Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The bridge was a mess when the fighting ended.  Forty or so dead mercenaries, ten construction workers’ corpses, Zabuza, Haku, and the pile of meat formerly known as Gato positively coated the stonework.  All told, there were about twenty-five times as many dead bodies as Sakura had seen in her entire life up to that point.  As evidenced by the pool of vomit at (and partially on) her feet, it was stomach-turning.  Amid the killing field, Kakashi cheerfully whistled while he rinsed Sasuke’s numerous new piercings with rubbing iodine. If Sakura were not already certain that Kakashi was gross and terrible, this absolutely confirmed it.  Sasuke was shaking slightly where he sat, between Kakashi and Sakura, staring fixedly across the bridge at where Naruto was happily chatting with Inari and the crowd of cheering locals.

As Naruto escorted Tazuna back to his home, Sakura had little to do while she kept watch during Sasuke’s treatment.  Kakashi ordered Sasuke to stay on the bridge, since senbon wounds tend to tear and get infected if not treated immediately, and he just ordered Sakura to stand watch.  She felt strangely detached after throwing up.  Sakura’s mind would not stop replaying the mission while she waited, and standing watch might as well be her official role on the team, judging by how this mission went. For all that it spared her the disgusting parts of the job, sweat, blood, etc., Sasuke seemed to like her even less now.  Maybe if she found some way to contribute (without exerting herself physically) next time...?

All at once Kakashi interrupted her thoughts by appearing less than an inch from her face in a swirl of leaves, and she fell on her backside in surprise.  Before she even got out an indignant cry, Kakashi drawled in her face, “Well, Sakura-chaaaan~, since you are mostly fresh, and Sasuke-kun is on his way back now, I think now would be a good time to give you a lesson!  This is one the boys will get eventually, but it requires serious book smarts, and its mostly taught at higher ranks, since it requires more maturity.  Do you think you can handle that?”

Sure enough, Sasuke had stood up and was picking his way through the sea of corpses to get off the bridge, looking vaguely like a mummy with all his bandages.  Sakura blinked at Kakashi’s praise for her intelligence and maturity; then again, he did have good things to say about her tree-walking.  Cha!  Finally, he’s going to teach us something!  Something all our own that we can impress Sasuke with!  She glanced around at all of the dead people before answering, “Uhm, sure, Kakashi-sensei, but can we do it somewhere else?  There are a lot of bodies here.”

Kakashi’s visible grin through his mask sent a chill racing down her spine, “I’m afraid not, Sakura-chan! After all, the bodies are the lesson!”

The next four hours were more disgusting and degrading than any of the thirty-odd D-rank missions they have been assigned so far.  At first, Sakura stared blankly at her sensei, incredulous that even he would make her do something this gross.  What followed his announcement was the most exact and thorough lesson she had ever experienced, in the academy or elsewhere, with special attention paid to how to handle the bodies themselves.  Kakashi would not let her leave until every body had been searched and cremated, although he performed the fire jutsu to burn the corpse pile.

Her stomach was empty of vomit by the fifth corpse, and she became increasingly coated in disgusting fluids even after that.  Kakashi’s chipper familiarity with the process of stripping corpses brought home how normal this was for him, driving Sakura to wonder exactly how many people he had killed. When he oh so helpfully dumped a bucket of water on her after the makeshift pyre was alight, she could not bring herself to be particularly upset at being soaked to the skin.  It was the first time she felt clean throughout the whole “lesson”.

Despite feeling increasingly disconnected and unsettled, Sakura had absorbed a shocking amount of information from Kakashi, all having to do with how to clean up after a ninja battle.  The most calming part of the experience was the familiarity of the rote memorization of regulations and technical details, sending her mind back to the academy and reminding her that Iruka had discussed battlefield cleanup, but as something only chunnin-ranked ninja and above needed to learn.  Every time she started to slow down, slack off, or turn away in disgust, Kakashi was right next to her, dragging her hands physically into the blood and bile, and showing her a new detail of searching a corpse or using a storage scroll.  At first, she shrieked, but by the end, she found herself unsettlingly enthralled, as he had moved into discussing the kind of traps that ninja sometimes applied to their own bodies.

Exhausted by the work of ‘prize-collecting,’ as Kakashi so helpfully put it, Sakura needed to be carried back by Kakashi along with the newly filled sealing scrolls containing anything of interest on the bodies, as well as Gato’s head, Zabuza, and Haku.  When they arrived, Naruto was busy celebrating with Inari, Tsunami, and Tazuna in his usual boisterous manner.  Kakashi passed them by before any of them realized they were back and set her down along with the pile of scrolls in her room.  He glanced down at her with his visible eye and said, “Great work, Sakura-chan!  Now, you have until tomorrow night to organize these scrolls by what’s in them and check for any time-sensitive information in them.  I’m going to check on Sasuke-kun, but I’ll make sure to come check on your progress before you call it a night, so better get started!”

Sakura was not aware of a time as Kakashi’s student that she had hated him more than this moment.  We're going to tear that mask off and feed him his damn scrolls!  Her right eye twitched slightly as she began to wind up to hurl one of the scrolls at him when his left hand landed on her head.  His eye no longer curved in his strange eye-smile, and his voice was as kind as she had ever heard it, “This mission was your first brush with death, so I know you’re feeling a little fragile right now.  I promise that doing this will help.”

With that, he vanished, leaving Sakura in damp clothes, sitting stunned on the floor beside a pile eighty-two scrolls.  Was Kakashi just…nice?

Chapter Text

Sakura’s first thought was sleep, which claimed her as soon as she had changed and cleaned herself of the remaining traces of the bridge.  Her sleep was empty and quiet, without dreams or other disturbances, and when she woke in the morning, only the sight of the scrolls and her utterly ruined clothes from yesterday convinced her that the bridge was not a nightmare.  Dragging herself up, she pulled on her backup clothes, a red skirt and a sleeveless red top, and slouched down the stairs to eat breakfast.  Sasuke and Naruto were both already down, stuffing themselves and glaring at each other on and off.  Naruto delightedly cried out, “Sakura-chan!  I didn’t see you last night!  Kakashi just said you helped clean up and that you were already asleep when he came down, dattebayo!”

Across from Naruto, Sasuke stiffened slightly under his layer of bandages and inspected Sakura (!!!!) for a moment before turned back to his food.  Just as Naruto began badgering her, Kakashi spoke up, apparently directly behind her, “Good morning!  Today, Naruto, you will be with me on the bridge, while Sasuke and Sakura stay behind.  We’re going to have so much fun hauling rocks!”

Sakura jumped at Kakashi’s voice from directly above her head, and leapt to the side, toppling over a chair.  In front of Sasuke!  We're going to kill that scarecrow!  She was slightly gratified that Naruto and Sasuke seemed at least a little surprised, although they were not falling over themselves like her.  Sasuke grunted and returned to his rice, while Naruto launched into his usual barrage of whining and moaning at the prospect of Kakashi’s idea of fun.  Sakura could not entirely suppress her sympathy, since Kakashi loved to coerce her into doing heavy lifting whenever they had a D-rank.  She was almost certain it was just so that she would get sweaty and gross in front of Sasuke.

When Naruto and Kakashi left, Sasuke disappeared before she could get a word in edgewise.  Sakura sighed and went back up to her room.  The stack of scrolls against the wall was all she had to do today, so she took a deep breath and began sorting through them.  She immediately set aside the three that held corpses, not wanting to dwell on yesterday.  The remaining seventy-nine were divided between fifty-two scrolls of weapons and equipment, twenty-two scrolls of money and goods, and five scrolls of information.  She decided to get the boring part out of the way first and go through the gear.

