking in absolute and uncomfortable silence. She approached the laps with refreshing vigor and made it perhaps two laps more than what he’d previously seen from her, telling him she certainly wasn’t pushing herself like she should’ve been. Now, he didn’t like to criticize the younger generation for a lack of work ethic, especially at his grand old age of nineteen, but it simply had to be said that, nowadays, children didn’t push themselves to their limits like they used to when he was their age. Probably for the best, but he also appreciated this change in attitude from Sakura since her lack of whining made training so much more peaceful.

It also meant she was as razor-focused as she was when she was reading, which meant she was less likely to make a mistake and he had to correct her less. It made for a more tranquil morning on the field, and gave him a chance to start his own training, stretching his cramped muscles like a cat in the glory of the sun. He wasn’t too much of a refined physical combatant on his best day, but he relished the movement anyway. A shinobi could only take so long in a sedentary lifestyle before something had to give.

He often liked to train as though he had no chakra just in case (he did not want a repeat of that one B-rank mission, Sage forbid), and focused on his messy but effective sequence of kata against his own post, making another clone to watch Sakura train. It was as easy as breathing, muscle memory kicking in and carrying him in and away, the silence turning companionable rather than stilted.

He stopped for five minutes to assess her for himself. Her form was leaps and bounds better than it had once been, but she was still slow, and very far off what a finished product would—should—look like. It was, however, decent progress for the time.

She stopped, suddenly, having realized his stare.

“You know, Kaa-san is paying you to do the job, not whatever that is!” she called from over the field, cupping her mouth.

He shunshinned to her and she startled. “I can assure you, it is competent enough to do what it’s supposed to.” He put an arm around his clone, careful not to put too much weight on it. It eyed him, slightly repulsed, but kept its mouth shut.

“And how do you know that?” she said. He noted that she liked to scrutinize people.

“Because I made it that way. I put more yin chakra in it than usual so it can teach you better. It’s shimmery, see?” He shook the clone about the shoulders, watching its head wobble on its weak neck. Its movements distorted the air around it, giving the effect of blurred vision, or the way air moves on hot ground. “And kinda see-through, which means it doesn’t have as much yang in it”

“Do you usually do it evenly?” Her tone changed, sounding more like when she’d first asked him about DNA sequencing. By then, his clone had had enough of him and smacked him off.

“Yeah, pretty much. Maybe a sixty-forty split depending on if it needs to talk like me or fight like me, but otherwise fifty-fifty. Maybe a little earth chakra to stand them up a little straighter.”

“So if it’s more yin than yang, it’s smarter but less tough, but if it’s more yang than yin, it’s tougher but dumber?”

“Yeah, that’s about right…” It struck him that these questions were a little below Sakura’s caliber. “But, you already knew that, didn’t you?”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Struggling to hold back a grin, she rocked back and forth on her toes, with her hands clasped behind her back. Resolutely, she refused to look at him.

“Oh, yeah?” he said, incredulously, feeling his own smile forming at her attempt at reconnaissance. She may have gotten one over him when they first met, but he wouldn’t let that happen again.

Pursing her lips coyly, she continued, smugly, “Well… Combat isn’t all there is to a fight, is there?”

He almost—almost—laughed.

“Alright, well, the first thing you need to know about espionage and reconnaissance is that you can’t let the enemy know that that’s what you’re doing. It gives them free reign to feed you as much trash as they’d like. Call that lesson three.”

“Maybe that’s part of my plan,” she said, shrugging. Personally, Shiro couldn’t fathom why that would be part of her plan, but she was five so he’d let that slide.

“The next thing you need to know is that you can’t ever let the enemy know what your plan is.”

“Maybe that’s part of my plan too.”

He stared at her, before reaching out and feeling her forehead. It was a little warm but nothing to worry about in his opinion, but then, he wasn’t a doctor, was he? She was more disheveled today than she had been yesterday, and he thought that would’ve been a hard feat to achieve. Her hair was plastered to her forehead and halfway out of her ponytail, whilst her clothes, self-tailored by a five-year-old lest he forget, was covered in dry dirt and her sweat. He stared at her a little longer.

“Maybe the training is getting to you. Go take a break,” he concluded.

“But I’m not tired enough yet.”

“You’ve trained longer today without a break than you have all week. You need a break.” Apparently, it seemed that her attitude had changed entirely since the first day of training.

“No,” she asserted. “I’m going to keep training.”

“Alright,” he returned, glaring back at her. “But when your mother arrives and you’re still passed out from training, it will not be my fault.”

“Fine,” she leveled.

“Fine.”

That day, she trained until she collapsed.

Thus began a new routine for them. She came, she trained, she attempted to gather information, she trained, she collapsed, he carried her to the library, she ate lunch, she read, he walked her home…

Shiro’s surprise and concern at her newfound vigor wore off within two days, as it became just another run-of-the-mill anomaly he associated with her. Her mother did not agree when he mentioned it to her, but that was an issue between mother and daughter. (If Sakura’s continued behavior was anything to go by, Shiro could succinctly deduce that Mebuki did not get through to her.) If anything, he was a little impressed as the rate of her progress increased significantly.

The thirteenth day of training was the first day she’d cried about it, much to his unease and her later embarrassment, when she’d trained so hard the previous days that she could barely move without pain. She’d fallen onto the floor after only half an hour and didn’t get up for the rest of the day, sitting by the tree in silence, until they’d walked back to the library, also in silence. He hadn’t known what to say, so he’d said nothing at all. He regretted that by the time he went home.

He’d almost thought she wouldn’t turn up the next day. He was wrong. (He was starting to sense an unpleasant pattern in his life.)

In fact, she’d turned up, and told him she would be making her first attempt to defeat fake-Sakura today. He felt too awkward to suggest otherwise, so he’d let her have at it.

Sakura and the clone stared each other down in the ring he drew in the dirt with a stick.

“Same rules as last time,” he said, speaking the longest sentence he’d said to her in over a day. “You hit it hard enough for it to disappear and you win. You can take as long as you need. Only this time, if the clone drives you out of the ring, the fight ends.”

“What if the clone leaves the ring?”

“Then…” he gave it some thought. “You win.”

“Alright…Two ways to win…” She breathed hard. “I got this.”

“You got this,” he said awkwardly.

He looked between fake-Sakura, clad in her original green day dress and brown sandals and real-Sakura: one stone-faced eerie replica of a child, and one nervously twitching real child.

“You may begin.”

Before he’d even finished his sentence, Sakura had pounced.

Yes—pounced.

Already, the improvement in two weeks had been evident. She was much faster than she’d started, she held more power in her attacks and her practice with the kata had clearly paid off. This was a quicker turnaround than he’d expected, no doubt due to her newly reformed attitude and training practice, and perhaps set them on course for actually meeting the goal in time for her exams by the end of the month.

But, he grimaced, he knew she was not going to win, even before they had started. Naturally, fake-Sakura was too far above Sakura’s level despite him dumbing it down enough to only be as skilled and smart as a second year Academy student. She didn’t have a chance to begin with, and there was no way she would land a hit on it. Even if he’d dumbed it down to a first year Academy student’s level, he still had his doubts.

If he weren’t a shinobi, he supposed he’d feel guilty about lying to children, but he was a shinobi, and thus he felt nothing.

She’d eventually lost by being driven out of the circle, and demanded a rematch as soon as she could stand.

He looked at her like she’d grown another head.

“No way. You’re covered in dirt,” he began, “and in sweat. You’re too tired to continue so you’ll be putting yourself at a disadvantage here.”

“No,” she all but grunted, “I know I can win. I can go again.”

“Take a seat, Sakura, you’re clearly exhausted.”

“No. I can do better than that, I swear!” she said, the beginnings of hysterics making themselves known. He scrambled for what to say to her that wasn’t an offer for dango.

“But you did fantastic today. You did way better than I thought you could, and, quite frankly,” and he felt almost embarrassed saying this, “you’ve impressed me.”

“But I didn’t win.” She sniffled.

“You can try again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, until you win. Don’t stress about it. Read a picture book or something for now. Knowing when to cut your losses is a crucial survival skill in the field, so you should always avoid getting into unnecessary fights when it’s likely you won’t win. That’s lesson four.”

“Yeah, yeah… I get it.” She stared at him, a little shyly. The first time she’d ever been properly shy in front of him since they’d met. “Was I really good?”

“Well,” he weighed his words, “no. But before you get upset, I’d like to add that nobody can expect you to be any good after only two weeks of training kata. Your progress is good though.”

“Enough to make it into Class A?”

Shiro held back a grimace. That was still a tough task. Class A kids were clan kids, clan heirs and that sort. Clan kids trained from the moment they could walk. And that was just on top of their own optimized clan kata, far more lethal than the standard Academy set. An entire private repertoire at their fingertips. What did Sakura have? A month of training. She would be lucky to get into Class C and that would be relying on her written scores. He didn’t know what to say.

But he didn’t have to say anything, it turned out. From his silence, she’d gleaned the answer.

Like clockwork, she trained until she collapsed.

“What’re you reading this time?” Shiro asked Sakura a day later. She’d just awoken from her routine unconsciousness in her designated library chair, and she still hadn’t ever asked how she’d gotten from the training grounds to the library every day whilst being asleep. Just another thing that remained unspoken between them.

“It’s a biography.”

“A biography?” he said. “Wow, that's the closest to a story book you’ve ever had. What sparked this change?”

“The history books just aren’t cutting it anymore. They don’t tell me enough about what the shinobi can do for it to be useful to me.”

“What shinobi is this one about?”

When Shiro peeked over her shoulder, he was met with the printed face and name of Senju Tsunade. He paused.

“Senju Tsunade, huh?” He supposed most girls would like her, for lack of other role models.

“Why? Do you know her?”

“Know her?” Now, that was a crazy thought. “I know of her. She’s practically a village myth.”

“Why’s she a myth?”

“Have you gotten to the part where she disappeared without a trace two decades ago?”

“She disappeared?” Her interest spiked. “No, I’m only at the part where she invented a bunch of jutsu.”

“Well, the official report is that she disappeared. Everybody knows she ran,” he whispered conspiratorially. Children were so easily impressed.

Sakura chewed her lip, absent-mindedly.

“Ran from what?”

“Who knows.” Pressure, stress, grief, madness… The potential reasons were endless. “She was a genius, a legend before that, especially on the battlefield, according to everyone who's ever known her. I wouldn’t know. She left before I was born.” There was definitely a trend, as far as he was concerned, of the remarkably talented going rogue from the village, for some reason. Shiro wasn’t inclined to probe this matter, since he’d never be in a position to understand it.

“I think she’s awesome… She totally changed the village forever. She practically invented modern medicine before she was even twenty-five and reformed our hospitals. Apparently, life expectancy shot up a crazy amount. Like thirty years, crazy. And she was, like, a terror on the battlefield. She’ll have her name in the history books forever.” Sakura had a wistful look in her eyes. “She fought in the Second Shinobi War, right?”

“She did. She fought with her teammates and they acquired the title of the ‘Sannin’. The stories I’ve heard…” What stories they were. Blights upon the field, blazing and razing entire cohorts to the ground, like a scythe through grass. Standing toe-to-toe with Hanzo himself. Alone the sannin were formidable, but, as a team… He supposed that was why Konoha held the values that it did.

“And then she ran?”

“Yeah. After that war ended, she ran. Or disappeared.”

“So she became a missing-nin.”

“Not officially. Nobody in their right minds would classify the heir of the Senju clan as a criminal so they said she went missing.”

The Senju clan had all but dissipated after the Second Shinobi War as much of the front lines had been occupied by their ranks. The war had taken much of their best and brightest disproportionately probably, in Shiro’s opinion, due to some genetic self-sacrificing tendencies, but he wasn’t clear on the when, why or how. He’d missed those history lessons to do his own time on the battlefield, evidently. He knew, however, that the Senju clan seat on the council would always remain even if it was empty and only honorary, and that the clan compound was unoccupied and sealed away. He actually didn’t think he’d ever seen its outer walls. But again—none of his business. The fact remained that the Senju would always be honored in the village so smearing the Senju heiress’ name was close enough to treason.

“Nobody’s seen her since?”

“Nope. Not one. It’s hard to find someone so skilled when they don’t want to be found.”

“That’s a shame.” Sakura wilted.

“Sure is.” Although it probably wasn’t. What good is dragging somebody back to a village to serve it when it's that same service they fled? All it would do is stain the name of the Senju further and he suspected that was why the Sandaime never put out an order for her retrieval. Everybody knew the Hokage got sentimental. “Probably for the best though,” he amended.

“Yeah,” Sakura said pensively, ruefully. “Maybe.”

Stretching, running, katas, a failed spar, katas, collapse. For a while at least, Shiro grew comfortable in the routine. He knew he’d had a house call from Kurenai recently wondering where he’s been, according to his landlord Naoji-san, but he had avoided questioning thus far and he was not about to let this little income of his get taxed. Sakura, in the meantime, had not shied away from asking him questions that he could not avoid.

‘What’s the greatest distance your clone can be from you?’ ‘Does it differ with different people? And chakra levels?’ ‘Does it differ with amounts of yin and yang?’ ‘What are your chakra levels?’

“Okay, I’m gonna have to stop you there, detective. I appreciate your attempts, Sakura-chan, but this is way too obtrusive,” he paused, seeing her mouth the word and adding it to her repertoire. “Look, lesson five—subtlety, okay? Subtlety is key. In any sort of conflict.”

“What’s the point if you already know what I’m trying to do?”

“Practice is always useful. Lesson six for you.” He looked away for a second and muttered to himself. “Wow, I’m getting good at this.”

“Whatever, shinobi-san.” She sighed dramatically. “It’s okay. You can always admit that you don't know the answers. It really is okay, shinobi-san.”

“Better,” Shiro grinned as he spoke. “Still a little obvious given the lead up but definitely better.”

“But it’s interesting, right? How chakra works?” she said, a sort of glee in her tone. “I mean, it’s energy in its most powerful form, it's so—cool. How it changes between people, what we can do with it changes, but everything alive always has it and it interacts with the world in such a cool way. How it can reach across distances, be in two places at once, without actually being linked—”

“What do you mean, without it being linked?”

“It’s energy right? Once it leaves you, it doesn’t come back.”

“That’s true, technically. Chakra does get expended after you’ve used it, but whilst you’re using the chakra for whatever method it’s still connected to you. I mean, it’s not like there’s a string of chakra between me and my clones, but my chakra signature is, like, you know what a radio signal is, right? It’s like a signal, or a beacon. A tether.”

“And when you disrupt the tether, the jutsu and the chakra dissipates?”

“Correct… Oh, for fuck’s sake.” His groans cut through his sharp laugh. “Of course.”

“That was subtle, though, right?” A coy smile adorned her little face, but her eyes gave away her giddiness.

“It was,” he begrudged her. “I’m impressed.”

Shiro would later rationalize that he only gave away such information because it was his duty to correct her mistakes as her teacher, and resolved that he would never make such a slip up in the field. No, in fact, he was at a disadvantage with Sakura, because she wasn’t actually a threat to him as his student. That was it. Yes.

Privately, he wondered when he’d started considering himself her teacher in earnest.

The next day, the twenty-fifth day of training that was, five days before the September entrance exams, brought along an ugly little storm in the morning. Shiro supposed this was long overdue for the yellowing Konoha grass, which didn’t usually yellow in summer. Sakura had a few choice words to offer though.

“This is so stupid. We haven’t got the time for this, shinobi-san. We’ve only got five days left to train,” she whined from her comfortable, dry, warm library chair. He rolled his eyes, flicking through some clothing magazine. He spotted a cute pair of shinobi boots for kids. And a nice red top. He bookmarked the pages.

“I don’t know. I figured you’d rather not be ill on the day of your exams, not to mention, you’re probably gonna get in, anyway, without the extra work.” Of that, he was certain. He hadn’t been sure previously, but she’d made good progress, more than he had anticipated. Part of this, he suspected, had been due to his unplanned integration of spars which usually wouldn’t be introduced until after the katas were perfected and optimized. He had no idea that integrating the practice instead would be so much more effective. He was shaping up to be a decent teacher.

“Good enough to get into Class A?” Well, not that good of a teacher. “Hm. Thought not.”

“Watch your manners, kid.”

“Sorry, shinobi-san,” she muttered, blushing. “I really need to train though.”

“Can it wait until this afternoon?” Shiro looked out of the window. A flash of lightning, seventeen seconds, and a rumble. “It’s a little close for comfort.”

“It can’t, sensei,” she whined. She’d never used that word before. It made him puff out his chest just a little.
“What if I just spar with your clone? That’s the best sort of practice.”

He could hardly refuse his student now, could he?

“One spar?”

“Just one.”

They made it to the training grounds in record time considering the empty streets and their half running, half walking jog. The grounds were muddy, empty, and the air was sticky, and humid under the rainfall. He never liked how the rain made his hair stick to his neck. Clothes were waterproof, though, unlike Sakura’s, whose clothes were near enough soaked through. They made it out to the center of the field, against Shiro’s better judgment, since Sakura demanded to be where there was greatest light to fight in.