Most of the weapons were either polearms, oversized “idiot-swords” as Kakashi had called them, or small knives and senbon.  All told there were twenty swords and polearms of sufficient quality to be worth keeping, forty kunai and other knives, and around three hundred senbon.  The sheer number that Haku managed to throw over the course of a fifteen-minute fight was horrifying and made Sakura question her own throwing skills.  If someone our age can throw senbon that fast and still hit what they’re aiming for, We're way, way to slow!  Sakura contemplated the swords, all of which were useless without at least four years of instruction, which made them useless for most non-specialized ninja, and re-sealed them.  Zabuza’s enormous sword had been set aside by Kakashi, who explained that, as a sword of the Seven Swordsmen of the Mist, it was impossible to seal in a normal scroll, and even more dangerous to be seen carrying, so they would be leaving it behind, to be retrieved at the Hokage’s discretion.  After discarding the broken weapons, sorting them by type, and consolidating the knives and senbon into fewer scrolls, Sakura had a set of thirty weapons scrolls, none of which were particularly important, and which were destined for Konoha’s quartermaster, who would trade them in for a small bounty for the team.

The scrolls of goods were mostly filled with Gato’s waterlogged jewelry and Haku’s surprisingly lovely and extensive selection of hairpins, all of which were poisoned according to Kakashi’s warnings from the night before, and a small set of beautifully carved bone brooches in the shape of snowflakes.  All told, they also retrieved 167,800 ryo from the fallen, which Kakashi estimated would cover about a fifth of Tazuna’s debt to the village for lying about the mission rank.  The collection of twenty-two scrolls shrank to four scrolls, one of which was marked as important, since it had all the money.  The jewelry would be appraised in the village, and they would be divided among the team, or sold, and proceeds split among the team, a perk of being a field operative.

Of the remaining five scrolls, only one was a sealing scroll, and she spent the rest of her morning until lunch sorting through the various accounting books in that scroll.  While she was hauling the cleaned corpses into a makeshift pyre off the bridge, Kakashi had retrieved Gato from the water, and taken a few minutes to take anything of interest from his boat.  This sealing scroll contained twelve volumes of accounting books, most of which covered increasingly illegal trade deals, embargoes, and scams, to the point the Sakura felt mildly ill reading through them.  Her parents had shared the generalities of the business world with her as she grew up, and she knew from her father’s lessons on the consequences of scams that Gato was responsible for a lot of poverty, starvation, and slavery.  Two of the accounting books covered illegal operations in the Land of Fire, so they were sealed into a scroll marked as priority.  All of Gato’s books would end up in the hands of the Intelligence division, who would assign the team a reward based on the value of the information.

Lunch was a mostly silent affair, with Sasuke appearing, eating, and leaving with barely more than a nod of thanks in Tsunami’s direction, whereas Sakura stuck around to help collect the dishes.  Her mind was caught up in the calculations that she had been trawling through, and it was, frankly, the most interesting puzzle she had had to think about since graduation.  Cha!  We're such a paper-ninja…

After wrapping up Gato’s finances, Sakura opened the three scrolls they had found on Zabuza’s body.  The first two were in code, and after applying the basic code identification techniques that she learned in the academy, she identified the code as a variation on the standard Mist encryption, so she marked that down and set them aside.  They were not a priority, given that they seemed to be at least a year old.  The final scroll was his contract with Gato, which made mention of the “Mist rebellion”.  That sounded like important intel, so she marked that as priority, and moved on to the last scroll.

The last scroll was contained in an old locking wooden case.  She had found a matching key to hidden in Haku’s hair bun, after Kakashi made her sift through all the corpses’ hair.  Within the scroll was a long, complex description of the Hyoton style, its core jutsu, and Hyoton-specific training techniques.  Sakura almost closed it up and packed it away then and there, since Hyoton was one of the kekkei genkai mentioned at the academy as being native to the Lands of Water and Frost.  Nothing in the scroll would be useful to anyone without the kekkei genkai, so it was probably a waste of time to read further for a native Konohagakure.  Then again, maybe something in here explains his speed and accuracy with senbon…Maybe we're not quite so far behind?

Skimming through the scroll, Sakura found that Hyoton did allow a ninja to move substantially faster by cycling ice-aligned chakra through their limbs, which explained Haku’s speed but implied that his accuracy was just a product of long practice.  At the end of the scroll, Sakura found something different from the list of increasingly complex ice jutsu.  It appeared to be a medical procedure, wherein one ninja directs Suiton and Fūton Chakra simultaneously onto another ninja’s back, who then guides the chakras into their spine through the third chakra gate, the Gate of Life.  The procedure called for, on average, two months of chakra control exercises focused on the spinal tenketsu, and a high level of chakra control to begin with.  She reread it, looking for an explanation for what the technique actually did.  Most of the writing focused on the technical details, but there, at the very end, it stated, “And so the subject shall become an inheritor of ice-natured chakra.  Should our clan ever be reduced drastically in numbers, this technique can be used to rebuild.”

What!?  You can do that?  Just give someone a kekkei genkai with a couple of months and crazy chakra control?

Sakura stared at the scroll for a few moments, stunned.  She reread the technique, realizing how simple it would be for a jonin to give a viable ninja the Hyoton.  As she set the scroll in the priority pile, she wondered if every kekkei genkai could be created like the Hyoton.

Kakashi used that Suiton dragon on Zabuza, and he might be able to use Fūton too, if what Zabuza said about him copying techniques is true.  Chakra control is kind of our biggest strength.

…We could do this.

Chapter Text

The Hyoton scroll was the only thing Sakura could think about for the rest of the mission.  At first it was just a passing fantasy, to have her own kekkei genkai, so she could stand on her own alongside Sasuke (and Naruto, I guess).  After Kakashi checked her work organizing the spoils from the fight, he charged her with keeping the pile of scrolls, aside from the money scroll, until they arrived back in Konoha.  Kakashi had Sakura and Naruto helping on the bridge for three days, at which point he had Sasuke join them.  At the bridge, all of them were forced to do chakra control exercises while helping the workers.  Naruto was still working on vertical-walking, since Kakashi was apparently dissatisfied with how wobbly he was when he was distracted from walking, and Sasuke was switched back to vertical-walking after a couple of disastrous attempts at water-walking, much to his fuming anger.  Sakura ended up picking up water-walking by the end of the first day, and Kakashi told her to focus on the leaf sticking exercise while water-walking.

Within three days, she was bored out of her mind.  We can water-walk in my sleep at this point, and sticking leaves to our body doesn’t actually need any concentration at all now.  We had this sort of stuff down before we graduated!

Kakashi’s response to a request for something more complex was to laugh, ruffle her hair, and tell her to “go looking for inspiration, Sakura-chan!”

Cha!  I guess he doesn’t treat the boys any differently at least.  At the base of the bridge, Sasuke had just been forced to go back to hauling stone up the side of the bridge after failing to convince Kakashi that he was ready to start water-walking practice.  Naruto fell off the side of the bridge while laughing at him, landing with a huge splash.  Serves him right for mocking Sasuke-kun!

Needless to say, Sakura decided to break out the tenketsu exercises from the end of the Hyoton scroll that night.  The control exercises for her spinal tenketsu were simple enough for her to learn, but needed focus to master, so it was at least a step up from the Kakashi’s useless advice.  For the rest of the two weeks they spent on the mission, she practiced moving her chakra in and out of her spine with ever increasing precision.  All throughout, in the back of her mind was the whispered promise of her own kekkei genkai.