“You’ll catch your death in the rain, Sakura. If we turn back now, we can get you a dry change of clothes so you don’t get ill. It has to be now, though. You hear?” he shouted over the roar of thunder. He’d stopped counting the seconds now but he knew it was getting closer. If he put a little more earth chakra in his clone, they’d get the spar done just that much faster before the lightning got here. It was about time he upped the difficulty.

“I’m not afraid of a little storm, shinobi-san,” she grinned, oddly excited. Whatever, she was weird, he knew that.

Shiro’s clone poofed into existence. It was the same old girl in a pick dress, though smaller than the real Sakura now and a little more opaque. He drew the circle into the mud. “Ready?” he said.

“I’m ready,” Sakura shouted through strands of pink falling into her face.

“Here we go then.”

As was common these days, real-Sakura attacked first and the fake-Sakura merely blocked. He saw the flash and heard the thunder boom in the background. It had his hackles rise, but he focused on the spar. Sakura was faster and more precise than she used to be, driven and tenacious, and calculating in her blows. Her kata sequence was generally smooth and well-applied, but not perfect and clumsy in some instances. Between spars he changed fake-Sakura’s constructed weakness from this to that, sometimes the real-Sakura could get to it, and often she spotted it but couldn’t do anything about it, as the fake-Sakura’s defense would always be far greater than real-Sakura’s offense. Today, it was a sprained ankle, which meant his clone didn’t use its right leg for anything but dodging. Sakura spotted this faster today, and went for a kick that was slightly too late on the timing and too slow on the execution. The light flashed and thunder roared.

He was getting nervous. For the first time, he was not going to wait out for her to collapse in exhaustion. Instead, he was going to push for offense.

Fake-Sakura moved in. She pushed back instead of simply blocking, pushing Sakura, inch by inch away from the circle’s center. Shiro could read the alarm on real-Sakura’s face. Sakura attempted to dodge fake-Sakura’s palm toward the diaphragm but only dodged enough so that it grazed her side, still winding her some. Light, thunder, ten seconds. He’d started counting again. Fake-Sakura landed a knock to the backs of Sakura’s knees causing her to stumble but not fall into the mud. Just a week ago it would surely have sent her to the floor.

Light. Thunder. Nine seconds. Too close. Hair raised on his arms.

Fake-Sakura’s next kick was the hit to send her to the floor. A sharp, roundhouse kick to the back, possibly a little too strong for what it was supposed to be, as it sent Sakura face first into the mud, but he’d chalk that up to the earth chakra he imbued the clone with. Sakura rolled over, wiping the mud from her face and grabbed at the clone’s weak ankle. Fake-Sakura kicked it off with ease and backed up into the center of the ring, giving the girl some space to breathe. His student was growing irritated, he could tell by the set of her jaw and clumsier attacks. If Sakura was smart, she’d cut her losses and call it quits.

The lightning snapped, Shiro jolted, the clone shook for a moment, and the thunder rumbled. Sakura got up. There had been seven seconds this time.

The clone crowded in on Sakura, slightly more aggravated as a result of Shiro’s tense nervousness. Fake-Sakura aimed up and at Sakura’s jaw, which Sakura leant out of the way to avoid. The clone hit her squarely in her exposed side again, knocking her sideways and almost sending her stumbling out of the circle. She had never lost that way so far, and he suspected that she would feel embarrassed if she had.

The lightning flashed once more, the thunder louder, closer. Five seconds. Faster. The fight had to end now.

Shiro’s clone knocked Sakura from her feet with a low, sweeping kick. She landed with a groan on her back, rolling to avoid another aggravated kick from the clone standing menacingly over her. Perhaps Shiro was being harsh.

Light. Thunder. Four seconds. Shoulders hunched, startled, wavered. Not harsh enough.

Sakura cried out as a kick actually landed on her, threatening to push Sakura out of the circle. Anguished, Sakura cried out again. Sakura knew the rules. If she wanted to quit, she’d leave the circle, stay down or forfeit. As it was, she tried to stand up again. Was that tears or rain? Whatever.

Light. Thunder. Three seconds. Waver.

Fake-Sakura slammed Sakura back into the mud again, with greater force than necessary. Shiro used the tether to pull the clone back. That was enough. Sakura was crying. She was going to quit. She was going to quit.

Light. And this time he heard the sizzle as it struck a tree some several hundred meters behind him before he heard the thunder. Felt it reverberate under his feet and into his body. He jumped, and wavered, his clone flickered, going almost entirely see-through and back to opaque again, jolting and looking back at the burning tree he knew was behind him. Light again.

In that moment, Sakura, fully in the mud, crawled and lunged, whilst the clone had gone hazy and transparent again, latched her hand around her ankle and pulled with all her might. The clone slipped, falling backward and, as it made contact with the ground, dissipated into the air.

Silence. The rain. A wet laugh from Sakura who still laid on her front in the mud, hair plastered to her forehead, caked in mud, a channel for her tears carved through down her dirtied cheeks. A belated, disbelieving laugh from Shiro. Light again.

In a second, Shiro was by her side, hauling her up and onto his shoulders, smearing mud onto himself in the process. He wrapped her arms around his neck and legs around his waist. He could hear her giggles in his ear all the way back to the library.

Chapter Text

“Naturally, the win was a fluke,” Shiro said once they were situated in the library, semi-warm and dry with his emergency towels around them. “You wouldn’t have won if there hadn’t been a storm.”

Sakura shivered and recoiled, water streaming from her hair still. “I won, so I won! You said combat wasn’t all there was to a fight, and I was using more than just combat!”

“You used my weaknesses against me…” he acknowledged, half ashamed, half exhilarated. “How did you know I was scared of lightning?”

Her face twitched and his face grew hot.

“Uhh… I didn’t know that.”

“So you guessed?” His voice dialed up a pitch.

“Uhh… no. I figured that since you use earth chakra in the clones, the lightning would disrupt the tether. Because earth chakra is weak to lightning chakra… you know?”

Interesting. Not correct, surprisingly. But an innovative, if extremely risky, idea.

“That’s unexpected.” He cleared his throat unnecessarily. “Anyway, that’s not how it works. There’s no chakra in natural lightning.”

“Huh? So how did your tether get disrupted?”

“I told you… I got a little, uh… jumpy.” From the heat in his face, he just knew he was broadcasting his embarrassment loud and clear for her to see. He’d have to get her back sooner rather than later: once she wrapped her little head around the humiliation she had bestowed upon him, he was sure he would see her head grow bigger in real time. It was truly in the best interest of her health that he stopped that process before it started.

“You were scared?” And Sakura had the audacity to look confused. Brat. “I wasn’t scared.”

“Well, you’re a weird kid so I’m failing to see your point,” he snapped. He had to admit, that wasn’t his greatest comeback, but today hadn’t been his day in general so what was new?

“What do you mean there’s no chakra in lightning?”

Teacher-mode: on.

“There’s energy in lightning, sure, but not chakra energy. Chakra is only found in living creatures, like ourselves, which we can use and mold into different forms. So artificial lightning, that is to say made from chakra, would’ve done the job.”

Leaning almost out of her chair to squint at him, she said the dreaded words, “So I won, because you were scared?” Her head was growing as she spoke.

“Not scared. On edge.”

“Same thing.” No it wasn’t. He fought the urge to correct her. “Are you going to train me with chakra now?”

“No.” That was a weight lifted off him.

“What?” He took great glee in the sadness that befell her. “But you said–”

“I know what I said, but that was never my plan. Lesson seven, never take a shinobi’s word at face value. Moreover, don’t trust anyone.”

“But–”

“No buts, we would be wasting time at this stage to try and unlock tenketsu and move chakra instead of sparring. You wouldn’t be able to use it in the exams anyway.” And he was right, as ever. It would be a tremendous waste of time and effort. He continued over her obvious sounds of protest, loudly, matter-of-factly and stern. “No, we have five days left to train, but ideally you’d have a rest day before the exams, so no, no chakra, no meditation, no jutsu, just hand-to-hand. Lesson eight, play to your advantages always, when under time constraints.”

Regrettably, he had the fleeting thought that she should be able to revel in her victory for more than twenty minutes so he begrudged her this: “That being said… you did very well today. Keep that up and score 100 on the written test and you could make it into Class A.”

“Really?”

“I said ‘could’—so, as long as you don’t mess up and the cohort this year is a little weaker than usual, it is more likely than not that you’ll get into Class A.” He let that linger in the air, before he stood up. He would not be the one to provide false hope to such an intelligent child. “We’ll resume training tomorrow.”

Pensive, she sat back in her chair and after a moment of furrowed brows, she dug into her satchel and pulled out a little notebook he’d never seen her with before. Taking that as a sign, he turned away from her.

“Sensei?” She caught his attention before he returned to his desk. Perking up, he turned back around.

“Yes?”

“You said there was no chakra in lightning. How do lightning users actually use it then? None of the books say anything about that.”

Another interesting question.

“I guess… They use chakra to replicate lightning.” Even to himself he sounded unsure. “I wouldn’t know. I use earth.”

Nodding voraciously, she scribbled something down before scratching something else out, tongue poking out. He wondered briefly what notes she'd put in there—and in general, what notes a six-year-old would find to be significant enough to write down. She scanned her eyes across her notes again.

“Would it be the same for fire users?” Shiro shrugged, feeling like he shrugged too much for a grown man.

“As lightning users? I suppose.”

“Right. Okay.” Her hands went back to scribbling. He had the vague sense that she was now in her own little world again.

“Anything else?” he offered.

Without looking up from her writing, she mumbled, “No. Thank you, sensei.”

Exam day crept up on them far too quickly. Shiro waited by the entrance of the Academy and her mother to turn up and found himself getting just a little misty (just a little!) at the sight. He blinked himself back into composure as they approached. He lifted the bag in his hands and waved it. Sakura sped up dragging her mother along with her. She had her shredded clothes on today, complete with an extra large satchel and hair tie bunching her hair up in the back, leaving bangs to fall over her face.

Shiro looked behind him, at the ever growing crowd of parents and children, and tried to put off the observation that an entirely too large portion of the parents were clan heads and their children, their heirs. It was a nasty coincidence, a terrible situation for somebody like Sakura to be in. He could practically smell the defeat on her now. He could imagine it’d be one of the seven Uchiha kids to pummel her into the ground or that Sarutobi boy, or even those Yamanaka and Hyuga girls. (He squinted at the downcast Hyuga girl—on second thought, maybe not.) He could hear the tantrum brewing already and convinced himself it was only annoyance he felt, in anticipation of Sakura returning to him after the fact and demanding to be trained for next year.

Sakura’s arrival at his side caught his attention once more. He bent to match her level but not before bowing to her mother, who begrudged him a nod back.

“Sakura-chan,” he greeted, kneeling to match her level. “This is for you.”

She took the bag from his hand and moved to peer inside.

“What is it?”

“Don’t look yet. It’s a surprise for after the exams,” he said, holding the bag shut and smiling at her. Sakura grew a little giddy. “And I want you to remember,” his face soured a little, “that no matter how these exams go, you did well, and you can always try again.”

“What do you mean?” She faltered, looking around. “Is there something wrong?”

“No, no, nothing’s wrong, per se… But the competition is a little tougher this year.” He looked behind him and winced. She followed his line of sight to the collection of children beyond the gates and paled, eyes widening. “All I’m saying is maybe luck isn’t on your side today, and that’s okay because… well, uhh–”

“I think what shinobi-san means to say is,” Sakura’s mother placed her hand on Sakura’s shoulder and turned her around, glaring a hole into Shiro before smiling in what he assumed was supposed to be an encouraging way to Sakura, “there's no shame in failing the first time, especially against this selection. The Academy will be open next year so it’s no rush, really. And you can always change your mind, even in the midst of the exams. Just let a teacher know you want to go home, okay?”

Shrugging her mother’s hand off, she frowned.

“I’m not quitting.” She looked back toward the gathering of applicants and seemed to shrink in on herself. “I’m not quitting.”

“Good for you,” Shiro chimed in. Haruno’s glare returned. “But if you did, it wouldn’t be so bad.”

That seemed to draw Sakura’s ire.

“I’m not quitting!”

Shiro raised his hand in mock surrender and looked pointedly at her mother. She rolled her eyes.

“Alright, well.” He remembered something. “Now listen, kid. This is probably the last time we’ll ever talk—”

“What? Why?”

“Hold on a second. This is probably the last time we’ll ever talk because I’m back on duty tomorrow—well technically today so I really shouldn't be here—and I’m leaving the village,” Phase Two of his punishment, he thought privately: dangle the prospect of a fun mission in front of his eyes only to put him on patrol duty for three months at Fire’s border, “so I want you to know,” he cleared his throat awkwardly, “that I’m, uh, very, uh, proud of you… And you’ve been a pretty cool student. Yes,” he nodded, “pretty cool.”

“Oh.” She seemed to ponder this, calm again. “So you’re not gonna die?”

“What? No!” He hoped not. An Academy sensei began to call the applicants in.

“That’s good. Thanks for the present Shinobi-san. Kaa-san will take care of it for me. Goodbye,” she said, handing the bag to her mother.

“Sakura, isn’t there something you need to say to the kind shinobi before you go in?” Haruno muttered.
Sakura blushed.

“Oh yes,” she bowed deeply at the waist, “thank you a lot, Shinobi-san, for teaching me a lot for these exams!” She stood up again and huffed. “Okay, I gotta go in now. Bye Kaa-san!” She ran through the gates.

“Bye, Sakura!” she said back. “And remember what Keiko-san told you!”

This gave her, and Shiro, pause.

“Okay! Bye!” She disappeared behind the closing Academy doors.

Well. That was the end of it. Felt a little anticlimactic if you asked Shiro, but that was the nature of most endings. Awkward too, if the way Haruno was staring at him in his periphery had any influence. He turned to her. He bowed.

“Haruno-san. It has been a pleasure teaching your daughter—”

“You’re a little young, aren’t you?” He straightened at her cool tone. What was it with him that pissed her off? “How old are you?”

“Uh, nineteen—”

“How’d they get you?”

“Excuse me?” he said before he could process the question. She looked expectantly at him. “The Academy? They didn’t ‘get’ me, I joined because… Because I wanted to.” He was carefully growing uneasy.

“At age six?” He nodded. “Why did you want to be a shinobi at age six?”

“I don’t remember,” he forced out, throat tight. “I don’t see what this has to do with you.”

“Maybe you should try to remember,” she returned. Shouldering past him, she turned a corner and left his field of vision.

Weird woman.

(It hadn’t occurred to him until he was halfway to Fire’s border that that had been the first time since he was nine years old that anyone had ever called him young. He figured that was what had unsettled him so, and promptly shelved that thought in favor of tackling a few younger bandits from attacking an old lady on the road.)

Sakura didn’t care much for Keiko as a general rule but she did pity her, even if Sakura’s position wasn’t much greater than hers. She wasn’t stupid: she knew what Keiko did for a living and she wasn’t trying to end up like her, so she was not inclined to take her advice. Not that it had made much sense. She’d told her to mess up a few of the written questions but failed to explain why she should. Sakura wasn’t a fan of following advice that was not reasonable and would prevent her from achieving her goals, so she would not do as she said even if she had promised otherwise, even if her mother had nodded along with Keiko’s argument last night at dinner.

This is why, when Sakura was sitting at the end of a desk with a little boy with brown spiked hair beside her and she was handed a wad of paper, she answered each question with ultimate precision. Not that it was hard. Basic arithmetic, basic reading and writing, a few harder kanji, names of the Hokage, made up most of the knowledge based questions, half of the paper if she had to estimate. There were a select few harder questions on the shinobi wars and geography but that was no challenge. It took her less than nineteen minutes. By the time she’d finished that half, the boy next to her had gone to sleep.

The other half were the stranger questions meant to examine character, she surmised. ‘What is the best thing about living in Konohagakure?’ She thought that was a bit redundant, but she mentioned something about tall trees and the like. Even added a bit about the nice people. She wasn’t sure how they’d mark this but aimed to seem as eager as possible.

‘What would you change about Konohagakure if you had the chance?’ Sakura had a plethora of festering critiques, starting the underwhelming assortment of dango stalls and ending with her shoddy apartment building and her ugly neighbors, but naturally, she couldn’t write that down. There was only so much space and time she had for this question. She debated whether writing ‘nothing’ would be too si-co-fan-tic, and instead wrote that she’d like for there to be more women shinobi—kunoichi in other terms.

‘Why do you want to be a shinobi of Konohagakure?’ That was a bit on the nose, even for a six-year-old, she thought. The obvious answer was to protect the village and the people, but she didn’t really care about all of that. Sakura knew what she wanted. Again, she couldn’t write that down. She wrote down the obvious answer.

Done in twenty-nine minutes, with thirty-one minutes left on the clock. She spent the rest of the time staring out of a window.