When the bridge was completed (and dedicated to Naruto of all people) the team departed for Konoha with thanks from the citizens of Wave.  The return journey was much faster, with Kakashi leading them directly through the trees rather than following the winding road.  Naruto and Sasuke were consistently assigned watch together at night, with Kakashi’s cheerful “Don’t kill each other without waking us up first, kids!” which was consistently answered with grumbling from both boys.  Kakashi kept her company on her shift on watch each night, and, a few hours before dawn on the final night, he addressed her out of the blue, “So you want to be able to use Hyoton, eh Sakura-chan?  You seem to have the chakra exercise down, from what I’ve seen over the last week.  Maa, great initiative, but maybe just check with me before you start those sorts of exercises next time.  Stealing kekkei genkai is fun if you can do it, but it can be pretty risky.”

Sakura froze.  He knew?  This whole time!?  Wait…risky?  She glanced back to where the boys were sleeping, then hissed back, “T-They’re just chakra exercises, sensei.  It’s not like moving my chakra around my back is going to hurt me!”

Kakashi’s eye curved up, and Sakura’s heart sank in her chest before he even answered, “Maa, Sakura-chan, chakra exercises near any of the chakra gates can damage the coils that pass through them!  If your control were any worse, you could have fractured some vertebrae too.  If you were as rough around the edges as Naruto, they might even explode outright!  There’s a ninja in Konoha who used to routinely shatter his own bones trying to use his chakra gates, so I’ve actually seen it happen.  We used to have a betting pool on when he would break his back again!  Good times, all around.”

Oh kami…The blood drained from Sakura’s face, and she felt slightly faint, even as Kakashi laughed.  He shrugged nonchalantly, “Either way, no harm done this time.  I can probably borrow a lab from R&D or T&I once we’re back in the village tomorrow to perform the procedure in the Hyoton scroll!  I even know a jonin who can check your work before we start.”

The rest of the night was spent in a daze, as Sakura tried not to think about her back exploding, and Kakashi flipped through his godawful porn, giggling.  When dawn came, and they could see Konoha’s walls swiftly rising above the tree line, Sakura had become less subdued, as thoughts of having her own kekkei genkai filled her mind.  It’s going to happen!  We're going to have our own kekkei genkai!

Arriving in the village meant going through four layers of bureaucracy to finish reporting in.  First, they checked in at the gate, where a pair of chunnin checked that they were who they said they were, and then the whole group trekked to the Hokage Tower, where they reported to the mission desk, who immediately redirected them to the Intelligence division, since their mission was mis-ranked.  At the Intelligence division building, halfway across the village, the staff took their statements about the mission, collected and noted down the spoils that Sakura had so meticulously sorted and labeled, and sent them back to the Hokage Tower to debrief with Sandaime personally, as is normal procedure for a genin team’s first C-rank.  The Hokage and Kakashi were both content to let Naruto rant and rave for half an hour about their mission, not letting anyone get a word in edgewise.  Much to Sakura’s annoyance he was on the other side of Sasuke from her, so she could not hit him to get him to let Kakashi debrief properly.  That said, she was pretty sure that the hand that Kakashi was using to fidget with his book might be performing jonin sign language, so the Hokage might be getting his debrief anyway.

The Sandaime passed the debriefing smiling, shuffling papers, and emitting the occasional chuckle.  Finally, he dismissed them, “Excellent work all of you!  I am proud of your progress as shinobi of Konohagakure, and I will raise the mission’s rank to an A, with the associated pay and benefits.  Now, I believe you will all want to reacquaint yourselves with the village, so you may go.”

By the time they were done, it was noon, and Kakashi dismissed the boys to unpack and rest until tomorrow but performed a shunshin while holding Sakura’s shoulder before she could react.  They appeared outside of the T&I building, a nondescript grey building in the center of the civilian housing district, where a similarly nondescript brown-haired ninja with an extended hitai-ate caught Sakura by the shoulder as she tumbled forward from the unexpected shunshin.  He glanced at her then addressed Kakashi, in a neutral voice, “Sempai, what did you need?”

Kakashi’s smug grin was audible in his answer, “Sakura-chan here has been doing some fun control exercises, and I’d like you to check her work, since you have some experience, Tenzō.  It’ll be just like when you were a kid!”

Tenzō paled slightly and looked at Sakura with that neutral expression as he led them into the T&I building, passing through four different locked doors until they reach a nondescript white-tiled room with a medical examination table in the center.  Twice, the staff verified their identities, and Kakashi produced a paper allowing them access to a lab from his little orange book.  Once they were in, Tenzō directed Sakura to take a seat on the table, and walked around behind her, saying, “Alright, now that we’re behind privacy seals, which kekkei genkai, and what does it require?”

Kakashi laid out a scroll on the table, upon which was written a transcription of the Hyoton scroll, with a list of notes, all in Kakashi’s loose, messy handwriting.  As she stared incredulously at his endless doodles of puppies running along the side of the scroll, he gestured to Sakura, and said, “Walk us through it, Sakura-chan.  I want to make sure you know the steps.”

Sakura gulped, then began to speak, “Hyoton, Tenzō-san.  Assuming I have good enough chakra control, and I’ve done the exercises correctly, then I need to pull both Suiton and Fūton chakra through the tenketsu above the Gate of Life in my spine at the same time until my chakra system starts producing Hyoton chakra there.”

Tenzō nodded thoughtfully, then glanced at Kakashi, before addressing Sakura directly, “You are probably not aware of how all of this really works, since you are still a genin, and sempai never bothers to explain anything unless he has to.  What you want to do is call kekkei genkai theft and is illegal to perform with in-village kekkei genkai without direct written and verbal permission from the Hokage.  If the Hyoton bloodline in the Land of Water had not been disavowed by the Mizukage, this would also paint a target on your back.  You would be informed of this upon reaching jonin rank, normally, but exceptions are made for candidates with extremely high chakra control, like yourself.  For the record, never tell anyone below jonin rank what we are about to do.  If anyone asks, you awakened your bloodline on your first C-rank.”

That was more direct and sensible than anything Kakashi-sensei has said since he started teaching us.  Why can’t Tenzō-san be our teacher?

Wait.  This is normally a JONIN rank thing?!?

…does Kakashi really think we can do this?

Kakashi chipped in, his eye curved up, “Yep, I’ll be putting in the paperwork to list you as having distant family in the Land of Water, as a cover once we’re done here.  This sort of thing is attempted at least once a decade, so we have a form for lying about your family origins and everything!”

Tenzō then ran her through thirty different chakra control tests of increasing difficulty and complexity, most of which Sakura achieved on the first or second try.  Once he was satisfied that she “wasn’t about to get herself killed,” he moved on to having her demonstrate her spinal tenketsu exercises, using a piece of chakra conductive paper to measure how precisely she could control the chakra moving along her back.  Kakashi elbowed Tenzō at this point, saying, “See, she’s good to go.  Sakura-chan, are you ready?”

It’s now or never!  Shannaro!  Sakura nodded, as firmly as she could manage, and Kakashi placed his index fingers above and below the vertebra that housed the Gate of Life, and he began counting down.  On one, Sakura began trying to channel chakra into the chakra gate, as Kakashi emitted the first traces of Suiton and Fūton chakra.  As the chakra entered her tenketsu and her body started to process it, she started to feel cold, and her breath came out in a frosty puff in front of her.  The cold spread swiftly along her spine and through her body like icy tendrils were worming their way along her nerves.  After roughly a minute, she started shivering, her teeth chattering.  The cold spread through her blood and muscles, getting progressively worse and worse.  Just as her back went completely numb from the cold, Kakashi’s chakra started moving differently within her, being absorbed before it could even reach the chakra gate, and the numbing cold stopped spreading, leaving her body tingling.  Her skin had gone from pale to faintly blue tinged at the extremities, and her muscles were tense and trembling.

As she unclenched her hands from the exam table, she found the leather cracking, frozen stiff and brittle beneath her fingers.  She held her hands up in wonder as frost drifted from her skin, fingers still shaking from the cold.  For most of her time in the academy and afterwards, Sakura had had her mediocrity thrown in her face from all sides, first by the instructors, then the other students, then Ino-pig, then by her team.  She worked hard to prove them wrong, of course, but she had always been a paper-ninja.  She never expected to have any special chakra skills.  We did it!  We have the Hyoton!  Sasuke-kun will respect us now!

Tenzō and Kakashi helped her down from the table, with more gentleness than Kakashi had ever displayed before.  He guided her out of the room, speaking softly, “We’ll go and have the hospital give you a checkup, then you can head home and rest.  You did a good job, Sakura-chan, and I think you’ll like where this leads you.”

Sakura, feeling a little out of it, squinted at Kakashi, “Who are you and what have you done with Kakashi-sensei?  He’s never this nice.”

Kakashi giggled in response, “Sakura-chan, you wound me!  I’m always nice!  I think you just don’t appreciate your hard-working sensei enough.  Don’t worry though, your training regimen to get your kekkei genkai under control should give you a proper appreciation of my efforts!”

Sakura groaned as they stepped into the lobby of the T&I building, drawing the attention of the pair of blondes that were entering the building.  Ino stepped away from her father as he went further into the building, waving to Kakashi in passing.  She sauntered up to Sakura, head cocked mockingly and voice teasing, “Forehead!  How lovely to see you back in the village!  I heard you had such an awful first C-rank, it’s such a shame.  If you want to quit, I’m sure nobody would blame you.  That way someone more deserving could be on Sasuke-kun’s team!”

Sakura bit out with a stutter from the shivers, “A-As if, Ino-Pig!  I’m not g-going anywhere!”

Before she could continue, Kakashi started dragging her out the door by the back of her collar, cutting in, “Now, now, girls, I’m sure you can have your catfight over broody boys later!”

As they left, Kakashi dragging her away while she tried to hit him, Ino called out cockily after her, “Sounds like you aren’t so sure, Forehead!  No shame in quitting while you’re ahead!”

Cha!  We'll show her!  We've got my own special ability to impress Sasuke-kun now!

Chapter Text

The hospital checkup was mercifully brief, after which Sakura went home to collapse into bed, absently noting that her parents were out somewhere.  She slept until dawn the next day bundled in an extra blanket.  Her whole body ached when she pulled herself out of bed.  As she brushed her teeth and washed up, she noted absently that she had kicked off her blanket and sheets sometime in the night, and was still feeling a bit too warm, even in her summer sleepwear.  In the shower, she ended up using only cold water, after being jolted awake by the sheer heat of the hot water.  What was once tepid felt almost too hot to tolerate on her skin, although there were no signs of actual burns from the scalding hot water.  She ended up pulling on a new outfit for the day, since her old one was far too thoroughly trashed to recover.  The top displayed her family’s crest, a white circle, right under her chin and on her back, had a high neckline, and lacked sleeves.  Below, she wore Konoha-issued armored black pants hemmed to knee-length.  She was annoyed that she lacked any armored skirts, but she could live until she had a chance to go shopping that evening.  Grabbing the rest of her gear, she departed to meet her team.

When she arrived at the bridge where her team normally met, she was about ten minutes late, but she was still there before either of the boys.  When they did show up, neither Sasuke nor Naruto were particularly talkative, as Naruto immediately fell back to sleep on the bridge, and Sasuke started throwing kunai at a tree, as was his habit in the mornings.  For her part, Sakura decided to begin the first exercise in the Hyoton scroll, and pulled out the copy that Kakashi had left with her.  Next to the first exercise, Kakashi had scrawled out that it should be done daily for at least a month, and ideally until it was something she could maintain constantly.

The exercise itself was extremely simple.  She had to convert some of her chakra into ice-natured chakra and cycle it through the large chakra coils in her torso, arms, and legs.  Given that the same exercise was taught in the academy once students mastered the leaf-sticking exercise, but with neutral chakra, the challenge was mostly in producing and maintaining ice-natured chakra within her body.  Sitting cross-legged, Sakura began trying to change some of her chakra.  She quickly discovered that the conversion itself was easy, but once it changed, it became harder to control and tried to exit her body via the nearest tenketsu.  By the time Kakashi arrived, she had accidentally coated the surface of the bridge underneath her in ice produced by the chakra that had escaped her grasp.

Kakashi’s book shut with a snap, and he surveyed his genin as Naruto jerked awake from the noise.  He gestured to the three of them with his book, and began, “Alright, kiddies, it’s time to change things up!  Sasuke-kun wasn’t the only one to activate a kekkei genkai in Wave, you see.  Sakura-chan also activated a dormant ability, quite unexpectedly.”

Sakura stilled as she felt the other two turn their eyes on her back.  She reached across her chest to grab her left arm, and spoke up, “Ah, yeah, it turns out I have some, uh, distant family from the Land of Water, and apparently, uh, they passed on the same ice-natured chakra affinity as Haku had…”

She turned and pointed to the slowly thawing patch of ice where she had been meditating, and she saw the boys stare at it for a few moments, before Naruto burst out, “Whaaaaaaa!?  You’re an ice-nin too?  That’s crazy, Sakura-chan!”

Sasuke, on the other hand, was nodding, slowly, and spoke once Naruto petered out, “So encountering the Hyoton activates it then.  This means we need to change how we fight, doesn’t it?”

Kakashi beamed at Sasuke and used his long reach to ruffle his hair before he could dodge, “Exactly!  Before, I was letting you three experiment with team formations for the first two months, but now the Sandaime has passed down a new directive for Team 7.  Congrats, you three are going to be on display for the Chunin Exam in two months!  The Hokage has decided that you three are an ideal assault team, so I’m going to be shifting your training into high-gear.”

Sakura feels a lead weight settle in her stomach.  So far, Kakashi had mostly been drilling them in teamwork exercises and polishing their taijutsu and basic ninjutsu.  Even so, he had regularly run her into the ground physically, forced Naruto to perform chakra control exercises constantly, and made Sasuke maintain either the Henge or Bunshin jutsu whenever they were on D-ranks.  He made a point of torturing them with their weak points, and now he was going to step it up?  …We’re gonna die.

Apparently, Naruto and Sasuke did not agree with her, as Naruto’s shouts of joy, and Sasuke’s smirk attested.  Kakashi then proceeded to whip out three scrolls and tossed one to each of them.  His eye curved in a smile, “I will be working with each of you in the afternoons as we have so far, but each of you have some tutors I’ve arranged for your mornings.  Naruto-kun, the Hokage has designated you as a ninjutsu-specialist, despite your control issues, so you will be working one morning a week with me to learn a new jutsu, and the rest of your time with Ebisu-san, who will be drilling you in chakra control.  If he isn’t satisfied with your work, no new jutsu.”

Naruto was like an open book, swinging from elated (ninjutsu-specialist), to ecstatic (new jutsu), to annoyed (Ebisu), and finally to horrified (no new jutsu).  Kakashi spoke over Naruto’s immediate outburst, turning to Sasuke, “Sasuke-kun, you will be with me five days out of the week to train your sharingan, and you will be sparring with Team 9, headed by Maito Guy, the other two.  The Hokage has decided that your training will focus almost exclusively on taijutsu until you are fully proficient in your sharingan.”