The next phase was the physical exam. Almost trembling with nerves, she feared that she would let it show.

When the horn had sounded, the group of applicants set off on laps of the field being timed by the teachers. Sakura started in the middle of the group but somehow had fallen behind on the second lap, drifting towards the civilian kids. A mortifying occurrence, to be quite frank, as she noted the looks the clan kids aimed at her—of which the Uchiha were the worst offenders—but she was certain she’d be able to recover for spars… Almost certain. Sakura had come into this phase with low expectations so she couldn't say she wasn't meeting them.

The teachers read off the spar pairings once the last of them had finished the third lap, without so much as a minute’s break. She was intensely thankful she was not that last boy, who she assumed to be asthmatic by the way he blotched red and heaved. Behind her back, she crossed her fingers, hoping desperately that he would be her sparring partner when her turn arrived, but she thought better than to depend on her hope.

Sakura was in the fourth match to be called. Her hope was futile—she had been paired with Uchiha Sasuke.

He was a small boy, but by no means scrawny. He was well groomed, smartly dressed. Pristine white shorts and unruffled high-collar blue shirt, despite the laps, of which she knew he was at the helm. A gleam in his eyes and a set to his mouth. He smelled of self-assurance. His clansmen clamored at his name. This did not bode well for Sakura.

“The rules are simple,” a white-haired man named Kuzo started for the fourth time in a steadily increasing monotone. “First to forfeit or leave the circle’s confines loses, the other wins. Should there be no winner after ten minutes, we’ll call a draw.” Practically identical to the rules of her training spars. “No weapons or otherwise harmful objects are permitted. Let’s keep this an honest and fair fight. We’re all comrades here. You may begin.”

Uchiha Sasuke made the first move. His fist darted towards her face, and Sakura, not having anticipated such a quick commencement (although she really should have—if she’d been paying due attention she’d have noticed how he’d planned his strategy before he’d entered the circle) failed to dodge in time. The fist skimmed her cheek. He was much faster than her and she was desperately unaccustomed to fighting anybody that didn’t have her face, that was real. It unsettled her.

Sakura aimed a kick to his stomach, using her momentum from dodging, closer to simply leering sideways, to twist, put her hands on the ground, twisted back to kick his stomach and continued to twist until she was on her feet again. The positive was that she was sure her foot met flesh; the negative was that being upside down briefly had disoriented her and Sasuke in comparison hadn’t the good grace to at least seem winded.

His kata were much different to hers and much more streamlined than her own. He punched harder, kicked harder, both of which she felt painfully in her diaphragm. She was forced on the defensive, evading the worst of the blows and enduring the least damaging, to mitigate the damage. Her priority couldn’t be to win—there was no chance—but merely to stay in the center of the circle.

But—There! A weakness! His sandal caught on the dirt causing him to stutter and Sakura took her chance to wallop him in the jaw. He stumbled backward.

Her wrist ached, she must have punched wrong, and his face bloomed red if only a little. It was hardly a momentous victory for Sakura but the look in his eyes made her shrink anyway. She hesitated. The clamor paused and morphed.

In the split second before Uchiha Sasuke made his next move, Sakura considered this: the other children must be able to smell the fear, the weakness, the other on her, or otherwise sense it. There was no other explanation for the mounting chants of Uchiha Sasuke’s name as he proceeded to sufficiently pummel her into the ground.

Uchiha Sasuke’s last punch sent her falling out of the circle. His name was called out as the victor whilst she cradled her bruising jaw, holding back her tears. She looked at the stopwatch: they had only fought for fifty-one seconds.

Haruno Sakura was usually no good at remembering names but she did remember people’s faces pretty well. She remembered exactly who had cheered for Uchiha Sasuke and who had stayed silent. This was why, when she saw a blond little boy with whisker marks adorning his cheeks being taunted by some older civilian kids, she was heavily inclined to help him out.

She was in a park closer to Enkita Public Library rather than her own district, here instead of the library because she couldn’t bear to show her face in front of Dosato-san again after firstly betraying him by sidling up to that shinobi, and secondly the embarrassment she would face if he asked her how the academy exams went only for later to find out she had been rejected. She would visit him in a week’s time after she got her results back, if, and only if, she was accepted. In the meantime, she had time to waste, no sensei to train her, nothing interesting to do at home, so she sat on a park bench as civilian kids played.

She hadn’t shown her face here in months, not after a particularly surly boy had stolen her bento and threw it on the ground, a final straw in terms of how they usually treated her, and she had scurried away in terror. Now though… Now, she was trained and they weren’t. She could take them and she let it show with the standoffish glare on her face anytime one of them approached. Intimidating them felt like her just desserts. She let it show in the clothes she was wearing too—a new red top and ninja boots, courtesy of Nakamura Shiro—which she had worn for the past three days after the exam, her mother scrubbing them and wringing them out to dry each night.

Now, as she saw the blond boy, the boy who had stayed silent during her spar, get picked at and taunted by those bullies, she got a little angry, a little surlish herself, a little temperamental, and threw a rock at the bully’s head. She missed, of course, her aim had always been subpar, but it had the right effect. The bully startled and bristled. She stared him down. Something on her face must have made him pale. He left the little blond boy alone.

He must have figured that it meant they were friends, for he smiled at her and waved. That wasn’t her intention at all: she didn’t know how to make friends since she’d never had one before. Although, that also meant she had no way of telling if they were now friends or not. She felt uneasy in unknown territory like this. The boy couldn’t have read this on her face as he slid onto the bench next to her.

“I’m Uzumaki Naruto!” he shouted in her face. Her nose wrinkled at the smell and lack of volume control. If he was this loud, it didn’t make sense that he would let the bullies pick on him, especially as he had actually won his spar. It was oddly endearing to her. “I remember you from the exams, dattebayo! You’re Haruno Sakura! You’re super pretty, Sakura-chan!”

She got a little flustered.

“Thanks, Naruto-san…” she muttered, suddenly timid again. This wasn’t going to work for her image in this park. He also kind of smelled weird.

“Don’t call me ‘Naruto-san’, that’s for old people!”

“Okay, Naruto-kun,” she quickly amended. How did one talk to another person again? She wasn’t cut out for friends. She simply couldn’t get a sentence out right.

“We’re gonna be best friends, dattebayo! I can just feel it now! You’re gonna be my right-hand man—uhh, woman—when I become Hokage! Uzumaki Naruto—the Fourth Hokage!”

Sakura looked at him a little disbelieving. He couldn’t be serious. She squinted.

He was, in fact, serious.

“The Fifth Hokage, you mean. There was already a number four,” she said in the absence of any other appropriate response. “Don’t you know how to count?”

He looked away and started to count on his fingers.

“One, two, three..I know how to count! Gramps is Lord Third, not Lord Fourth!”

“Uh-huh…” She looked at him incredulously. “But there was already a Fourth Hokage. Only, he died ages ago and the Third Hokage had to come back again.”

“Ehh?” Naruto squinted back at her. He suddenly got into her face. “Are you lying to me? It’s not funny when people lie to me! I’m pretty smart you know—”

She sneered back at him. “I’m not lying. Just look over there.”

She pointed at Hokage Rock, just visible over the treeline. “Can’t you see there are four Hokages on that mountain?”

Naruto followed her index finger and squinted further. “Huhhhh? That’s what those ugly rocks are for?”

Sakura jumped at the sound of her own laugh, rapidly feeling completely out of her depth. She turned back to the original topic.

“You have to be really strong to become Hokage. And famous.” Although he was an Uzumaki, and from what she’d read they did have the tendency to become exemplary shinobi. So, unless Naruto was an outlier in the same way he was blond, she didn’t doubt that he’d become strong. But Hokage-level strong? That was… not likely. But she didn’t want to confront him with the truth lest she transgress social boundaries. Instead, she regaled him with facts. “The Uzumaki clan have always been very strong shinobi.”

“What clan?” he said, quiet for the first time. She had the feeling she’d transgressed anyway.

“The Uzumaki clan.” He looked lost. She looked away and straight ahead and started talking. “The Uzumaki clan is famous for their use of fuinjutsu techniques and strength in battle. They used to be the dominant, that means most powerful, the most powerful clan in a village called Uzushiogakure but there was a war and the village was destroyed. That means a lot of Uzumaki have spread to different countries. Your parents probably—”

“I don’t have parents.”

“Oh.” Definitely transgressed. “Then they probably saved you by sending you to an orphanage before they died.” Within the timeline of history that definitely didn’t happen, but Naruto couldn’t know that and perked up a bit.

“Yeah. My parents loved me, dattebayo! They saved my life.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Say, Sakura-chan…” he said, suddenly pensive and betraying more intelligence than she had given him credit for, “does that mean I have family somewhere?”

“...Probably. I mean–”

A shadow was cast over them. Sakura startled so much she leapt from her seat. A man, dressed in armor, a sword strapped to his back and a painted mask over his face. A type of shinobi she’d never seen in person before, only mentioned briefly in books, shrouded in secrecy, threat and power.

Naruto broke the silence.

“Nooo…” he whined. She would have snapped at him to show respect had she not been frozen where she stood. “You said I had until lunchtime to play!”

The man merely twitched his head. Naruto got up.

“Fine!” he shouted and turned back to Sakura. “I have to go now. I’ll see you later, dattebayo!”

He turned and dragged himself towards the gate. The man leapt back up into the trees.

As Naruto disappeared from view, she wondered just what type of orphan had an ANBU guard trailing after him.

The results arrived by courier post the next Monday. Haruno Mebuki had a rare day off and read the newspaper at the table whilst Sakura ate breakfast silently. As the front door was visible from the kitchen, Sakura saw the Academy emblem as it passed through the door. She was the first to the door and, with trembling fingers, ripped the envelope apart.

She read.

She had gotten into Class A.

She screamed and her mother forced a smile at her joy. She screamed for so long, the toothless old lady next door banged on the wall for her to shut up.

Sakura was overjoyed, sure, even if she had ranked first in the written exam with full marks and sixtieth in the practical exam, coming in at thirtieth overall, the very last slot in Class A, even if she knew her mother was greatly displeased. She was ecstatic, even. But as she recalled her performance in the practical exam, she felt inexplicably like something was wrong. Like they had miscalculated her score and that she should be in Class B. Or C.

Her mother chose that moment to stand up. “How about a cake to celebrate?”

Chapter Text

Shiro hated border patrol duty. It was known amongst the chunin and jonin population of Konoha that nothing noteworthy had happened ever since the Third Shinobi War and that nothing would happen since Konoha’s resounding victory still echoed across the Five Great Shinobi Nations and then some. The most interesting thing that could happen was the occasional foolhardy spy being too conspicuous in which the guards would swiftly apprehend and package up for the next Torture and Interrogation department courier to collect. But this was more or less business as usual for the nations. Peacetime wasn’t complete without (notso)friendly, mutual espionage. Everyone knew to look the other way when Konoha ANBU zipped through the outpost.

The funnier of the idiots they apprehended were the smugglers, often by the Fire-Wind border, smuggling contraband this way and that. Sometimes it was drugs; other times it was… Well, it was really mostly drugs, since reportedly speaking, Fire country drugs simply didn’t compare. The most potent of drugs crafted from Wind country’s vicious animals and plants, scorpion venom being one of the preferred drugs at businessmen’s brothels for a quick, intense high and moderate comedown. But it had to be a certain species of scorpion lest you meet death. Even if the high risk of addiction and death was becoming a problem in the more impoverished towns, Konohagakure shinobi were content to turn a blind eye to such smuggling since the Daimyo unofficially had his fingers in many pots, which made such idiots more frustrating. Everybody knew that the way to smuggle drugs was via Fire’s coastal ports, not the borders!

The idiocy of civilians was beyond Shiro by now: both the smugglers and the depraved lunatics who took the drugs. No self-respecting shinobi would consume something so risky. The preferred drug among shinobi, on the other hand, was soldier pills, but he could count on one hand the amount of shinobi he’d seen get addicted and none of them were dead.

Far be it from him to judge the civilians though. Their business was their business. Not here, however. Here, in the outpost in the middle of the dried earth, half drought-ridden and half dust, the gradient between Wind and Fire, in the holding cells, civilian business was shinobi business.

As the highest ranked shinobi of the guard rotation, Shiro sat in the cell opposite a shackled little man cowering away from his gaze. Behind him, outside the cell, a line of bored guards watched.

“My name is… Tatsuhana Yobu… uh… I am a Wind country resident..” the man’s flimsy voice warbled. He sweated and shifted his head wrap fanning his neck. Shiro could relate. The heat in south Fire was killer.

“Tatsuhana Yobu…” Shiro drawled. His lackadaisical nature was a product of the fact that he knew this
man was not lying. The civilians rarely do, exceeding his meager expectations of their intellect. Cooperation is always best when you’re outmatched.

“Tatsuhana-san. I am Shinobi Nakamura Shiro of Konohagakure, registration number 018304,” he recited. The registration number was incorrect and was not necessary to share with detainees, but he found it was useful to give civilians a sense of security. “You are being detained at the Fire Border Outpost Honkan under strong suspicion of smuggling since you attempted to cross into Fire without security processing. You will be interviewed,” civilians didn’t like the word ‘interrogate’, “and if we suspect you are guilty you will be incarcerated according to your nation’s laws, details to be determined. Let us commence.”

“I am not a smuggler!” The man started to tremble vigorously. “I am not a criminal!”

“I am afraid you are. You attempted to cross without proper documentation or processing, regardless of whether you are a smuggler or not. You will be at least fined before we send you back through Wind country.” The man trembled some more. He could only just hear the guard shinobi snicker outside the cell. He signaled for silence. “Would you care to explain what you were doing with a sealed storage scroll?”

At this point, the smuggler would crumble assuming that they’d unsealed the contents already. This was not true: protocol was to leave it sealed until the seal was checked for a signature to see who last opened it as potential evidence.

“Open it!” the man cried. Shiro straightened to attention. “Open it and see! It’s not drugs!”

“What is it then?” he responded, still visibly neutral.

“It’s my daughter’s belongings! Look.” His shackled hands reached for the scroll. Shiro handed it to him.

WIth unsteady hands, the man used most of his little chakra to unseal a little red cap, a pair of small blue, spotted socks and a pink blanket, in pristine condition compared to the rags he wore.

“Why do you have this?” Shiro continued. It was still a possibility he was using this as a cover.

“My daughter… She was kidnapped a few months ago. I wanted to take her things to Konohagakure and have her tracked with these clothes.”

“That wouldn’t be wise. Our village guards check documentation. You would’ve been detained at the gates.” Shiro had little patience for idiots considering who he’d spent the last month training.

“I know. But I thought…” he swallowed, “ if I asked for mercy they might let me pay for a mission.”

Ah. The benevolence of Konohagakure to the rescue once again. Back to the important questions.

“I am sure the Kazekage wouldn’t be pleased to know you’re taking your business elsewhere.”

“The Kazekage doesn’t care!” He had the grace to look abashed at his outburst. “My pleas never make it past the Mission Bureau. I must be too far north for him to care.”

Shiro hummed quietly. He wasn’t lying. Liars don’t tremble so viciously. A smuggler would’ve given himself away by now. This had the potential to be mildly interesting.

“How do you know it was a kidnapping?”

“My daughter wouldn’t run away! I love her well, and she has friends and she loves school… She’s going to be a doctor!” he stressed. “And there was no sign of her. No belongings taken, no windows unlocked, no noise. The neighbors didn’t hear a thing. At six o’clock I left her in her room. It was still daylight. I came back five minutes later and she was gone! Somebody skilled must have taken her! A shinobi or missing-nin! Who else could’ve taken her with no noise?”

At this, Shiro leaned back, signaling a short chunin forward, named Miyu. She was one of the older career chunin who routinely went on infiltration missions (or working the rumor mill, as she liked to say) in Wind.

“Your thoughts?” he said, voice low enough only for shinobi to hear.

“His story isn’t inconsistent.”

“On the Kazekage’s perceived indifference?”

“A more tricky matter. The Kazekage is a utilitarian man. It could be that he thought it would be a waste of resources to send out a search squad for one child. Especially for a man that appears to be poor.” Shiro frowned.

“And the kidnapping?”

Miyu frowned, her scarred brow coming together. She hesitated.

“Also not inconsistent. Rumors have been arising these past few months across north Wind of ghost-like kidnappers of children from mostly impoverished regions. I wouldn’t be surprised if missing-nin were working for child traffickers.” Shiro had seen such things in his time. They were always the most grueling of cases to work.

“Sunagakure know?”

“Presumably. Intelligence should’ve sent out a missive to Suna. But that would make the Kazekage’s indifference a cause for concern.”

His eyes snapped to hers.

“No. It wouldn’t. If he is indifferent, he might be,” Shiro switched to Konoha Standard Sign. Collaborator. Not our business, cause conflict.

She signed back: Hope, otherwise.

“We’ll report to Konoha Intelligence,” he said loud enough for Tatsuhana to hear. “We’ll take your daughter’s name and a photograph of her if you have one. An address also.”