Sasuke’s expression was a closed off as it normally was, although he frowned slightly at the limitation to taijutsu.  As Naruto’s protests as to “Ebisu’s perversions” winded down, he turned to Sakura, “You, Sakura-chan, will be dividing your time between Tenzō-san for six days and me for one day each week.  You will be training in your kekkei genkai and precision throwing, as the Hokage has decided you will be the team’s mid- to long-range fighter until your skill with your kekkei genkai affords more options.”

Sakura sighed in relief as she accepted the scroll.  At least it was not going to be taijutsu and bodybuilding.  Throwing kunai, shuriken, and senbon was something she was entirely comfortable with.  Before she could get too comfortable, Kakashi continued, “Also, we are going to be doing nothing but team formation training and missions in the afternoons.  We have a two-month deadline by which to have you up to my standards for B-rank combat missions, which will be decided by my own little ‘Chunin Exam’ a week before the real thing.  If you fail mine, I’ll decline to sign you up for the exam and relegate you to only D-ranks for three months straight!”

The scroll in her hand was spontaneously coated in ice.  Excuse me?!

***

The Sandaime chuckled as he watched Team 7 explode in horrified complaints at Kakashi’s announcement.  Across from him, Yamanaka Inoichi was also watching his crystal ball with a smirk.  Hiruzen caught Inoichi’s gaze as it flicked up to him, and he released the remote-viewing jutsu.  He settled his pipe in his palm after a long inhale, and simply said, “Your thoughts?”

Inoichi leaned back in his chair from where he had been hunched forward to watch, then answered, “She definitely has the right talents and the right sensei, but I think she needs some sort of goal to drive her development in the right direction.  We have at least four in-village kekkei genkai that are poorly understood, and Sakura-chan has loved puzzles and thought experiments from when I met her at four years old.  Assign her to one that could use some research.  Worst case, she gets nowhere, but learns from the experience.  Best case, she pulls an Orochimaru and deconstructs a kekkei genkai’s activation method from thin air, taking a huge step forward.  Unlike previous candidates, your students included, she is starting training for this as a genin, so we have a chance to mold her approach and mindset more thoroughly.”

Hiruzen nodded, thinking on the matter for several long, silent minutes.  Finally, he stamped the paper on his desk and handed it across, proclaiming, “Very well.  Haruno Sakura is to be placed on track to be given kekkei genkai retrieval training under Hatake Kakashi until she reaches the rank of Jonin or Tokubetsu Jonin.  You are her case worker, Inoichi, and this time you have one goal above all else.  Keep her loyal.  We will not have another renegade jutsu thief.”

Inoichi accepted the document, rolled it up, and bowed low to his Hokage.  Without another word, he departed the Hokage tower, leaving Hiruzen to his thoughts.  He eventually withdrew a heavily sealed scroll from his desk, undid the security seals, and spread the scroll on his desk.  After a while, he nodded decisively, and wrote two messages that he sent off with messenger hawks an hour later.

***

The next month was relatively pleasant for Sakura.  Tenzō-san proved to be a very direct but reasonable teacher, although he had a terrifyingly blank face when she annoyed him.  He drilled her first with meditations, then with increasingly fast-paced taijutsu forms to acclimatize her to her new Hyoton chakra cycling technique.  Four weeks after acquiring Hyoton, Sakura habitually maintained a steady flow of ice-natured chakra within her chakra coils whenever she was awake.  She also learned rapidly that while it made her substantially faster, it did not improve her spatial awareness or self-control, as demonstrated by the five times Tenzō, Kakashi, or Naruto startled her into dodging into three trees, two walls, and a river.  After having to chip her way out of her own ice flow, she forced herself to work on restraining her chakra cycling lest she over-react.

Meanwhile, Kakashi had steadily smoothed out her throwing technique and introduced her to Konoha’s senbon throwing forms.  In addition, he drilled her on mathematics, anatomy, and chakra coil structure to augment her ability to gauge difficult shots and target weak points in both body and chakra.  Where before, Kakashi’s teaching had been lackadaisical and vaguely cruel, his behavior had shifted to actively malicious.  From the first morning session on, she was constantly in motion during the day, regardless of where she was.  If she sat still, she was immediately targeted by Kakashi’s projectiles, always aimed to hurt but not injure.  It got to the point that she was forced to eat while walking and convince Naruto to distract Kakashi when she needed to use the bathroom.  At the same time, every time she missed a shot, Kakashi forced her into some sort of physical conditioning.  Her once perfectly maintained skin gradually accrued hundreds of the miniscule silver freckles of senbon scarring, and her fingertips developed calluses, to her dismay.  When Sasuke neither noticed not cared about her new blemishes, however, she was both frustrated and relieved.  Kakashi did not give her a way to avoid them either way.

The next month was characterized by chakra exhaustion and a lot of accidentally frozen drinks and food.  Tenzō, having been satisfied with her newfound skill in Hyoton-specific control from her cycling exercises, began her on the simple ice ninjutsu in the Hyoton scroll, as well as a few other jutsu stolen from enemy ninja in the previous wars.  As she exercised her control over Hyoton chakra outside of her body, she found herself accidentally freezing things whenever she was tired or distracted, which was most of the time.  Her underdeveloped chakra reserves grew steadily as she was forced to repeatedly exhaust them to master first the ice senbon jutsu, then the frozen ground jutsu, then the ice-skating technique, alongside a myriad of training techniques.  The ice senbon jutsu was a ninjutsu which laced thrown senbon with ice-natured chakra for as long as it was maintained, allowing her to inflict instant frostbite from a distance.  The frozen ground jutsu created a layer of slick ice on the ground at her feet, and when combined with the ice-skating technique, itself a variant on water-walking, Sakura could slide along the ground at shunshin speeds for minimal chakra cost, leaving a trail of treacherous terrain in her wake.

Kakashi’s methods did not change in the second month, beyond the naturally increasing difficulty of the forms he was teaching her, moving from single senbon throws to multi-senbon throws and extreme-range shots.  As she practiced increasingly complex throwing forms with Kakashi, Inoichi began to drop by to help, as he was apparently one of the senbon throwing instructors for T&I.  It honestly hurt Sakura a little to work with him, since it reminded her of when she would visit Ino as a kid and he taught them simple ninja tricks together.  He had barely changed from her memories of childhood, and from his commentary during her training, he still met up with her father for lunch occasionally.

Throughout this time, the team continued to churn through two dozen D-rank missions and four C-rank missions.  None even approached the mission in Wave in difficulty, with only two real fights overall.  Both were against bandits, and they captured them within seconds of noticing the enemy.  Their teamwork steadily shifted in dynamic as they were run into the ground daily by Kakashi’s brutal training schedules.  Without even weekend breaks, Sakura found she lacked the energy to pursue Sasuke’s affections day-to-day, which led to the uncomfortable realization that he interacted with her almost twice as much when she was not lavishing him with her love.  Sasuke and Naruto, on the other hand, seemed to become somehow even more competitive and friendlier at the same time.  Naruto came into his own after an initial period of conflict with Ebisu, mastering eight new ninjutsu, all mid- to low-ranked Fūton or Katon.  Sasuke’s body had gone from wiry to distinctly muscular, and he moved with a poise and speed that outstripped most Chunin, although he seemed to have developed an aversion to any and all green clothing for some reason unknown to Sakura.  Kakashi kept snickering whenever Sasuke dodged away from someone wearing one of the green chunin vests common in Konoha.

Overall, they had come a long way in a short time, but there were also problems, primarily in the way the boys interacted with Sakura.  As she interacted with them less due to sheer exhaustion, Naruto seemed less and less interested in asking her on dates, and while Sasuke spoke with her more, he seemed to be avoiding her when she was using her new kekkei genkai, which, by the time of Kakashi’s test, was most of the time.