“Thank you!” The man almost collapsed into his chair. Shiro ripped a piece of paper from his pocketbook and slid him a pen. The man wrote his name, address, and another name: Tatsuhana Tonomi. He slid the paper back and awkwardly pulled out a creased photo.

Shiro took both and studied the photo. The man in front was in much better shape, grinning with a little girl on his lap. Red hair and frilly pink dress. Much, much younger than Shiro thought she was.

Tatsuhana lurched at him, grabbed Shiro’s hands suddenly, pleading with him.

“Please,” he begged. “You have to help her. She’s only six.”

A flash of pink hair crossed his mind.

Shiro met the man’s eyes and made an empty promise.

Sakura was sure before she had even entered the classroom that she would hate school, which was surprising considering the effort she’d gone to so she could attend, but unsurprising when she recalled the jeers she’d endured fighting Uchiha Sasuke. She dawdled in her pretty red top and brown satchel, stuffed to the brim with half-new supplies and followed the man, Iruka-sensei, in a line of children. Similar to the examination room, they filed into a large classroom with tiered benches. Sakura was near the front of the line and as such, had the option to sit anywhere. She chose the front bench closest to the window.

The students walked past her bench despite the fact it could seat three. She’d expected that. They seemed to have their own friends already. She tried not to stare wistfully at the prettiest girl she’d ever seen, talking loudly to a gaggle of attentive friends, breezing right past her to the back of the room. Though she kept her head down, she noted the Uchiha at their own desks, the Hyuga at their own, and the two other civilian born students at a desk huddled together, whilst the rest of the room was generally mixed. Sakura tensed when a boy sat next to her.

He wore a high cuffed coat and tinted glasses, the Aburame clan symbol adorning his back. Quiet. He left a space between them. A bug crawled from under his collar and into his hair. She was fairly certain she hadn’t seen him at the entrance exams, but at least that meant he hadn’t witnessed her calamity of a fight.

Iruka made his way to the podium and called the class to attention. The voices ceased.

“Welcome to the Academy, students.” His voice was high, piercing, but cheery. “Today is your first day on the road to becoming incredible ninja of Konoha! Over the next six years, you will learn to fight to protect your family and friends and your comrades, and become genin in no time at all!” Excited murmuring broke out. “My name is Umino Iruka. You may call me Iruka-sensei. I will be heading this class’ education. I trust you will all do your best as my students.” Iruka ended his speech with a bright-eyed smile. He seemed nice enough, if a little nervous. He turned to the blackboard, chalk in hand.

“Okay, class. What do we know about the founding of Konoha?”

Sakura pulled out her notepad and began to write.

By the time recess rolled around, Sakura was sure the Academy was just a formality. A whole morning spent on the founding of Konoha and her hand cramped with writing information down that she’d already memorized and was sure every other child in there could’ve recited to her by age two. It must’ve been more for appearance’s sake.

By recess, she was also sure her social life was doomed. She must’ve racked up bad karma in a past life because the boys behind her—and they must have been Inuzuka if the dog smell was anything to go by—kept tugging at her hair and threw screwed up paper into it. Too afraid to disrupt the class, she didn’t so much as turn around, instead sinking in her seat so that they couldn’t reach her. The status of prime bullying victim must be printed on her forehead, because her forehead was so massive (as she was later reliably informed by Ami of Class B when all classes left for recess) a billboard could fit on it. Sakura promptly shifted her hair to cover her forehead.

After attempting to hide in the girls bathroom only to reroute upon hearing voices, she’d simply resorted to sitting at the base of the old oak tree, angling her body so that she couldn’t be seen by the majority. Sakura got to work on her bento box and pretended she didn’t exist.

By lunch, she’d only been more certain that the Academy was a waste of time. An expeditiously long way to acquire a hitai-ate and necessary documentation to become shinobi. They weren’t even going to work on chakra until the second term! Spars were also off the schedule until next term, which she wasn’t too upset by, but it meant they’d be running laps and exercising every afternoon—and she was terrible at that! And, by lunch, she’d realized again, she’d have nobody to sit with by the tree.

Indeed, she was also almost certain that the entirety of Class A collectively agreed to ignore her existence or else taunt her to death.

On the first day, at lunch, Sakura approached a gaggle of girls by the swing hanging on a different tree. They were Class A exclusively as it happened, with the blonde Yamanaka (Yamanaka Ino, Sakura had noted from the amount of times she was called on in class) heading the group. This was the girl Sakura picked out as the prettiest girl she’d ever seen. She spoke, and the rest listened. What about, Sakura couldn’t follow, but as Sakura drifted in at the back of the little circle, not quite entering it, she caught a few words about a cartoon on television. Sakura laughed as the others did, and made it a point to be heard, but did not interrupt. She’d even locked eyes with the girl—Ino—but as Ino finished the story and the group started to move to a different location, not one uttered a word to her.

Sakura flushed.

She knew when she wasn’t welcome. She wasn’t going to try again.

She finished her lunch hiding in the canopy of the old oak.

After lunch, training was humiliating, as predicted. She knew after the entrance exams she could never look Uchiha Sasuke in the eye ever again, and now, after training at the Academy and him outdoing her in this competition she’d privately initiated, she was certain she could never be within ten feet of him without combusting. When he’d finished first in the laps again and she finished last (two whole minutes after him) panting and red, she’d felt his stare on the side of her head and she’d stubbornly looked away. Oddly enough, it was only the other Uchiha boys who laughed.

A positively treacherous day, in total, though she’d lied and told her mother otherwise.

The next day followed much the same. And the next day. And the day after that. And…

Ami was proving to be a bit of a problem. (Read: a very big problem.)

Sakura was no stranger to bullies and being bullied. They usually had the same tactics: harass, physically intimidate, push around, isolate, spread rumors, so on and so forth. Sakura knew this dance well, and yet that didn’t stop it from hurting.

Ami was a small girl, even for her age, and had lank brown hair with blue eyes, but what she lacked in height she made up for in sheer viciousness. She crowded Sakura in corners and pulled at her hair, poked her forehead and made fun of her red shirt—which Sakura took full offense to, but only cried about it after Ami left. Though Sakura made every effort short of fleeing the Academy to avoid her, Ami, or her friends, always seemed to find her.

As Sakura left class for recess, at the back of the clamoring horde, she felt before she saw Ami walk up beside her and grab her wrist. Sakura refused to look at her, let her hair fall into her face. Ami dragged her along into the yard, passed the smiling Iruka and turned a corner. Ami jerked to a stop.

“Sakura.”

Sakura did not look up.

“Sakura!” She poked her forehead until she looked up at Ami. “I remember you! I didn’t before, but I remember you!”

Ami leaned in. “You’re the girl Sasuke-kun beat up! He really beat you up good, huh? Did you cry that day? I don’t remember. I hear you like to cry a lot,” she said as Sakura’s eyes watered. “Are you gonna cry now? I haven’t even said anything mean! You can’t cry when Umeko’s not here. She’ll wanna see this. Don’t cry yet Sakura.”

Sakura regrettably (and to her immense shame) could not restrain her tears.

Ami poked her forehead.

“Oh man. You’re a little crybaby, huh?” She leaned back and snickered. “Umeko’s gonna love this.”

If it wasn’t Ami’s posse, it was those two Inuzuka in her class who made it their business to bother her.

To summarize, after three weeks of this routine, the only social interaction she was getting was Ami. Her only solace was the boy who sat two feet away from her, who, whilst he didn’t acknowledge her per se, turned to stare at the Inuzuka when they were being too obnoxious until they quietened. Privately, she considered Aburame Shino—she’d found that out from checking his exercise book when he wasn’t looking—her first ever friend. Or was that her second ever friend? Wasn’t her first friend supposed to be…

Wait.

Where was Uzumaki Naruto?

It turned out, Uzumaki Naruto was not attending the Academy. She’d learned this after losing patience after a week of waiting for him to show up, then deciding to use her bathroom break to peek into other classrooms. Alas, he was nowhere to be found. This was beyond Sakura, because he was clearly stronger than her if his spar was anything to go by. However, she wouldn’t have been surprised if he was so stupid he was rejected and barred from the academy due to his written exam results—not that she’d seen his results, but she got the sense that whoever he was, he was pretty dumb (not like her) and kind of a social loser (a lot like her). She considered it a shame. It would’ve been nice not to have been alone while bullied.

The plus side was now that bullying seemed the least of her issues. No, her biggest issue now was how far behind she lagged in all manner of physical ability. The other two civilian students were miraculously keeping up with the class (though Sakura had an unhappy suspicion that they were meeting up to train and spar each other) but she simply couldn’t do it. She was last in all races and couldn’t keep her balance if they spent too long on the Katas. She couldn’t even get away with sitting them out like the clan kids because everyone knew they had better katas, and Iruka never forced them to practise it.

Aburame Shino, she noted, still practised them. As did Hyuga Hinata (the quiet girl who only ever came second to Uchiha Sasuke in physical rankings), Yamanaka Ino and the dreaded Uchiha Sasuke, even to his own clansmen’s bewilderment.

She thought that she must practise more than them. Before school, after school on weekends, all the way until bedtime even if Kaa-san did look at her strangely when she practised Kata on her futon. So how was it that she still lagged behind?

Those issues played off each other. The bad training fueled the bullying once Ami had gotten round to hearing about it, and the bullying hindered her focus that sometimes sabotaged her training. A self-cannibalizing snake, an ouroboros of schoolyard misery! But it was her training that bothered her the most. What was she going to do if they kicked her out for being such a blatant loser?!

Now, Sakura knew that if they just published the written exam results after every class test, the others would finally accept her as worth something and she would stop seeing the dreaded Uchiha silently compare their scores when handing out graded papers. It didn’t matter to her that he was probably beating her in the written exams also (it didn’t, it really, really didn’t (really)), but she at least wanted everyone to know that she was smarter than them, and therefore deserved respect. This was all a moot point since it wasn’t like she could publish her grades for everyone to see and accept…

Unless…?

No, she couldn’t risk getting caught. Nevermind.

She would have to force the respect the hard way.

That afternoon, she faked an injury and dedicated her training time to watching how Yamanaka Ino held herself. It wasn’t like she was losing much esteem in her sensei’s eyes and one afternoons’ missed practice wasn’t going to matter when she nailed her masterplan.

Yamanaka Ino held herself with all the grace of a princess who knows she is going to be king one day, and trained with all the determination of an incredibly haughty clan kid. She flowed through her kata like it was as easy as breathing, but that seemed to be an act to conceal the little tremble in her arms and bead of sweat on her (normal-sized) forehead. Yamanaka Ino had what Keiko-san would call a ‘poker face’. Sakura could do poker face.

When Iruka in their Language Arts class asked a question, Sakura watched how Yamanaka’s hand shot up in the air and answered with practised ease. Her answer wasn’t completely right but Sakura doubted anyone could notice that behind her confident delivery.

She dressed a certain way that Sakura couldn’t afford, she acted with a grace Sakura had never been taught but Sakura knew she could fake a face and a tone of voice, so that was exactly what she would do.

On a Monday morning, fresh-faced Sakura strolled into the classroom with her head held high, and eyes level. Though she couldn’t force herself to actually make eye contact with anyone, she managed to get to her seat beside the stoic Aburame Shino without the Inuzukas messing with her. She sat straight and for the first time ever, raised her hand to answer a question in History class. Iruka scanned his eyes across the class and landed on her. He lit up.

“Sakura-chan?”

She felt the blood leave her face when her name was called. Being sat at the front of the class, she couldn’t see her classmates turn to face her, and Shino certainly wasn’t the type to make the effort to turn his head, but she could feel the stares from them nonetheless, probably wondering who the hell ‘Sakura’ was. She cleared her throat. She could do this, she had practised several times in the mirror on how to speak. She was confident.

“It was the Niidaime, Senju Tobirama, who founded the academy and created its original curriculum, and it was the Niidaime who invented the Shinobi rank system, and he also initiated the creation of the Uchiha Military Police Force,” Sakura spoke, perfectly with a smile.

“Good job, Sakura-chan! You’re even ahead of me,” Iruka-sensei cheered, delighted. Such sincere praise was almost enough to make her facade crumble. “I hope everyone wrote that down, because Sakura-chan is correct. Whilst Senju Hashirama united the clans under one village, Senju…” As his voice faded out of focus and she felt eyes leave her, she relaxed some into the seat, a bead of sweat rolling from her hair to her collarbone. That was her participation quota done for the day, tomorrow she would do it twice and hopefully get twice the reaction from Iruka-sensei.

By her side, Aburame Shino inclined his head infinitesimally toward her. Behind his glasses she could see his gaze dart towards her and away. He tapped on the table twice with his index finger and a bug crawled out of his sleeve at his command. She willed herself not to startle. It crawled toward her on the desk, toward her writing hand, frozen in motion. It paused at the tip of her finger.

Eyeing it and Shino, she felt the gentle flutter of insect legs crawl onto her palm and onto her inner wrist, right where the pulse met the skin. A flutter of chakra, not sharp but simply surprising, flushed her skin. She gasped quietly as it warmed her skin like a balm. It hopped off her wrist once more and she followed it with her eyes back to Shino where it disappeared up his sleeve once more. He was staring at the blackboard intently.

When she turned back to her blank notebook page, she wore a private, proud smile.

Sakura still couldn’t quite pluck up the courage to talk to anyone, not even the Hyuga Hinata girl who performed efficiently in class but seemed to cower when talked to. She still sat by the tree at lunch hidden from Ami’s view, who now only ambushed her on her trips to the toilet. But she could now look people in the eye, starting with those troublesome Inuzuka twins.

From left to right, Katsu and Koma, the first with spiky black hair, the second with buzzed hair, both with the signature red, fang-like markings on their cheeks and both stinking like wet dog. She wrinkled her nose at the smell as she looked them in the eye. She tried to lift her chin higher, to exude the I’m-better-than-you aura Yamanaka Ino effortlessly exuded when stinky boys from Class B approached her on the playground. Koma elbowed Katsu and pointed at Sakura, whispering furiously to one another whilst glaring at her nastily, but somehow more subdued. She slid into her seat in front of them and listened to their white noise whispers. She sat up straight when Shino arrived and the twins quietened.

In her periphery, whilst Iruka-sensei greeted the class and commenced the lesson, Shiro sent another bug over, creating another warm fuzz in her hand. Almost unnoticeably, she shuffled to sit closer to him.

Ami did not appreciate the new attitude, it seemed. When Sakura had finally debuted her new attitude on the playground, audaciously sitting on the other side of the tree where she was in plain view, Ami had stared at her from across the playground with Umeko and Fuu at her side before turning and squabbling with some boy nearby. Sakura hasn’t made eye contact with her, resolutely watching Inuzuka Kiba chase Akimichi Choji around with a worm, only spotting her in her periphery. For the rest of recess and of lunch later on, Sakura was in the clear, but she dared not get her hopes up.

The next week followed much the same, except she sat a little further from the tree each day, her own island amongst her classmates, and answered more and more in class, even outpacing the Yamanaka herself. And though the situation didn’t much improve in training, she was certain things were looking up. So,when Uzumaki Naruto showed up the next day at recess proclaiming loudly that he had returned to be her best friend, she could practically feel all the progress draining away.

Face burning, she stood up from the grass and pulled his (slightly-wet?) sleeve leading them behind the tree and shushing him profusely.

“Naruto-kun,” she began, mortified. “You can’t… You can’t shout so loud like that.”

“Ehh?” He pulled a face. “Why not? Don’t tell me you’re one of those… Aww no, Sakura-chan! Don’t worry, I’ll fix you, dattebayo–”

Sakura zoned out as he rattled off, feeling shame and embarrassment take over. What were they going to think of her now? She had just narrowly escaped being a total loser, and now Naruto was going to drag her down again! Yamanaka Ino had just sent a smile her way yesterday! And she was going to lose all of that to…

She looked back at Naruto, who was still rambling. He wore a black long sleeve with the Uzumaki red spiral over his chest, snot at the wrists and toothpaste at the collar; ragged gray shorts and ninja sandals which, to his credit, were now in better condition than hers. That didn’t take away from his disconcerting ramen smell and cheeks smeared with dirt. She wondered what the orphanage matron was feeding him and whether she dressed him with her eyes closed.

“Ehh? Sakura-chan?”

Sakura jolted back into her body, looking at him squarely into his big blue eyes. His brows furrowed and his mouth dropped into a small ‘o’ shape. She stared at him for a moment.

She couldn’t tell him to go away. She wouldn’t know how to get the words out. He probably wouldn’t listen.

(And besides, it was nice to have someone that talked to you.)

“You have to go to the bathroom and wash off those stains on your shirt.” Folding her arms across her chest, she leveled him with a look. His face screwed up as he recoiled.

“Why? Sakura-chan, you sound just like those old, stuffy—”

“It’s so you look like you could be Hokage,” she interrupted, trying her best to effect a friendly voice, but her voice being out of practice fell short even to her own ears. “You don’t see Hokage-sama with stains on his clothes, do you?” Her arms dropped. Like Sakura would know. She’d only ever seen him from twenty feet away, at Konohagakure’s Founding Anniversary. But Naruto was enamored by the thought—his hands came up to rest on his hips as he looked at her appraisingly.

“Huh… I guess you’re right, Sakura-chan… You’re so smart, ‘ttebayo…” Flushing, she leaned away from him when he grabbed her wrist. Startled, her head snapped back to look at him. His gaze was unsettling, none of the brazen audacity he usually wore, but something a little more familiar to her lingered, something like desperation. “If I do that, will you sit with me?”

His voice had quietened. She felt it like a swarm of gnats in her chest and an aching pull in her hands.

Clearing her throat, she said, “What class are you in?” Not Class A, not Class A, not Class A….

“Class A.” Oh. “I asked Jiji to put me in the same class as you.” He grinned again. “I said to him, ‘Haruno Sakura, she’s my best friend and she thinks I can be Hokage, dattebayo!’” Oh no. She had the urge to crawl into the dirt and never come out again, but instead grit her teeth.

Her mind turned.

“How is it that you got to pick your class?” she asked, suddenly envious. He pondered this and shrugged.

“I don’t know. He said it was because they miscounted or something. So will you sit next to me or not? I know you probably already have a whole lotta friends, ‘ttebayo, so you probably already have people to sit with but…”

“You can sit with me.” Tension from his shoulders seemed to leech away as he puffed out his chest again. Sakura thought it best not to correct his misinterpretation of her trep-i-day-shun. Sakura thought of Naruto attempting to converse with Shino and watched the scene unravel into Shino sending a swarm of bugs at Naruto for his efforts. She shuddered. “But you have to promise to be quiet, okay? My friend I sit next to doesn’t like loud people.”

“Okay, I promise.” His voice dropped into a loud whisper. “Dattebayo!”

She supposed at least, when all the strength left her spine and the dread settled in her stomach, she wouldn’t be alone in what came next.

In the classroom, after forcing him to wash his shirt and him coming back demanding to play ninja so his shirt would dry faster, she was too winded, embarrassed and resigned to her fate to care about Shino’s opinion of their new deskmate. She did however, make it so she sat between Shino and Naruto as she suspected he would be rather less amenable to him than he was to her. He busied himself with looking at her like she’d hung the moon, which, for all he must’ve known, could’ve happened. And though was lousy at sitting still and an even lousier student judging by the sheer quantity of questions he whispered to her during the lesson, he did somehow restrain himself for the most part. The most Shino reacted was shifting his glasses awkwardly on his nose bridge. Not even the Inuzuka twins seemed interested in Naruto’s presence.

Iruka-sensei perhaps was the most confusing element of the day. Where once he’d smiled so brightly her way, he now refused to so much as look her way. Her life was certifiably being ruined, but at least someone was enjoying himself.

She looked sideways at Naruto and his ugly scribbles in familiar red pen in his scrap of a notebook and almost scowled. It was horrendous. She would have to rectify that as soon as possible.

When Iruka snapped at her suddenly to stop whispering, she all but felt her soul leave her body.

Bored of the curriculum and no longer interested in raising her hand, she flicked through her two-decade old copy of the Bingo book she found in a bin somewhere. She recognised the names, especially the Konohan figures: Senju Tsunade, Orochimaru, Jiraiya, all three at their peaks; Hatake Sakumo—The Legendary White Fang—before he’d unceremoniously fallen from grace; and the young Namikaze Minato, only eleven at the time, not yet flee-on-sight like the others she’d noted, but he would be within ten years. And in even less, he would be internationally recognised at the Yellow Flash. And by twenty-four he would be history’s youngest Kage. Like her, he had no clan background. If he could succeed…

She straightened her spine and looked back to the blackboard. When a bug crawled out of Shino’s sleeve and bit her, she didn’t even flinch.

It hadn’t taken long for the pair to settle into a sorry routine. He was allowed to harass her to play at recess, but lunchtimes were for food and quiet contemplation, or, if you were Naruto, figuring out how many different ways you could climb a tree. And at physical training they would keep out of each other’s way to knuckle down and train, which he was satisfied with. After school was a giant gray area, as she often raced off home with her mother who was always on time nowadays before Naruto could get a word out edgeways. Some classmates turned their noses up at them and sneered, where once they had graciously ignored her existence. Teachers snapped at him incessantly which perplexed her, since he has been on his best behavior, focussing and following every order, despite his fidgety nature. Sure, he missed his homework assignments but it was no more than what Nara Shikamaru did, and that boy slept in class. But because she could not speak up for Naruto, she got used to the iciness with which the teachers treated him with, and occasionally her if she interacted with him under their tutelage. And it was that that grated at her most, yet she had no choice but to stomach it. To stomach the changeability of most people and the un-changeability of only one person, because she couldn’t find the words to say otherwise.

It only took him four days before he figured out Sakura had no other friends in the Academy which somewhat mollified his starry-eyed looks at her and this frustrated her greatly as much as it lightened the weight on her shoulders. For comparison, it took Ami six school days before she confronted Sakura.

Today, she knew her mother was going to be late, so she waited by the swing outside of the Academy. Naruto took it upon himself to keep her company.

“Are you sure you don’t want to play with me in the park?” He looked up to her from his seated position on the swing. He was wrapped up in a small winter coat for the mid-November chill. Goosebumps flesh raised on her arms but she herself wasn’t wearing a coat.

“I’m sure.”

“Really? Because I’m really good at—”

“I have to study.”

“Ehh? Sakura-chan, you’re smart enough already, dattebayo.” There it was again. The strange flattery. She didn’t like it when people weren’t honest.

“I can always be better.” Be smarter. Be stronger.

Truth be told, there wasn’t much for her to study anymore. She was ahead of the curriculum for at least three years, and then some. To make matters worse, Dosato-san refused to lend her any more non-fiction books until next year, let alone agree to bend the rules for her to access the genin-only materials. She had only the fiction novels to read, which she found dreadful, but also found that between that, and doing nothing, she would choose to read. Often enough, it filled her free time. It was growing on her, though. And she had a number of new words to practise.

Being stronger, however, was a dilemma. She could not train out of hours because her mother had entrusted Keiko to watch her after school when her mother returned to her hospital shift. Even as Keiko was often knocked out on the couch, Sakura knew she slept with the keys under head, and she wasn’t
going to attempt that sort of heist and escape. And, being frank, she wasn’t completely inspired to do so. Her willingness to work for her ambitions waned with the sun.

“Hey, Sakura!” came the dreaded voice from behind them. Sakura stiffened immediately and Naruto noticed. The voices grew louder and louder and Sakura dared not turn around. “Sakuraaaa! Sakura! We haven’t seen you in a while. Fuu and I have come to say hi! Who’s that with you? You’re not friends, are you?”

She locked eyes with Naruto, staring moon-eyed at her, before replying slowly, “I’m waiting here to be picked up.”

“No, you’re not.” The voice came from next to her ear. A giggle. “Your mom probably isn’t coming. Why would she come to pick you up? Your forehead might be big but that doesn’t make you smart enough to want to keep around.”

“Hey, you watch your mouth, dattebayo! That’s my best friend!” Naruto shouted, too loud for the cool air of the empty yard.

“Shut it, whiskers!” Fuu sniped. If Sakura wasn’t being shoved to the ground, she might’ve laughed at how stupid that sounded.

“Sakura-chan!” Roaring, Naruto leapt between Sakura and Ami. Senses dulling, she trembled on the floor in the cold and her forearm skinned from elbow to wrist on the concrete. Tears broke through as her teeth drew blood from her lips. They had never tried hitting her before.

Just as she thought that, Fuu darted around Naruto’s form and kicked her in the ribcage with a close-toed boot. A bleeding pain erupted, knocking the breath out of her in a cold plume. Naruto spun on his heel and shoved Fuu back, shouting something unintelligible over her hyperventilation. The pain from her scraped arm was unbearable, and yet, she knew that had she had the courage to turn and face Ami, she could’ve seen the attack coming and dodged it. That knowledge captured the burning-wet, physical pain and spun it into something mental and of iron.

Sobs tore out of her as Naruto shouted and pushed them around above her. The three of them fell to the ground in a scuffle of grunts, scratches and punches. Naruto managed to yank a fistful of daisy-yellow hair out of Fuu’s head before the two girls wrangled him onto the floor. Meanwhile, Sakura pushed herself into a seated position, cradling her forearm to her chest.

“Sakura—” Ami’s hand landed on his mouth; he bit her. Her hearing came back to her, crystal-clear. “Sakura-chan! Get ‘em! Like at the park, dattebayo!”

Looking between the three of them struggling on the concrete, her heart gave a jolt at the prospect of facing them down again. She cradled her arm closer to her chest and for a split second Naruto’s face fell.

This Sakura couldn’t do anything, curled in on herself, body aching. Her physical body could still stand, she knew. She could perhaps win with Naruto’s resilience at her side, she could still fight. But the cage holding her back resided in a different plane. Sakura swallowed this truth and it burned like vomit. Her face screwed up. She did not want to fear. She wanted to be feared.

She thought of the labels besides little faces in her old Bingo book, and she thought of one, in particular, that spoke to her like an uchiwa fan against a dying fire.

Flee-on-sight, they called it. Her mouth felt dry. She was thirsty for it. Still, she could not move.

A shadow cast over Sakura.

She looked up. In a cloud of cold winter backlight, Yamanaka Ino appeared. At that moment, Sakura could’ve sworn she was an angel. Purple adorned her, she looked like spring frozen over. Her barley-blonde hair whipped like a halo in the cold wind, as she glared, incensed, at the lump of limbs below her.

“HEY!” Ino’s commanding voice boomed. The trio on the ground stilled. “What do you think you’re doing? Are you trying to bully my classmates? What is it with you Class B losers always forgetting your place?”

She grabbed Ami’s hair and pulled her back off Naruto, shrieking and palming at Ino’s unshakeable grip.

“You.” She pointed at Fuu. “Get off him if you want your friend to live.” Fuu scrambled off Naruto with her hands in the air.

Ino bullied the hair in her fist once more before letting go. “Now scram!”

The two girls grunted to their feet and stumbled over one another running towards the yard’s front gates, disappearing to the right, leaving behind only silence. Naruto, besides her, panted heavily. He looked at her and she looked away. Yamanaka Ino took that moment to crouch next to her. Her heart nearly beat out of her chest, eyes wide. Ino smiled at her, wrath dripping off her face.

“You know, you really should be more confident, Sakura-chan. You’re representing our class, you know, so you can’t let the Class B losers push you around. And I know you can fight, at least better than those girls, even if you did bad in the entrance exam.”

Sakura’s world stopped spinning for a moment and the pain in her arm all but faded into the background.

“Thanks…” Sakura fumbled. ‘Yamanaka-san’ was too formal. ‘Ino-san’ was almost as bad. “...Ino-chan!”

She smiled brilliantly at her, and Sakura was seeing the sun for the first time. Ino turned.

“Who’s this supposed to be anyway?” Ino scowled at Naruto. Naruto scowled back, crossing his arms across his puffed out chest.

“I’m Sakura-chan’s bestest friend ever, dattebayo, and I’m gonna be the Fifth Hokage!”

She scoffed. “The Fifth Hokage? You’ll be lucky if you make it to genin, you little runt. You show up one day outta nowhere and you think you’re all that. And, anyway, Sakura-chan’s my friend, so now what?”

Her heart skipped. She was dreaming, she was dreaming, she was dreaming…

“Sakura-chan, tell her!”

“Uh, yeah… He’s my best friend… His name is Uzumaki Naruto,” she said, almost entranced.

Ino’s glare softened, but remained skeptical of him, looking him up and down. “Hm. If she says so. I don’t know… I always thought you were some loser who turned up and followed her around, but I guess not.” She turned to Sakura. “You can always hang around me, you know. You don’t have to settle for losers.”

Naruto crawled over and got in her face. “Hey!” Wrapping an arm around an unsuspecting Sakura, he helped her to her feet and linked their arms together. Ino rose also, standing taller than them by a few inches. “We’re a package deal, dattebayo. Sakura-chan, tell her.”

He looked at her with expectation. She thought of him on the ground, and it shook her out of her Ino-induced reverie.

“We’re a package deal.”

Hair bouncing around her, Ino nodded, mouth set. “I can respect that. But do me a favor and stop hiding that forehead of yours.” She leaned in, brushing the hair off Sakura’s forehead, smiling as she did so. “A ribbon would suit you nicely. I have just the one at home. I’ll bring it for you tomorrow, okay?”

Sakura nodded with a barely restrained smile.

“And wash the graze with water, okay?”

Sakura nodded again.

Ino lingered, seeming reluctant to leave.

“I’ll… I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

Sakura watched her back wistfully as she left the yard, hair swinging behind her. A new friend…

“Whew, Sakura-chan… That was close… Hey, do you think that girl wants to be our friend?”

And though her arm hurt when her mother ran it under water and wrapped it up, and she couldn’t sleep for fear and excitement of the next day, Ino did keep her promise and took it one step further. During lunch, she approached the tree, sitting next to the frozen Sakura, below Naruto who watched from a tree branch, and began talking to the two of them like she had known them forever. And, Sakura, with a new red ribbon holding back her hair, finally felt like she had a place in the world.

Chapter Text

Shisui knew his little cousin Sasuke would pass the entrance exams, as did Itachi, so he knew Itachi’s offer of going out for dango as a reward was less so congratulatory and more so routine for the three of them. Or, as close to routine somebody like Itachi could get when they were seemingly always on call. As loyal as Itachi was, however, he promised to make time for Sasuke, and this time he delivered, sticky sugary fingers gently ruffling his bashful little brother’s hair with quiet pride.

“So, how did it go?” Shisui asked between bites. “Like, I know you passed, or whatever—and everyone knows you were totally the one to beat, little man, so good job—but, like, how did it go?”

Sasuke glared at him over the dango platter, apparently nonplussed despite Shisui’s praise—Sage knows Sasuke’s always hated him for hogging Itachi’s time, but seriously?---and sneered adorably.

“It went fine.”

“Uh-huh. Like expected, champ, but who was it you fought? Was it that Hyuga? I hear the heiress is in your cohort—”

“It wasn’t the Hyuga!”

“No. It was a different girl, right Sasuke?”

It was at times like this Shisui remembered Itachi was only a twelve-year-old boy.

“Aniki~!”

Shisui picked up the baton with glee: “What? Who’s this little girl? Was she cute?”

“No. She was just a girl. And she was terrible!” Sasuke returned to picking at the dango, very obviously pretending to enjoy it. It was sweet, what he would do to have Itachi’s time.

“Aww. I bet she was better than that.”

“No, she was terrible! I got her in less than a minute. You can ask Iruka-sensei.”

“Oh.” Less than a minute was pretty miserable. He pivoted. “Was she cute?”

“Aniki~! Tell Shisui to stop it!”

Itachi’s eyebrow twitched and he tapped Sasuke twice on the wrist.

“Quiet down, Otouto, we’re in public. And, Shisui, cut it out.” He let the moment sit as he chewed before smiling wryly at Shisui. “Apparently, her hair was bright pink.”

“How did you know that?” Sasuke twisted to gawk at him, causing Itachi to repress his smile.

“You may not be so forthwith, but the other Uchiha your age certainly are.”

“Those idiots. They talk too much, and don’t train enough. They can’t even do a fireball jutsu yet. How lame is that?” Shisui snickered. He doubted Sasuke was aware of how he came across when both Shisui and his precious Aniki knew what he was really like. Sasuke was the type to pretend he didn’t like playing games to fit in with the older kids, the type to fake tastes for certain things to imitate his brother, the type to tell everyone he already could perform Katon: Gokakyu no Jutsu even though nobody believed him, but then again, nobody would tell him that to his face.

“What did you think of her pink hair, Sasuke-chan?” Shisui continued.

“It was ugly, and bright. Shinobi shouldn’t look like that. We should appear in natural colors to camouflage better.” Itachi nodded. “Besides, she was no good, and she was a civilian. She looked like she was gonna cry after. What type of shinobi cries?”

“Lots of shinobi cry.”

“And who lets civilians into a shinobi academy anyway? They’re all—”

Shisui stiffened and his gaze darted to Itachi, who now sat ramrod straight, not too far from his usual posture but just different enough for a friend like Shisui to notice the difference. The difference being the haunted look in his eyes, the despair in the wrought of his mouth, and the deep set to the furrows under his eyes. All at once twelve years old and a dead man walking, a soldier on the edge of a knife. In his eyes, Shisui saw his reflection. This is what they were here for. This is what—

“Lots of shinobi cry, Sasuke. And I know enough shinobi who came from a civilian background who are worth twice as much as some of the Uchiha I knew growing up. Don’t make ignorant assumptions. Ignorance heralds death.” Itachi’s voice could slice a mountain in two.