Chapter Text

From just within the tree line across the river, Ino watched from stealth as Team 7 congregated at training ground three near the trio of training posts.  To her left and right were Shikamaru and Choji, although Shikamaru appeared to be asleep, and Choji was working his way through some jerky rather than watching.  They had the day off, and Ino had decided to scope out the competition for the Chunin Exams in the coming week.  Shikamaru had scoffed when she chose Team 7 as their target, muttering about Sasuke and girls, but they still ended up coming.  The three genin of Team 7 were sharing what appeared to be a late breakfast together, Naruto chattering away about the ramen he was devouring while the other two ate in relative silence.  Sakura appeared to be eating freeze-dried fruit, while Sasuke was having some sort of salad.  All three appeared noticeably different from the last time Ino had seen them.  Sasuke, her primary interest in this group, had adopted heavier armored clothing which seemed to hide an increase in musculature, judging by his movements.  His clothing had shifted from blue and white to mostly blue, with long pants and sleeves.  Naruto, on the other hand, appeared to have removed the sleeves from his hideous orange jumpsuit and reclaimed his goggles from before graduation, which now hung around his neck.  Sakura seemed the most changed, as she now wore a shorter armored skirt which wrapped around the sides of a pair of calf-length armored capris.  Her sandals had been exchanged for a pair of white open-toed boots, and her armored top was sleeveless.  She appeared to have row upon row of tiny silvery studs running all over her top and skirt, and she now carried a pair of pouches on each hip.

Abruptly, Team 7’s strange sensei appeared before them as they were packing up their leftover food.  He gesticulated to each of them, then delightedly announced, “Time for your test!  You three are going to spar with each other.  The goal is to go all out without injuring each other until all but one of you is immobilized!  If any of you ends the fight with more than bruises and scratches, you will all fail, and if I feel like any of you aren’t giving your all, you will all fail!  Thee, two, one, go!”

Then, as abruptly as he arrived, their sensei vanished.  Immediately, Naruto exploded into a dozen of himself, each raising his goggles and charging Sasuke and Sakura.  In the time it took the first to reach Sakura, Sasuke had already removed five of his six attackers in a flurry of strikes and flashing red eyes.  The single remaining Naruto from his group was sent flying into the water, and Sasuke immediately turned and charged at Sakura.  Sakura, mobbed by both Sasuke and a team of Naruto clones, crashed into the forest, leaving a line of reflective, misty ground behind her as she fled.

Beside Ino, Shikamaru perked up, “That looked like ice release.  I didn’t know that Haruno-san had the Hyoton bloodline, did you?”

Ino shook her head as she followed Sasuke’s decimation of the remaining clones with her eyes, “She definitely didn’t have it growing up.  It must’ve been dormant until recently, but it doesn’t seem to have done her much good.”

As Shikamaru leaned back again, the river exploded as a wave of Naruto clones flooded toward Sasuke, the front row performing a simple fire breath jutsu in tandem, while the backrow perform the Gale Palm jutsu, resulting in a wave of fire rippling toward Sasuke, pushing him back to the trees, from which he vaulted over the firewall and began a twirling taijutsu assault on the forty or so copies of Naruto.  His taijutsu style had evolved from the domineering efficiency of his time in the Academy into a near-prescient dance.  Every single movement, strike, and block redirected at least one Naruto’s strike or jutsu into another, until they had practically annihilated themselves with a barrage of wind ninjutsu and kicks.  After five minutes of harried combat, Sasuke stood pristine over the last remaining Naruto, who he had caught trying to retreat and make more clones.  The only sign of the fight the Uchiha bore was his sweat and heavy breathing as he trussed up his teammate with some ninja-wire.  Naruto, meanwhile, was soaked in mud and swearing up a storm at his loss.

Choji hummed around his jerky, “That was really clean taijutsu.  I think he would beat all of our class at this point in a pure melee.”

Ino nodded decisively, “Well duh, it’s Sasuke-kun!  Anyway, we should keep an eye on Naruto in the exam, those were solid clones, and he had a lot of ninjutsu.  I’m not even sure he’s all that tired.”

Shikamaru shook his head, “Nah.  Naruto’s approach will be obvious, and I don’t think we need to worry as long as we have any plan to avoid or trap him.  My worry is Haruno-san.”

Ino and Choji both turned to stare at him, and Ino’s voice was confused when she responded, “Forehead?  But she just ran away!  She’s no match for Naruto, let alone Sasuke-kun!”

Shikamaru wordlessly pointed at the trees at the opposite edge of the training ground where Sakura had fled.  As Ino and Choji turned to look, a wave of cold mist began to flow out from the trees, which now appeared to be rooted in a growing field of ice.  Sasuke began approaching warily, a kunai in each hand, and almost immediately had to deflect a dozen hissing silver flashes which resolved into senbon once they were planted in the surrounding ground.  As he stopped advancing, Sakura slid out of the woods on a growing trail of ice, the ground wreathed with a cloud of frost.  She circled Sasuke faster than he could turn, hurling wave after wave of hissing senbon at him, which he nonetheless knocked out of the air, his eyes flashing red as he struggled to keep up with the pink and red blur that Sakura became as she formed a complex pattern of ice on the ground around him.  Every time Sasuke tried to advance, Sakura was already changing direction and circling around him, her reflexes and speed almost twice as good as his, approaching shunshin speeds.  Finally, Sasuke saw an opening and blasted out an enormous fireball directly in front of her, which she pirouetted over, her barrage ceasing momentarily.  As she landed, Sasuke leapt for her, only to land in a cloud of thick steam produced by his ninjutsu’s impact on Sakura’s icy trails.

As they both vanished from view, Ino realized she was gaping in awe at the display, and forced her mouth shut.  Shikamaru looked smug, however, and immediately spoke up, “She’s was performing that freezing jutsu on the ground all over the area while the other two were busy.  The ground is saturated with ice at this point, so the moment either of them used a fire jutsu, which they both favor, visibility was going to drop like a rock.  Sasuke’s sharingan might as well be off at this point, and I’ll bet she’s trained to aim by sound.  Sasuke lost the moment he let her escape into the forest.”

Choji was frowning as he watched the clouded training ground, and responded, “I think she’d have had a lot more trouble if Naruto hadn’t gone down so quickly.  They might have noticed her tactic, and she might have had to deal with being outnumbered.  She’s fast, but senbon take very little strength to throw, so I think she would have serious problems at close range.”

Ino was about to voice her opinion when the voice of Team 7’s sensei interceded, “Excellent commentary, kids!  You wouldn’t be thinking of sabotaging fellow Konoha ninja in the exams, now would you?  No?  Great!”

All of Team 10’s genin leapt back, scared witless by Kakashi’s appearance right in the middle of them.  Before they could so much as nod, he was already walking out onto the river toward his team, where the steam had finally blown away to reveal Sasuke lying on the ground, his clothes pinned by at least a hundred senbon holding a ninja-wire web over him.  He could barely twitch beneath the layer of steel wire, and Sakura was seated next to him, panting while she fanned herself to cool off from the steam.

Ino beat a hasty retreat, followed by Choji and Shikamaru.  She glanced back a few minutes later, and said, “When did she get so strong?  I thought Sasuke was unbeatable, but she crushed him.”

Shikamaru shrugged as the re-entered the village proper, “Honestly, she’s always been smarter than him.  It was just a question of how long it took her to find a good combat instructor and whether she wanted to beat him.  I really don’t get what you see in the Uchiha.  He’s got talent but no real subtlety.”

Ino’s responding fury was dampened by the knowledge that Sakura had just proven Shikamaru correct, but she still harped on him all the way to the nearest restaurant, Choji laughing at Shikamaru’s groans.