The drop in temperature was palpable enough for the servers to start avoiding their table.

“I’m sorry, Aniki.”

“Don’t apologize. Eat your dango.”

It was not long after that Shisui went missing. Sasuke would not learn the truth of his disappearance until many, many years later.

Uchiha Sasuke considered the Academy to be a glorified stage more than any place of education. It was the place where he would prove to his kin how and why he was better than them and, with his kin, stand his ground against the outsiders. But, for him, it was also a secret third thing, and that was the place to prove to Uchiha Fugaku that he deserved to be his son. He placed first overall in the entrance exams which came as a shock to absolutely no-one, so the feat of coming first fell away into the void, as Fugaku didn’t pay it any notice. His next feat would ideally be to graduate within the year to beat out Aniki, but Lord Fourth apparently banned that. So, the next thing on the list was learning Katon: Gokakyu no Jutsu, under his father’s tutelage, an Uchiha rite of passage commencing in December. He would need to produce a fireball great enough to melt the snow on the ground before the week was up to impress the man and he would not fail. In the meantime, however, it was his priority to show all the other clans how much better he was than them, and part of that was outperforming everyone, every time.

The Academy boasted three classes in first year: A, B, and C.

Sasuke was in Class A. Somehow, so was Haruno Sakura, the girl he beat near enough into a pulp during the exams. That bothered him greatly. As time passed, however, other things bothered him more. Like how the Hyuga heiress appeared to be a formidable opponent during the exams but a snivelling mess otherwise, the general presence of the Inuzuka, how the Akimichi were labelled a ‘noble’ clan despite scraping mediocre, and so on. The Yamanaka girl, he considered, might’ve proven herself to be a worthy opponent if she hadn’t been so loud. Even his own clansmen bored him—they acted like surly children, but they were meant to be shinobi. Not to mention the drivel the Academy was feeding him. Tou-san had warned him about this, their propaganda: the Senju were credited with all too much, and the Uchiha barely a footnote excepting in the wars. Distinctly outrageous.

Every day, he’d return home with his clansmen and at home, Kaa-san would feed him, water him, and send him out to train. He would try to find dear Aniki, only to be told, usually, that he was on a mission again, or infrequently, Itachi would be waiting just to prod him on his forehead and leave again. Rinse, repeat. He wanted greater things.

He wanted meaningful acknowledgement from the best for being the best. He wanted to be among the best. And that meant his father, his brother Itachi, and, regrettably, Shisui. He wanted worthiness, he wanted—

Sasuke stared at the paper in his hand, frozen in the class aisles whilst handing out graded class tests, labelled Haruno Sakura with a mark of 100. His own lay below hers: 93.

No. He shook his head, placed it on her desk and moved on.

It was not a one-time thing.

Time after time, he offered himself to hand out the papers, an unnecessarily servile position for an Uchiha of his station, just to check what she had gotten. It was 100s—every time. His marks never rose above a 95, which hadn’t been a problem because Aniki’s expert opinion dictated that getting 100s was made specifically impossible for students. Once, she’d even gotten a 103. He’d almost split the paper in half before the paper made it onto her desk. That figure physically pained him when he’d added that to his table of results comparing his and hers side by side.

He watched her outside of class to understand this. In training, she was abominable. Seriously. She was only just better than the civilians of Class C, but she was dedicated, somewhat. It lessened his stress to know she’d never catch up to him where it really mattered. But the Uchiha main branch could never expect anything less than top spot in any venture, so when the year was out, he needed to place first in every area. His rival must be squashed. He watched her during recess and lunch. She was a critical social failure, smart enough to score academically, dumb enough to bend to her clear inferiors, to even the most despicable civilian fodder in Class B. Ridiculous. Regrettable, even. She could do better than that, he just knew it. She had to be, if she was outdoing him.

So when Uzumaki Naruto made himself known as her best (and only) friend, Sasuke was almost annoyed.

What a terrible mess. The first exam they sat after Uzumaki Naruto was unceremoniously dumped in their class one day showed him how undeniably stupid the obnoxious buffoon was. He got a resounding 3 on the exam. That was who Haruno Sakura’s so-called best friend was. She should’ve really been keeping better company.

When Yamanaka Ino infiltrated the pair, and the Class B imbeciles stopped encroaching on his classmates, Sasuke had the idea that she must be making up for the blond buffoon to at least offer Sakura a semblance of intellect to engage with, definitely a cosmic interference at least. He watched the trio through late November into early December with hawkish eyes. They laughed and giggled under the tree whilst Uzumaki dropped in on them from the branches, utterly ignorant of the other classmates running around them. They shared lunches, though the Uzumaki never seemed to have anything to share, and on occasion they were joined by one of Yamanaka’s other, lesser friends, or Yamanaka disappeared to join the Nara and Akimichi boys. Despite Yamanaka’s intrusion, it still seemed that Haruno had plateaued in training.

December came and went. He mastered the fireball in under a week, which made his father finally congratulate him, but Sasuke found that fleeting was not enough. Itachi was growing colder with the weather and by the knocking of new year’s, Shisui was found dead, his body swept away by an ice cold river, eyeless. Sasuke did not yet know the significance of his death but news of it sent the clan into martial silence. When the Academy started up again, he was thankful for the distraction.

Chill biting at his skin and feet plodding through sodden ground, his journey to school was muted. His clansmen modelled their behavior after his. His classmates behaved as though the world still turned. He was disillusioned. There was, evidently, no place for him in this Academy.

To the left of him, Hyuga Hinata left a note on the desk and waited for him to look. He looked.

“I–I–I know,” came her cowardly little voice, “I know, what it’s—what it’s like, to lose family.”

She scurried away. He grabbed the note, crumpled it and threw it on the floor.

Spring broke, finally. He hadn’t seen hide nor hair of his brother in at least a week. The house was cold, Sasuke colder still, and Kaa-san had forgotten to heat the tea again. That was happening more and more nowadays, whilst Tou-san rarely showed his face. He drank it cold, watching the birds on the branches from the engawa. That day, his father had walked him to school with the promise that Itachi would be home by dinner. He would never forget it.

In hindsight, it was incredibly unfortunate for Haruno that that was the day he’d decided to approach her.

Sakura had never been so happy as in those few months between November and March. She was still abysmal at training, and though Naruto and Ino had both offered to train with her, she was on strict supervision out of school hours. It was authoritarian, for sure, but, little as she was, she had very little say. But, despite that, she, for those icy months, adored her life.

Naruto, from the trees reached down to pluck a grape from her outstretched hand and snatch a shrimp onigiri from Ino’s dodging arms, scoffing it down to the sounds of her crowing insults. Sakura knew better. Ino used to show up with only two onigiri before she was friends with them, and Sakura would know—she was watching, and now she had three.

“Watch it, freak!” she shrieked, swiping at the snickering Naruto who swooped in and out intermittently whilst Sakura snacked on her sour grapes. If Ino wanted to, she could really get him, but she sat comfortably on the ground, pretending like there wasn’t a smile pulling at her lips. Her pupiless eyes shone in the wake of the sun.

“Hello.”

A shadow fell across Ino’s animate form as she whipped around whilst Sakura froze.

“Sasuke-kun! Hi!” Ino shouted, but he paid her no mind.

She startled, looking up at him, squinting through the sunlight. When she shielded her eyes, she caught on to who he was and blanched. He stood over Ino, hands deep in his pockets, faking a look of nonchalance almost imperceptibly rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. If she had looked a little more closely, she might’ve caught the hints of red crawling up his neck to his face.

“Haruno,” he started. “You got 100 in the last test.”

“Oh.” The first thing she’d ever said to him. How intelligent she must seem. “Yes, I’m aware.”

He grunted, eyes flitting between her and the rest of them. Above, Naruto stilled in the trees. She could imagine Naruto’s belligerent sneering as he crouched in the tree. Amongst all their differences, one thing she and Naruto could commiserate on was their mutual dislike for the Uchiha boy, for similar but different reasons. If she was being objective, it was mostly one-sided on their part as she struggled to know whether Sasuke remembered who she was if not for the snide side-eyes and outright scowl he directed toward Naruto, who, despite his hypothetical better judgement, challenged him to a fight every other week in training in which he was crushed or laughed off. On those days, she liked to pretend she didn’t know him, and Ino was more than happy to chase him away with a stick. Somehow, when it was her doing the chasing, it was graceful rather than rabid. Likewise, when it was her in association with Naruto, her reputation seemingly improved.

Ino looked at her and gestured furiously. For all her virtues, Ino’s inane infatuation with him was not one of them.

“And you… got what?” she continued. He grunted again, gesturing towards her with his furrowed brow.

“That’s my point. Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“What you do. To get 100.”

She paused. What a turn of events…

Her one-sided rivalry with him reared its head without the good grace to keep the misshapen sneer off her face. There he was, the boy who’d beaten her into the ground at the end of August, asking—but no, not asking, demanding—to know how she did better than him in written exams. He, who stood at the helm of his haughty, snide-faced clansmen as they mocked her during training, who outshone her at every moment without the decency to seem like he was making an effort, he, who she envied down to her core enough to cringe away from his gaze, wanted her help? Part of her wanted to throw the bento at his head, but another part of her sought to taunt. That was a side effect of spending time with Yamanaka Ino—one began to understand how to pull at the right chords, and with Ino herself, and Naruto, who would bite at ankles if need be, at her side, she fell into it confidently. There was an unquantifiable assuredness to her this March that had been out of the question this time last year, but, in hindsight, she would consider it entirely misplaced.

“Oh. I study,” she said.

He scoffed. “I know that. What else?”

“No, I mean I study in advance. I read everything in advance.”

He scoffed.

“Everyone does.” She heard Naruto harrumph from the trees.

“No. I meant three years in advance.” Lifting her chin when she saw his face stutter, she smiled.

“How did you know what they teach?” he asked.

“Why don’t you know the curriculum they teach?” she returned.

“How?”

“I read all the textbooks at the library.”

“How long did that take?”

Her eyes narrowed. Naruto spoke for her, effecting a voice that was supposed to be oppressive.

“Too long for you to catch up to by the end of the year, bastard.”

His scruffy form dropped down from the trees and into Sasuke’s intense line of sight. Arms shooting out to grab at his legs, Ino shoved him to the side.

“Watch your mouth, idiot. Don’t talk to Sasuke-kun like that,” she growled, turning back to simper at Sasuke. Only, she did not simper. “What will you give her if she tells you what she knows?”

It was visible the way his attention turned from rolling his eyes at the fallen Naruto, to calculating his next steps with Ino, what he thought of them in turn. It rankled Sakura's pride.

“Nothing. She’s not telling me what I can’t find out otherwise.” A rare grin spread across his face. It looked odd on him, like she was not meant to see it.

“Then you wouldn’t be asking her, would you? What will you give her?”

“Ten ryo for every percent I improve on the next exam.”

“No deal. That’s dependent on you. Payment needs to be dependent on the product.” Ino proved herself to be the incorrigible daughter of a politician and a flower merchant.

“A hundred ryo.”

“Boring. Give us something special.”

The question hung in the air for several seconds as he observed them with pursed lips. Eventually, his wandering eyes came to a stop on Sakura, pursing his lips.

“You’ve seen my brother in the Bingo book, haven’t you?”

“Yes.” Uchiha Itachi was only in the most recent copy Ino had procured for her. A blanked out face, and a bounty in the millions over his head. He was only thirteen. How Sasuke knew she had a copy, she would never know. Nevertheless, it was her only solace during her fits of envy that he could never match up to his own brother.

“You can meet him. Tonight. Take the deal.” Her heart skipped. The thought of meeting the Uchiha Itachi, known by all, beaten by none… Well, it was enough to send even Ino into a daze, inciting restlessness into Sakura. Sour as his tone was, it seemed honest, or at least Ino thought so.

“Uchiha Itachi?!” Ino squawked, and Sakura could tell by the wrinkle of his nose Sasuke did not like how exuberantly she reacted.

“Who’s that?” Naruto chimed in, working himself to keep up.

“Uchiha Itachi,” Sakura offered, “is one of the best shinobi Konohagakure has ever known. A prodigy.” She observed the flinch on Sasuke’s face. “He’s the heir to the Uchiha clan. According to the Bingo book, he’s already jonin.”

“What’s a progidy again?”

“Shut up, Naruto.” Ino’s eyes remained on Sasuke, calculating. “We’ll take it.”

“We’ll take it?” Naruto blinked owlishly.

“Yes, we’ll take it,” Sakura followed, surprising even herself. She wasn’t sure what she’d do once she met Uchiha Itachi, or what she’d ask for, maybe an autograph, maybe advice if advice from any competent unfamiliar ninja was to be trusted, but maybe she just wanted to see his face. Maybe, if she saw his face, she’d get a taste of what talent he had, what skill, even if it was simply the moisture on the outtake of his breath in the crisp air of spring breaking. “I’ll tell you what to read to catch up after I meet him.”

“I want a list,” his voice hardened as he spoke. He seemed to regret the deal as she took it, an angry red affecting his undereye.

“It’s a list you’ll get,” Ino assured.

As he stalked away from them, back to the other Uchiha boys who’d finally noticed he’d disappeared and had been watching from a distance. Ino, turning to her once he was a safe distance away, shook her by the shoulders urgently. Naruto crawled over to them and looked over Ino’s shoulder.

“Do you understand what I’ve just done for you, Sakura? Do you?” Ino screeched. “You just have to go! No ‘but’s, okay?” Cold feet struck. She remembered what she had momentarily forgotten.

“My mother—”

“No ‘but’s. I’ll handle Okaa-san. Naruto can be the distraction team. You just make it quick.”

Birdsong. He should’ve known something was wrong when he noticed the absence of birdsong. He and Sakura had waited for nearly half an hour in the classroom watching the front yard as Ino spoke quickly and vigorously to Haruno Mebuki who stood hunched over, almost skeletal with rippling sinew in her thin arms and pale yellow hair. With the angle of the sun, shadows cast over her eyes. She listened attentively to whatever tale Yamanaka was spinning with Uzumaki nodding dutifully beside her. After a moment, she disappeared down the road, Yamanaka trailing after her and Uzumaki lingering in the yard looking about him. He signalled toward the window. Their cue.

Birdsong. He listened for it on the way home, down the tree-lined dirt path to the compound. In March, the birds returned and their songs grew stronger by the day. In April they would reach a perfect balance of volume and harmony. By May, it would sound like screeching. He listened for it, and yet it was only the sound of the feet on mud that followed him home, and the clouds of breath emanating from him and the girl trailing after him, and the rain being spat at them from above.

It was the smell that hit them first.

Thirty feet away from the compound gates, the sharp coppery scent hit. It was sweet, cloying, and unmistakable. Ten feet from the gate. Behind his eyelids, he envisioned Itachi coming home from missions, doused in blood that was still wet on his clothes, dopeily trailing it in, in the middle of the night. Silence from the compound. The arterial road stretched ahead, deserted. A cawing of a crow.

Sakura came up beside him, sniffing and screwing her nose up at the smell. Her fingers clawed at her satchel’s strap, and she’d said something but Sasuke couldn’t hear her over the roar of blood in his ears.

Feet dragging like foreign limbs behind him, he approached his aunt’s produce stall. The stench grew stronger, and transformed into something, earthy, dirty, something potent even in the breeze. He stilled before he looked over the wilting produce. A head of grey hair just visible from his view, unmoving. He choked.

He fell back into Sakura’s unfamiliar grasp as she shook him by the wrist.

“Sasuke,” he could barely make out. His body twitched and trembled with something he couldn’t fathom. “Sasuke. We have to get out of here.”

He surged from her grasp, stumbling back.

“My–My parents.” He turned into a run.

He could scarcely hear the second pair of feet running behind him. The stench faded into nothing, burning his throat into numbness. Mind filled with chants. He wouldn’t, he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t…

Panting. He was panting. The engawa caught his ankles on the way in. He rolled onto the platform, kicked off his shoes and continued, half crawling half-running through the house. He minded the spilt tea on the tatami and the stickiness of the wood floors and the tear in a shoji door pulled from its tracks. He slipped in a streak of blood. Slowing, he came to a stop, breathing deeply. He followed the soiled scent to the study. The door was already open.

His lower lip trembled.

“Kaa-san…”

He was not more than a step inside before he saw it. Feet from behind the desk. Two pairs. Unmistakeable. His father’s slippers, his mother’s pedicured white feet, smeared in a pool of sticky blood, seeping steadily into the tatami. He felt more than heard the scream rip from his chest.

A body hit him from behind sending both bodies into the floor. Sakura pulled him back up again, but it did not disturb him from his trance. He saw the urgency in her face through blurry eyes.

“..suke! Sasuke! We have to run!” she said. Anger rose in him and he shoved her away. He was not sure where the pounding, rushing feeling in his body came from, but later he would be able to identify it as adrenaline.

“Run to where?!”

No answer. He turned back to the bodies.