***

Kakashi helped Sakura release Sasuke, and they all undid Naruto’s restraints together.  Sasuke was sullen and brooding, while Naruto was staring at Sakura like he no longer recognized her.  After a few moments of awkward silence, Naruto finally burst out, “That was amazing, Sakura-chan!  You’re so much better than either of us!  You moved faster than Sasuke-teme, and your jutsu blew mine out of the water!”

Kakashi interjected before either Sakura or Sasuke could speak, although Sasuke looked mutinous, his fists shaking.  Kakashi’s eye was not curved in a smile, but rather serious for once, “That is entirely incorrect, Naruto-kun.  Sakura-chan is roughly equal to you two in my estimation.  If you and Sasuke-kun had not ignored her after she escaped, it would not have been nearly so easy for her, and either of you could have won.”

He glanced sidelong at Sasuke, who was starting to look more contemplative, and continued, “Honestly, I’m a little disappointed in both of you.  I expected you two to keep both of your opponents in mind for this, but you dropped the ball because you had an obvious target right in front of you.  Look underneath the underneath.  Sakura-chan, you banked on them underselling you as a threat and used that to trap them both.  What was your plan if they turned on you?”

Sakura’s timid smile dropped into a grimace, and she answered, “I had nothing unless they decided to follow me into the forest, sensei, and neither of them are dumb enough to do that when its literally iced over.”

Kakashi nodded and looked at the boys.  Naruto was frowning, but nodding along, while Sasuke looked less angry, but more shaken by the loss.  He waved them off, with the statement, “I put your Chunin Exam signup sheets in the packs you left by the posts.  You all pass my test, even if you could have done better.  The next week is a rest week.  I’ve been pushing you hard for two months, and you are to take this time recover and equip yourselves for the exam.  I’ll be around.  Ja ne.”

As Kakashi departed, both boys turned to grab their packs, and Sakura barely managed to say goodbye before they were gone.  She sighed as she picked up her own gear and began the trek home.  The team could work together, but it felt entirely impersonal lately.  Sasuke-kun seemed furious that we won, but what were we supposed to do?  We had to give it our all!  What, does he really think that little of us?

***

As Sakura returned to her home and her parents, Sasuke and Naruto were settling into the stools before Ichiraku Ramen.  The past months of constant exhaustion had resulted in the two pursuing a less physical rivalry, ranging from jan-ken-pon to eating contests to memory games, at the not-so-subtle suggestion of their sensei.  At first, Sasuke was hesitant to engage in such frivolity, but Guy had pointed out the ways simple games exercised ninja skills, as well as the benefits of his rivalry on his motivation to train.  Since then, Naruto and Sasuke had taken to competing to see who was buying dinner every week, and this evening, it was Sasuke’s turn to pay, having lost a game of cards the previous night.

Naruto looked vaguely like he had indigestion, which Sasuke had learned translated to confusion over the last six months of team training.  He decided that they might as well get it out of the way before Naruto’s mouth was full, and asked, “Alright, what’s bothering you this time, dobe?”

Naruto turned to him and, in a serious tone, said, “I dunno if I want to date Sakura anymore.  I always wanted to protect her and prove she could trust me, ya know?  Now, though, she’s at least as strong as us, and she doesn’t bother you about a date anymore either…”

As Naruto trailed off, Sasuke frowned, but agreed, “I think she’s taking her training seriously now.  It’s an improvement in my opinion, but I don’t think I’ll ever like her and she’s realized it.”

Privately, Sasuke acknowledged that her Hyoton and use of senbon was making him more and more uncomfortable around her.  It reminded him a bit too much of struggling to stand under the icy weight of thirty senbon suddenly spearing him, when he had dodged between Haku and Naruto on the bridge.  He was not afraid of her, obviously, but he doubted he would ever be able to trust her fully.

Naruto nodded vigorously as their ramen arrived, “Yeah, honestly, I think I’d like a date with you more than her at this point, with how much we hang out!”

Sasuke blushed as Naruto’s brain caught up with his mouth, and he turned bright red to match.  Sasuke shot upright from his stool, and stuttered out, “I’d, uh…I’m flattered, but, are you, I mean, uh, that is, I thought you liked girls, though?”

Naruto frowned at him as he answered, “I mean, uh, I mostly like pretty people, and you’re pretty, teme.  I like being rivals, though, and I don’t think rivals can date.  So, uh, sorry for getting your hopes up, I guess?”

Sasuke, face still tomato red, gaped at his rival and solitary friend for a few moments, cleared his throat and sat back down, turning to his ramen and mumbling, “Yeah, uh, right.  Not that I’d want to date anyway, since, um, I’ve got to achieve my ambitions first.”

The rest of the evening was awkward but pleasant for both boys, and they never noticed Kakashi dying of silent laughter on the roof of the ramen stand.  When he left and met up with Guy, he said simply “Called it,” and Guy handed over 50 ryo, laughing.

Chapter Text

The week preceding the Chunin Exams was quiet for Sakura until the day before the exams were to begin, when she found herself called into the Hokage’s office.  She entered to find Sasuke and Naruto already waiting, while Kakashi was lounging on the windowsill behind the Hokage, reading his orange erotica.  Sasuke was holding a scroll open in his hands with the Hokage’s seal in bright red on it, and Naruto was looking over his shoulder at it.  When she entered, Kakashi waved to her without looking up, saying, “Yo, Sakura-chan!”

The Sandaime Hokage looked at her from across his desk, pipe in hand, and addressed her, “Haruno-chan, come in.  Uchiha-kun just received his assignment for the coming exams, and I was about to begin covering your team’s role, as well as your individual tasks.”

Naruto waved her over, and Sasuke wordlessly held out the scroll for her to read more easily.  It was a list of names, each with a village in black or red written next to each.  The Hokage began, indicating the scroll with his pipe, “That is a list of attending genin of interest.  As the village’s sole genin with an activated sharingan, you will be performing your clan’s traditional role within the Chunin Exams, that of identifying and cataloguing any new jutsu your fellow competitors employ.  Normally, the list would be split between four or five genin, two or more of whom would drop out once they had completed their tasks, but in this case, you will simply have to cover as many as you can, Uchiha Sasuke.  This is your mission.  Each new jutsu recovered by you during the Exam will be added to your record as a successful C-rank retrieval mission, and should you recover eight or more new jutsu, you will have earned a field promotion to chunin, regardless of your exam performance.”

The Hokage lifted another scroll, holding it out toward Naruto as Sasuke’s grip tightened on his list of targets, a smirk growing on his face.  Sakura’s eyebrows rose as Naruto opened his scroll, which was the profile of another genin, named Sabaku no Gaara, who looked to be sporting the heaviest eyeliner Sakura had ever seen.  The Hokage’s face broke into a smile as Naruto glanced up at him in confusion, “Naruto-kun, your mission is simple.  Publicly humiliate that genin during the Exam.  You are free to use every jutsu, ally, and trick at your disposal, short of killing him.  He is extremely dangerous for a genin, and the primary challenger in the coming Exams.  The worse you make him look, the more likely you are to be promoted.”

Naruto laughed out loud, dancing on the spot at the prospect of an order to prank someone.  Sakura and Sasuke both looked at the Hokage askance, and Kakashi was giggling in the background.  He’s ordering Naruto to prank somebody!?  That’s the meanest thing I’ve ever heard of!  It’s all Naruto spends his free time on!

As Naruto’s glee petered out, Sakura was handed her own scroll from the Hokage, and told seriously, “Your assignment is the most difficult and long-term, Haruno Sakura.  Should you succeed, however, you will immediately be given both specialized training and your choice of long-term assignments, as well as an A-rank R&D mission on your record.”