Slowly, he approached the desk, tracking blood in where he stepped, and rounded it. Where a tanto stuck out of his mother’s loosened yukata, the dark blue deepened into a brown. Her face, mouth dropped open, eyes glazed. A puddle of excrement lay under her twisted legs and torso. He pawed shakily at her stiff fingers, the blood on her fingers transferring to his. Her hands which once bathed him, combed his hair, cleaned his cuts, made him tea. This was not his mother. Whatever it was, it was not his mother. It was alien. He could not look at his father.

Resolved in the fact that those were not his parents, he stood back up, forcing his tears to cease.
Sakura waited by the open door. Behind a searing pain in his eyes, he could see her more clearly now. Could see the individual strands of hair stuck to her forehead. The individual strands of cotton and their patterned weave in her clothes.

Both of their heads snapped toward the engawa at the sound of roof slates falling.

Sasuke thumped toward the engawa, blood screaming in his ears. The shoji doors shrieked open.

There, across the garden’s pond, across where he’d taken his tea that morning, cold, and where the teacup still sat, a single drop of blood resting on the rim, sitting on the branch, a dark silhouette. A ninjato strapped to his back. His ANBU sheet armor across his front, hair billowing in the breeze. Spinning black pinwheels in glowing red eyes.

A head of pink bullied herself past him to stand in front of his still form.

“Aniki…” A sob tore out of him, his body giving into a sickening lurch. Bile rose in his throat, his head spun. “How could you…”

With the shift of a branch in the wind, the light illuminated his face, the insidious pull to his lips. Sasuke blinked and when he next opened his eyes, it was to Itachi, standing now only a few feet in front of him on flattened earth, a sky of red and a full moon now rising in the sky.

His breath caught once more. Itachi’s smile fell away, a twist of pride to the way he tilted his head. Sasuke’s heart was in his throat, but he could not move.

Itachi’s next words were low, crooning.

“Foolish Otouto.”

That was when the first body dropped from the sky.

Chapter Text

Shiro was initially quite disgruntled when he was called on during the middle of the night. He wasn’t told why he was needed, just what to do and ordinarily that would’ve suited him just fine, but they had never stationed him outside of the Uchiha clan compound, so he was forced to wonder. Wonder what business Konoha shinobi had around a clan that had their own taskforce, and what business ANBU agents had coming and going into the compound where they had always been expressly forbidden to go (as with all clan compounds), and why wily Councilman Shimura Danzo decided to show his face—and wonder why the trees were silent.

Yuhi Kurenai stood beside Shiro, as a working pair. Quiet by nature, she was, but hardened in spirit, and more observant than Shiro could hope to be. Shiro watched her red eyes watch the ANBU split atoms with the speed they ran past her with, and watched another pair of ANBU watch them from the treeline. A tense silence.

“I wouldn’t recommend using genjutsu on me,” Kurenai said, breaking protocol by talking to on duty ANBU. Alert, Shiro released the wave of chakra that had fallen over him. As it left his body, his skin crawled. “It’s not wise to deceive your own.”

The ANBU shifted in the treeline, only their pale masks visible in the great darkness of night and silence that had engulfed only this night.

“If you have something you want to hide from us, don’t bother. We’re all trusted professionals here. Unless you have other priorities, in which case I’ll have to report you to ANBU Commander Aburame.” Questioning ANBU and expecting an answer was a grievous assault on confidentiality protocol. He would know—ever since his suspension he’d memorized every rule so as to not get blindsided. If that had been Shiro talking, that would’ve been a one-way ticket to demotion, but Kurenai had every string to pull.

An expectant moment passed before the two faces parted. From the trees emerged the shrewd face of Shimura Danzo. Behind him an entourage followed, his ANBU guard platoon.

He drifted toward the space between them, a harsh set to his lips, and only came to a stop when Kurenai opened her infernal mouth to speak again.

“If I may, Councilman,” she started. Her tone had shifted almost unnoticeably to anyone who hadn’t grown up with her. It wasn’t quite simpering, not sycophantic as such, but had a ring of innocence to it, or rather, harmlessness, a way of presenting herself as inconsequential, enough to wipe the slate clean on what Shimura had witnessed. A certain… Implaceability. “What happened here tonight?”

Ah. The million ryo question.

His face turned to her. All Shiro could see was the side of his face and even like this he could see a terrible grief overcome him.

“A tragedy.”

Kurenai retreated as Shimura turned to Shiro.

“You.” Shiro controlled his face. “That girl you were mentoring.” Aw, shit. There goes his tax evasion. “She was found here tonight.”

His heart skipped as though a gale overwrought his chest. A tragedy. He thought of Tonomi, and of Sakura in cyclical succession, faces melding into one.

“She’s at the hospital. I expect you’ll be wanting to see her.” Councilman Shimura eyed him with knowing, like he saw into Shiro, as exposed as he was, itching to run.

“You are dismissed.”

Shiro ran.

Haruno Mebuki was dying. Or, she felt like she was. She suffered all the critical symptoms: shortness of breath, closing airways, pain in chest, numbness in extremities, loss of limb control, incoherent words, dulled senses, confusion, et cetera. She was dying, and she was undying. So there it was.

She followed the ANBU down the hallway despite the hands pulling her back. She wailed after the entourage until they sealed off a corridor and the limp body of her little girl disappeared on a stretcher into the room with other masked shinobi. That other boy who had been allegedly carried in was in that very corridor moments before she’d spotted Sakura, the boy whose family was exterminated in one night, his face held the same pallor, his hair like jet. He’d seemed like rigor mortis had set in except for the rise and fall of his chest—the living dead. Three assembled in a line before her, perfect porcelain strapped to their faces, eyeholes acting as wells to light. Death omens, through and through.

She pushed at them, helplessly. They were a wall to her.

“She’s alive.” Mebuki turned her head to the voice. The pediatrics Chief, Kanaka Hachinso, emerged from the wall, haggard and gray, clipboard in hand. “And she’s stable, but she’s unconscious. All you can do is wait. You can’t get through.” Wrinkled hands guided her toward the plastic chairs. He talked through the documents at hand but it may as well have been confetti for all she was listening.

“I need to see her,” she cut in.

The man clamped his jaw shut, taking the half-moon glasses off the bridge of his nose. In this lighting, his exhaustion was apparent, the grooves of his face deepened under the fluorescence, and all sixty years radiated from the way his hands trembled. He was a dying man, fighting a cancer of his own, the same bone cancer that took his wife six months prior, and he had been summoned in his off hours for this. Practically pulled from his deathbed. That was protocol.

“Remember protocol.”

“I am remembering.”

His liver-spotted hand grasped hers, her own skeletal form disappeared under his, a coldness grounding her. Hard plastic dug into her ribs as she settled back in the chair.

Shinobi Nakamura Shiro would not survive this. Her hands itched for his blood.

Honestly, it was just a lot of talking. And light. Lots and lots of bright white light, in her eyes, examining her head, because apparently she had an open wound somewhere, countless x-rays, and that nauseating cleanly-sickness smell. It was a smell she considered to be worse than the sulfuric stench of dead bodies. And she’d smelled plenty.

It was just a lot of talking, not from her, but from the six medics who asked her questions, one faceless face blending into another. She didn’t answer most of them. It was none of their business. They probed at her despite the intense pain in her skull which she complained about. They gave her painkillers which only made her lethargic and less likely to respond, but any response at all seemed miraculous to them. They seemed determined that she shouldn’t be able to speak, that she should be very upset. But she felt none of that. She was hungry, tired and she wanted to see her mother. A voice in her head told her that, if she wanted to see her mother, she should really act upset.

She cried viciously and obnoxiously, the same sort of inconsolable tears she’d rained on Shiro back at the library, and though the medics had denied her the request, the tension bled from their faces as they watched her cry and scribbled on their clipboards. They conferred, gave her an empty smile, one tried to hug her before backing off at her increasing volume, and left.

In the silence, she allowed her crying to peeter out, recounting the sequence of events that had led to her hospitalization. Death, running, death, a man with red eyes, Uchiha Itachi, a red world and—

The memory ended.

Pulling on the memory had forced her mind empty, like hoisting down a rope which abruptly runs out, then watching the anchor disappear from your sight as it flings over the edge. She pulled again. A sharp bleeding pain exploded in her head, radiating from the center outward. The heart monitor blared. Another voice in her head told her to—

Be Quiet.

Silence in the room. The returning steady rhythm of her heart. Her breath. She was not hallucinating, as the sounds did not come from out of her. She was thinking. In a different voice.

No.

Not a different voice.

No.

Not a different voice? Then, not her thoughts.

No.

Her voice. Her thoughts. Unless her body was trying to trick her again, like with her chakra.

Be Quiet.

Louder. A deeper tone in what was supposed to be her thoughts. Two threads running parallel, and both… hers. A low thrumming echoed in her mind, like the thread being plucked. Focussing on the thrum, she let the other thread fade away, senses growing more prominent as a result. At once, Sakura could hear the buzz of cicadas outside of the window, the similar buzz she tracked to be coming from the light, the wires she was hooked to and the thrum of her body. The smell of saline, sanitizer, rubbing alcohol, steel, bile, faded urine, and the sweetened smell of the sick. Light intensified, the soreness at the back of her head, where the medic had placed a bandage, returned tenfold. Thrumming reached a crescendo.

Be Quiet. The cord snapped still and her usual thread of thought returned to the forefront.

The door handle rattled before a nurse floated in, a tray of food in hand. He settled it on the bed for Sakura to eat, which she did, ravenously, and took a seat on a neighboring stool. Sakura watched over him whilst she chewed. The man, white-haired, pale-skinned, bespectacled, plucked a vial from the cabinet, alongside a tube and a small paper packet with a seal scrawled on the back. She watched carefully, as he sanitized his hands, grabbed Sakura’s arm and swiped the crook of her elbow. The needle came out of the packet and he assembled the tubage and vial.

“This will only feel like a pinch.”

Sakura watched the needle slide under her skin and the red, the blood red, seeped through the tube into the vial. Her face grew cold and she slumped in the bed, food forgotten. The deep thrum of the chord returned and her arm twisted violently back, ripping the needle out of her skin. The result was a gash in the crook of her arm, food tumbled onto the floor and a man who’d paled.

He’d stared at Sakura for a moment before he smiled.

“Nevermind. We can try again tomorrow.”

It took all of Sakura not to tear her arm away when he cleaned and patched over the wound. The man left swiftly. Sakura watched the door before sliding down in the bed and falling asleep.

He was not allowed to see her, which was fine, all things considered. She didn’t exactly need to see him of all people, but he was gratified to know she was alive. How alive, he wasn’t sure. When he asked if her mother knew, he was dismayed to find out that she too was not allowed to see Sakura, her own daughter. He was not allowed to ask other questions, he knew. The ANBU guarding the empty hall at the other end of the floor had been watching him since he arrived. He sat in the plastic chairs, waiting aimlessly.

The central reception and waiting area, where all four corners of the pediatric department converged, had no windows, and had no people, bar the singular receptionist who haphazardly filled in paperwork from behind the desk and the almost non-people who guarded that one hallway. Nurses came and went with trolleys, but none took the time to look at him. The air conditioning froze him to the bone. Still he waited.

Kurenai joined him after the fourth hour as dawn approached.

She sat in the chair beside him, cold takeout in a paper bag on her lap. She ate from it until it emptied and threw the crumpled bag to the floor.

“So,” she began. “The tragedy was—”

“Don’t tell me. I’m not supposed to know.”

“Hm. Uchiha Itachi—”

“Don’t tell me,” he snapped, looking at her for the first time since she arrived. “I’m drawing the line.”

She scoffed.

“Cat’s not going to tell anyone, right Cat?” Her voice carried over to the ANBU across the way. “And he’s going to make sure nobody else says anything either.”

“I’m drawing the line.”

“And I’m stepping over it. The Uchiha clan is dead.”

He grit his teeth. That would make sense. It also meant the Village was in trouble. That was one portion of the shinobi force eliminated, also meaning there was indeed an adversary indeed strong enough to do such a thing under Konoha’s nose. When the other villages smelled the weakness of Konohagakure, they would want to strike, like blood in water. He could only anticipate the volume of assignments he would be receiving in the wake of this.

“It was Uchiha Itachi who did it.”

Complicated.

“There was one survivor. Uchiha Sasuke, his brother. And of course, that girl but she was caught in the crossfire.” She yanked a strand of long black hair from her head and proceeded to use it as floss. “That’s the long and short of it.”

“Is there a pursuit team out?”

“Not as of yet. It’s all hands on deck. Even the medics, clearly.” She looked around. “That’s probably where they are. It’s a lot of bodies to embalm. After ANBU seal them of course. You know how the Uchiha like their quick burials.”

“You know too much.”

“We deal in information. You don’t know enough. Why are we waiting here anyway?”

“I don’t know.” A certain sliver of guilt wormed its way underneath his sternum burning in tandem with his beating heart. Guilt was, for the most part, foreign to him but he knew its taste, body reacting to it like a sickness. His head fell back, hitting the wall behind him with a dull thump.

“They won’t let you see her.”

“I know.”

Just then, a thundering pattering of feet stormed up the hall. His head turned and he blanched.

Haruno Mebuki approached, scrubs stained, in full medical garb, bloodied gloves up to her elbows, disposable apron tied at the back, a hair cap and mask, and yet he could recognise her by her stare alone, the fury and contempt in her eyes, the furrows of her forehead.

“You,” she ground out from behind the paper mask. He was getting really tired of being talked to that way. She stalked towards him at an alarming pace. At an arm's length away, she continued, not pausing even for a breath. “I’m going to kill you.”

Her clenched fist swung from around her side straight into his jaw. To the sound of Kurenai’s yell, he fell, blissfully unconscious.

She woke in the middle of the night, with only Sasuke’s name on her tongue and a vicious compulsion to see him. It didn’t take much to slip out of bed, but it took considerable planning to dodge the guards outside of her room. The first time she’d opened the door, she’d stopped short at the ANBU faces that met her. She slammed the door immediately.

The second time she’d opened the door, she had a plan. It wasn’t a good plan, but it was a surprisingly functional plan. When they opened the door and her face met their painted ghost faces, she’d smiled.

“Hello, ANBU-san. I need to use the bathroom. Where is it?” ANBU, being ANBU, were largely forbidden to talk in front of civilians, she surmised as they’d straightened and pointed down the hall and gestured to make a left. She nodded gratefully. “Thank you, ANBU-san.”

One ANBU darted into the room past her, and as she stepped into the hallway, barefoot and quiet, the other ANBU made a move to follow. She turned and frowned.

“But ANBU-san. It’s the little girl’s room. You’re not a little girl, are you?”

They stopped following.

As she walked, she made sure to listen. Most rooms were empty, lights off, no sound, nobody in the halls. Just sanitized off-white tiles with yellow grout, gaudy cartoon murals whose eyes seemed to follow her and dim yellow-green light. This was where Kaa-san worked. A shiver crawled up her skin.

Two turns, straight past the bathroom and she turned onto another corridor, spotting another pair of ANBU outside a door. Between them, a constant stream of medics rushed in and out of the room. A constant shriek followed.

A nurse pushed a trolley out into the hall, a white-curtained trolley, with food smearing the sides. She hurried down the hall toward Sakura, who ducked behind the wall. Blind to Sakura crouched on the floor, the woman pushed past, and Sakura turned to follow. She disappeared into a small store cupboard and Sakura crept in behind her. It was a simple affair, crawling onto the trolley to hide behind the curtains and in no time at all Sakura was being pushed by the audibly distraught and distracted nurse crossing the threshold into Sasuke’s room.

It was the shriek again. The same inhuman cry of sound into her brain. An echoing curse jarring Sakura forcing to press the heels of her palms into her ears. Even then, the sound penetrated.

Dishes crashed against one another, even hitting her through the trolley’s curtains, and from the sound of it, the nurse also endured such a hit. Sakura listened as her footsteps faded and the door to the room slammed shut, ending the last of the unintelligible shrieks.

Sakura chose that moment to crawl out from under the trolley. Looking up, she spotted Sasuke on the sticky vinyl floor. He was pale, even paler than usual in the hospital gown. Streaks of tears adorned his face, shrouded by shadow as he collapsed in on himself. And, though the lights were dimmed, she could see that all the furniture had been removed from the room besides the mattress on the floor. His hair, usually shiny, glistened with grease.

“Sasuke.” Sakura was overcome with urgency. “Sasuke. Over here. I’m here.”

His sniffles peetered out when he looked up, met her eyes. In his stunned state, his crying stopped. His face turned. He looked… angry.

“This is a trick… He’s tricking me again. You’re dead.” His hoarse mutterings were only audible because she’d held her breath. “This is a trick. This is—” He broke away as he lunged for a stray chopstick, flinging it at her. It hit her squarely in the forehead, bouncing back and clattering at the floor. The pain sprung from impact and she clutched at her forehead.

“Sasuke-kun. That hurt.” He looked between her and then himself, his clothes, where he was sitting. Smears of food splattered his half-ripped hospital gown, and he sat in what seemed to be a puddle. His hands came up, nails clawing red lines down his skin, rocking back and forth, gown wrinkled in his grip. Every muscle in his body flexed with permanent tension. Eyes screwed up, he shook his head.

“You’re not real.”

“I’m real.” A feeling gnawed at her. “Why do you think I’m not real?”

His eyelids stretched over his eyes, a trembling quality to them; it was as though his skin did not fit over his bones. His muscles pulled taut around his mouth, gaunt. The skin moved as though he and his skin were separating inch by inch and resewing itself together again incrementally. He looked like a mangy dog. It was something she had never encountered before. Spittle flew from his mouth.

“Because you are alive and they aren’t. Why couldn't he have killed you instead? It's not fair!”

It hit her then, that she was alive, and the sheer enormity of— Sakura felt a stab of pain.

He was right.

It wasn’t fair, least of all to him. But fairness didn’t exist, not really. She had once rued him, his clan, and at once, they had been… exterminated. That was how the wheel would turn, she understood.

She then thought of their classmates' snobbish mockery, their relentless prestige, but also thought of how their faces glowed in the sun when they laughed and how more than one of them acquired a sunburn even in winter, courtesy of their pale skin. She thought of the policemen who roamed Konoha in oppressive gangs, noses too far up in the air to notice her, too elite to sully themselves with stepping foot in the Akasen. The resentment she harbored for them all. The normality of it had escaped her. All of it gone, and nowhere to put the feeling. The emptiness that came after, a glaring hole where her classmates could’ve been. His family.

She thought of Sasuke.

The compound had been everything she’d expected. Regal, expansive. Even Sasuke’s house, in the glimpses she’d gotten. Sleek, and wealthy. Corrupted with their dead bodies. She imagined them in an insidious pile, a collection of limbs stacked on top of one another, one limb leading into another joined at the wrists or some other spliced intersection; a desperate monstrum of naked white-blue gooseflesh and desiccation. She imagined them squalling like rats before their deaths, the way the Akasen rats tried to help each other out of traps, or the other stronger, rougher kids did when the real bad guys arrived. Blood, and ice, and fury, and eyeless men. She’d imagined it then, in a way only a child could imagine, in all the blurred lines a watercolour painting could offer, and with all the intensity of dread as an imagined monster hiding in the closet: a stack of half-realities cloaked in a colorful trenchcoat, behind which a more terrible evil lied.

That might have been the first time she would witness that truth, a first of many moments. Something that would vindicate her, and send her straight to hell.

The volume had apparently broken secrecy, so much that the ANBU rushed in. One went for Sasuke, pinning him to the bed; another took her under her arms and lifted, hauling her out of the room. The sounds of his cries followed her down the hall. When she returned to sleep that night, she was glad she dreamt of nothing.

When he came to, it was to Kurenai standing between him and a Haruno Mebuki who was being restrained by a very small and very haggard old man. It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds that he’d blacked out, but it seemed as though Mebuki’s outrage had spawned a small crowd of medical personnel watching intently from a doorway. His bones creaked and cracked when he rose from his seat.

“Listen here,” he cut into what new horseshit platitude Kurenai was feeding her. His exhaustion allowed his irritation to take hold. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to accomplish by assaulting me, but it’s not going to work.”

“Oh! What am I trying to accomplish?” Scoffing, her face became a snarl, mask ripped off, hanging off her ear. “I’m going to fucking kill you!”

“I can see that!”

She lunged, but the old man tightened his frail grip, shaking her gently.

“Mebuki, don’t be so loud. Think of the kids!” he tried to placate, but Shiro imagined that would be like trying to put out an oil fire with water. The woman hissed at him, lips pulled back over her teeth.

“I am thinking of the kids! My kid! My daughter.” She turned back to Shiro, something reprehensibly familiar gleaming in her. “This your fucking fault!”

That caught him unpleasantly off guard.

“No, the fuck it’s not!” He screamed back, leaning into her face so that the breath punching from her flared nostrils hit his face. Kurenai shoved her arm around the front of his shoulders, keeping him away from the woman. “I did my job! You are supposed to take care of her!”

“Did ‘your job’? Your job was to train her to protect herself!” She broke free for a second to shove him by his shoulders but he was unmoving. The old man regained a grip on her. He laughed a hollow laugh.

“No, it was to train her to get into the Academy! And guess what? No amount of training could protect her from a shinobi like Uchiha Itachi!”

“You don’t know that!”

“I do! And if you were a better mother you could’ve protected her!” Shiro, the low man that he was, took great pleasure in seeing her face drop, her frown deepen, and her eyes widen, glassy enough to become a mirror. He smiled, charging forward with his unforgiving acrimony. “Huh? Where were you when it happened? Huh? Because last I remembered she was also sneaking out of your hovel of an apartment because she was unsupervised! Am I not supposed to infer that all of this,” he left a moment to gesture broadly to her, sneering, “is due to your negligence?”

“It’s your fault!”

The tears that fell from her eyes extracted something heavy from his chest, relieving him of the burden. His shoulders pulled back as he dropped his voice low enough so that the gasping, gossiping crowd could not hear him, and allowed the condemnation to fall from his mouth, a gavel slamming upon the table.

“No. It’s yours.”

Crack!

Another slap stung across his cheek as she stumbled back, roughly shrugging off the old man. Cradling her hand she stepped backward and turned toward the crowd of silent observers in the doorway.

They watched her back recede, in resounding silence, and Shiro, in bitter triumph.

As she stormed back down the hall, the old man sighed and turned to the crowd himself. They cringed at his look.

“Show’s over!” He yelled. “Get back to work!”

When the last of the staff left the room, the steaming pulse of victory had seeped from his skin leaving only the warmth of pain on his cheek and jaw, and all that remained was the ANBU watching him and Kurenai’s baleful glare, she cuffed him by the neck before pushing him into a chair.

“Congratulations, Shiro. You humiliated yourself in front of an entire ward of medics, by bullying a civilian. When Nara hears about this, you’re out of action for at least six months.”

Sage knew the Jonin Commander hated him enough. He sighed.

“Fuck.”

Yamanaka Inoichi was simply tired. Uchiha Sasuke was utterly impossible to unpick. Erratic, a refusal to sleep, a persistent refusal to eat, somewhat convinced that he could still be locked in a genjutsu, a refusal to answer his questions until he had his clan funeral details in his hands; all in all, exactly what one would expect from an Uchiha, but not at all what one would want from a child, nor a patient. He exhibited all major signs of post-traumatic stress, even so soon after the inciting incident, yet stalwartly refused to engage in the therapy ordered. As the new Uchiha head, the youngest ever in Konohagakure’s history, he had the power to overturn the order, and that, he did. Try as he might, Yamanaka Inoichi had no power. All he managed to do was teach him how to identify genjutsu—by pinching the side of his thigh, something he can do anywhere. If it hurt, there was no genjutsu. Inoichi was the only one of them aware that the Tsukuyomi was under no such limitations.

He was now sitting in wait for the second, less important patient. That was to say, the patient whose psychiatric review was not ordered. And yet, here he was. Waiting.

That very girl stepped in followed by a nurse. She was not at all what Inoichi had expected.

From his daughter, by which he first knew the name, she was a precocious girl, if shy and prone to underestimating herself. From her patient files, it read that she was also erratic, but had more teary outbursts than anything else, was confused and reluctant to speak, and finally, by a later addendum, was jumpy. As she entered, it was evident that she was none of those things.

She sat on the chair comfortably, wandering eyes only displaying curiosity.

“Haruno Sakura,” he began with his bedside smile. She looked unconvinced. “I am Yamanaka Inoichi. I am a mind doctor. I’m here to help you with your worries.”

She stared at him for a moment. Resistant.

“Nice to meet you, Yamanaka-san.” He noted her formality and maturity of enunciation in her file. She watched him do so.

“Sakura-san. I heard you had a tough day yesterday. Do you want to talk about it?” He observed her.

“Can I see Kaa-san?”

He pursed his lips.

“Not yet. You can see her after this.” The clock ticked away in the silence. She scrutinized him from the chair. Something about her lended itself to such a manner. She perhaps suited that sort of role. “Do you want to tell me about what happened yesterday?”

She seemed to contemplate this, to weigh her options. She, very smartly, chose correctly.

“I went to the Uchiha clan compound and everyone had died. A man appeared… I think he put me under genjutsu. Then, some people took me to the hospital, here.”

“Okay.” Inoichi noted what she mentioned, how it aligned with the ANBU report, and stuttered over only a section of that account. A small problem of phrasing he underlined to return to later. “Do you want to start from the beginning? Why did you go to the compound?”

She shrugged.

“Sasuke-kun said I could meet—his brother, and then I could help him with school. It was just me and him. Then we saw the bodies. Sasuke ran, so I ran after him. Then the man came.”

“How did it make you feel, seeing the bodies?” She stilled. Whatever loose thread she was tugging from the weathered chair fell from her grip. “Did it make you feel scared? Or did it make you feel worried?”

She shrugged.

“I don’t remember.” He scribbled in his notes.

“How does it make you feel now?”

A war occurred on her face. He wrote down ‘functional emotional processing and present internal monologue’. She showed initially signs of confusion, then anger, then, unusually, apathy. The kind of detachment that first stunned even the patient, then facilitated thought. Her eyes darted away from him before coming back to him, satisfied. Then, she put on the most subtly false face he’d seen in a child. A false face of vulnerability.

“Sad, I think.” Her lip tremble was artificial. His hand moved to write in his notes before stopping short, thinking better of it. He shut the file and set it aside. He leaned forward toward her.

“You think?”

Assured, she nodded.

“Yeah. It’s not fair that they died.” He hummed, leaning back.

“Sakura-san, do you understand that those people were killed?”

She seemed affronted by the question before righting herself.

“Yes. By Uchiha Itachi.” Inoichi assumed here that she had been told this by the medics on call yesterday, despite the fact that these topics were best broached by a trained professional like himself. He restrained his disapproval.

“Yes. How does that make you feel?” Her irritation grew. He focused on that.

“I told you, Sad. Because it’s not fair.” He acquiesced.

“Okay, I understand. What happened when the man came?”

“It was Uchiha Itachi.” She narrowed her eyes and spoke his name like it was rebellion. “And he put us both under a genjutsu. I think.” There it was again. ‘She thinks.’

“Would you like to share what happened in the genjutsu?”

A pause. He watched her visibly attempt to recall the memory only to come up short, teetering on the edge between reticence and genuine amnesiac circumstance.

“I don’t remember,” she whispered, growing uncomfortable.

He observed her for a few moments. Genuine, it seemed. That was fine: child minds commonly blocked recent traumatic events only to unwillingly recall it later. It was somewhat rare for this amnesia to be permanent, but realistically he had never had the opportunity to study the effects of the Tsukuyomi on any patient, let alone a child whose personality had yet to coalesce. This left the child's mind particularly vulnerable to traumatic events, and a traumatic event induced by chakra usage on the brain could have entirely unprecedented results. There was little chance he could persuade the young Uchiha to attend psychiatric sessions, so she was the next best thing. Therefore, he needed to find out what she remembered, and she would not be leaving this room until he found out. Such was the interest of science.

“Ah. Could you try to remember?” he pressed. Her discomfort grew back into irritation, a defence mechanism.

“I am trying,” she snapped at him. “I can’t remember. Don’t ask me again.”

He changed route. To signify as such to her, he changed his posture.

“Would you like to try something with me?” He smiled at her, reaching inside him for the closest thing to sweetness he possessed.

“What?” she said, softening but still distrustful. His open palms came up to the table to present himself as safe.

“May I use a jutsu to find the memory for you?”

“No.” Immediate defence, yet again. Closed off, distrustful. That was probably wise as a budding shinobi. He didn’t think he’d ever had one come in and agree to such a thing. Still, he pressed.

“You won’t have to see the memory. I can find it and get rid of it if you want.”

She sucked in a breath and crossed her arms across her chest.

“No. It’s my memory. You can’t have it.” Seconds passed as her words rang in the room. “I want Kaa-san.”

“You can see her when we’re done here.”

Inoichi approached the foremost problem of her account. The ANBU report read as follows:

Victim, short pink hair, roughly Academy age (subsequently identified by Agent Hound as one Haruno Sakura), found unconscious on Uchiha main branch eastern engawa beside primary victim Uchiha Sasuke; superficial head injury, otherwise intact. Delivered to hospital pediatrics alongside primary victim by ANBU Squad 17.

Therein lay the problem: the official ANBU account stated unequivocally that she was found unconscious, yet she’d implied she had been conscious during transportation. This was a small, perhaps insignificant misalignment of recollections, contradicting, yes, but maybe he had misheard her. If he was lucky, then it would be just that—a misunderstanding.

“Do you remember what happened after the genjutsu?” he said, hoping for the best.

“Yeah. I woke up on the engawa. The ANBU people carried me to the hospital.” His heart dropped. That meant somebody was lying. And that also meant—

“And how did that make you feel?” he said, just to say something, to make sure the nurse in the room didn’t notice anything amiss. Sakura responded with an unimpressed, impatient scowl. “I see.”

“Can I see Kaa-san now?”

This was becoming a situation of utmost importance. He had initially requested this meeting because she was dear to his little Ino-chan, but mostly to study the consequences of genjutsu on the mind. He was selfish in that respect, sure, but he fancied himself to be doing the girl a favor, examining her in a controlled environment. This was no longer doing her a favor. This was digging two graves.

He cleared his throat. Before he even spoke, he had the handsigns ready under the table.

“Unfortunately, you can’t see her until I have conducted the mind walk. Nurse, if you could hold her—”

Inside, it was what he could expect from any child, only more organised. The room he was in had hardwood flooring and beige painted walls, and it was cavernous. A yellow pendant hung from the vaulted soon, emitting a strong yellow light. A faint smell of mothballs and damp wood permeated the space. Lining the walls were doors, wooden and labelled with indecipherable metal fixtures, engraved in a crawling unknowable tongue. Most doors were battered and worn splintering, he noted as he ran a tentative finger along the surface, bar one, whose freshly stained wood stood vibrantly in the back corner. The ‘newest door for the newest memories’ was the logic Inoichi followed.

The door opened into one egregiously long concrete corridor with piercing white overhead lighting emanating from an ambiguous source. He kept his eyes on the black shelves stretching from the ceiling to the wooden floor, filled with meticulously curated boxes upon boxes of files, all labelled in that same indecipherable, shifting language crawling across the pages. As he walked on, the room grew narrower and the shelves more sparse. The floors grew greyer and eventually turned into more concrete. He continued to the end of the hallway where there was nowhere else to go but to walk into a solid concrete wall. When he decided to turn back to try a different path, a pungent scent, rich and rotten, caught his attention. He spotted a hatch hidden beneath a shelf.

The hatch was iron, and wet rust gathered at the hinges. It had an aura around it—not particularly positive or menacing but it was almost overwhelming. It wasn’t locked as one would expect it to be, but he supposed the suffocating atmosphere it had provided more protection than a flimsy lock would. A gut-wrenching stench of decomposing corpses and smoke emitted from the cracks, leaving a rotten taste in the back of his throat. If he was any less of an experienced shinobi he would’ve cringed, but he had smelt worse on the battlefield so he held his breath instead. It pained him to bend and reach for the latch, sending electrical impulses up his arm, but he persisted, and he dropped down through the opening into the great darkness.

The smell amplified, and he felt that he’d stepped past a sound barrier when the cacophonous sound of cicadas sang in his ears, disorienting him. He stepped off the ladder, but when he looked around and turned back to the ladder, it had disappeared. With no other choice, he staggered into the unknown.
The further he ventured into the dark, the greater his disorientation became. It was astounding, really. He hadn’t yet encountered such an obstacle in a person’s mind. He finally stumbled across a speck of discordant light glimmering in the dark. He approached it, watching it grow, expecting the memory of the genjutsu to materialize when he got close enough. Perhaps it would reveal to him the most excruciating issue with her, the dilemma that was giving him a pulsating migraine: who broke her out of that genjutsu—and how.

But what he was met with was not a traumatic memory but a little girl that looked like Sakura.

No, not exactly a little girl. Because little girls didn’t look at him the way she did. Oh no, not a little girl.

A rumble punched through him, as she talked without moving her gaping black mouth, from which a swarm of screaming cicadas escaped into the dark. He shielded his face as they engulfed him, wings scraping against his skin. Through it all, a deafening voice emerged.

Get.

Out.

He felt himself being ripped away from his jutsu.

Back in the room, after the dazed Sakura and confused nurse had left the room, he considered her file carefully. Where he had written anything of significance, he had blacked out, the most notable of which was her problematic recollection of events. If she had not been the single dearest friend of his beloved daughter, he might not have been inclined to go to this trouble. Instead, on behalf of his daughter, and for the first time in his medical career, he lied.

Before he left, he made sure to shred the original file before burning it and left the new file open, set on the highest shelf of the room. This decision, he believed, would be the thing to drive him directly to his death.