Opening her scroll, Sakura found a technical document, with Naruto’s face on it.  The scroll was almost twice as thick as either of the boys’, and it seemed to be describing…Naruto’s Sexy-no-Jutsu!?  Her face went beet-red, but before she could shriek in anger, the Hokage held up a hand and pre-empted her, “You have shown an aptitude for…jutsu creation and modification, according to Kakashi.  Naruto’s…signature technique is the first recorded instance of a low cost, physical shapeshifting jutsu, as opposed to illusory shapeshifting jutsu.  Your job, Haruno-chan, is to deconstruct it and try to develop variations on it.”

Naruto frowned, squinting at her scroll, then spoke up, “This again, jiji?  You’ve already made me sit around in R&D for, like, months now!  They couldn’t do anything, dattebayo!”

Before Sakura could say anything, she noticed a small henohenomoheji in Kakashi’s handwriting tucked into the margin of the scroll, and abruptly snapped her mouth shut, and bowed to the Hokage, her mind racing.  Kakashi-sensei told me that he would write that on any paperwork to do with kekkei genkai theft.  Does that mean that this is actually Naruto’s bloodline?  Naruto’s kekkei genkai is the ability to turn into a hot girl!? We have no idea how to do that!  Wait, if our mission is basically impossible right now, does that mean that the other two missions are just as hard?  Only Sasuke-kun was given a guarantee of promotion on success, too…

Kakashi broke into her thoughts, cutting across Naruto’s complaints to the Hokage with an unusually serious tone of voice, “These individual missions, however, are only part of the whole.  The Chunin Exams are an opportunity to draw in fresh clients for the village and intimidate our rivals, and I expect you three to act as one to protect your teammates and help accomplish each other’s missions.  This is your first true taste of how an upper ranked ninja operates, with both individual and team objectives to balance, wherein each of you has a separate leadership role within the team with regards to your own mission.  Sasuke-kun, you will be the mission lead for the combat portions of the exam, and you, Naruto-kun, will be the mission lead wherever Sabaku no Gaara is involved.  Sakura-chan, you will be in charge at all other times, taking the role of strategic team leader.  These responsibilities will undoubtedly shift mid-mission, and your job as a team is to adapt.”

The Hokage released a puff of smoke as he followed Kakashi’s speech, “Team 7 is dismissed.  Make Konohagakure proud in the Exams tomorrow.”

***

After a quick discussion of when and where to meet for the exam, Sakura spent the next day researching and reading over the scroll she had received, and quickly realized that Naruto absolutely had a kekkei genkai of some sort, and that it had already been identified as a mutation of the traditional bloodline of the Uzumaki clan of old.

I wonder if that’s why he’s been given the Uzumaki name, as opposed to one of the other extinct names they hand out to orphans.  He might be a real Uzumaki offshoot, unlike the twenty or so other ‘Uzumaki’ orphans we’ve met around the village.  It’d be a way to hide a surviving Uzumaki in plain sight, I suppose, given the purges they were subjected to in the last war.

Reading further into the traditional kekkei genkai of the Uzumaki had been surprisingly easy, since Kakashi had apparently arranged for her to have a higher clearance level specifically for kekkei genkai materials.  The village had retained around twenty manuals and studies about the Uzumaki of Uzushiogakure.  According to the documentation she managed to burn through in a day, Naruto was almost certainly related to them.  Although she could not find any genealogical documentation to show how he was related to them.

The main line of the Uzumaki clan was defined by their high-density chakra, which was thought to be the result of a unique chemical which took the place of insulin within their bodies.  The common side effects of their hyper dense chakra included a lot of traits that Naruto shared.  Hyperactivity, extreme stamina, greater appetite, slower ageing, and lack of chakra control all stood out to Sakura on her first pass.  On the other hand, she noted that Naruto lacked a number of key identifying traits, such as the red hair, water-natured chakra, and relatively slow chakra recovery rates.  The likelihood of Naruto being the descendant of a mainline Uzumaki just kept climbing in Sakura’s estimation.  Maybe he’s a Yamanaka crossbreed?  It would explain the blond hair and blue eyes, at least, although we don’t know how his physical transformation ability would result from that.

According to further documentation, the chakra technique for inducting a new Uzumaki was extremely costly and dangerous, calling for something like forty gallons of human blood of a compatible blood and chakra type with the inductee.  It also sported a terrifying eighty-three percent casualty rate from testing done approximately four decades ago.  Sakura felt rather relieved that Hyoton had not involved literally swimming in blood in retrospect, while feeling a little incredulous that that was the best method available.  I assume that it has to do with the residual chakra in the blood, and bathing in it somehow alters living chakra, because otherwise, why would the chakra type of the donors matter?  Perhaps the blood is not even really necessary, I mean, most of the information here is from the Warring States Era, with only a little research around forty and twenty years ago, by Uzumaki Mito and an Orochimaru, respectively.  No idea who Orochimaru was, but he seemed to write it off as a waste of time and resources, and Mito-sama seemed to lack the theoretical chakra knowledge to improve the technique.  Maybe for Naruto’s kekkei genkai, we can adapt some of the more modern medical transfusion techniques to copy it?

Naruto’s Sexy-no-Jutsu, however, was the most mysterious part, as it seemed to be the result of the same hand signs for a normal henge, but with Yang chakra instead of Yin chakra, which should require both more energy than it does, and an upkeep.  Naruto’s jutsu required neither, and the research thus far seemed to suggest that, once his chakra control becomes less abysmal, he could shapeshift without any jutsu involved.

By the time Sakura had started to see any progress, she needed to go to sleep to be rested for the exam.  She dreamt that night of a lake of blood and red haired oni crawling out of it.  Sakura, Naruto, and Sasuke met the next day equipped for war, an hour before the exam was to begin.  Their gear had not substantially changed from Kakashi’s ‘exam,’ although Sasuke and Naruto had both brought an extra pouch of supplies, writing materials in Sasuke’s case and nebulous “pranking supplies” on Naruto’s part.  There was already a small crowd of genin around the academy as they approached.

Chapter Text

Team 7 entered the academy building, where the Chunin Exam was taking place, without major issue about half an hour ahead of time, as Sasuke immediately caught the genjutsu distracting from the real entrance and alerted the other two.  They slipped past the crowd and up the stairs without drawing any serious attention.  On the correct floor, however, Naruto pulled them aside into an empty classroom, where he created five clones, each of whom began to pull out paint and smoke bombs.  As his clones left one by one, he turned to Sasuke and Sakura, saying, “Alright, this Gaara guy should be getting here soon.  Sasuke-teme, I need you to be my lookout out of this room’s window, since the foreign genin housing is in that direction.  Sakura, when the teme sees him, can you run ahead to the exam room without anyone seeing you and freeze the main door shut?  I need people to form a crowd in front of the door by the time he gets here.  This is gonna be great!”

Sasuke wordlessly turned to the window, his sharingan active, and Sakura nodded, assuming a sprinting position by the door, but on the ceiling.  Naruto, meanwhile, ran out of the room, down the hall.  The wait lasted about fifteen minutes, during which time, they heard a dozen or so people pass by the room outside.  When Sasuke gestured to her with the signal for “Go,” Sakura rocketed down the hallway on the ceiling, silent and blindingly fast.  She arrived at the exam room in three seconds, then formed the hand-signs for the frozen ground jutsu as she crouched above the door, watching the wall slowly develop a growing layer of ice.  As her jutsu worked, she pulled aside a ceiling tile and hid in the crawlspace between the floors, carefully maintaining her jutsu from concealment as she slid the tile back into place.  Over the course of the next five minutes, the ice gained almost two inches of thickness, as they approached the time for the exam to begin.  Suddenly, Sasuke pushed up the ceiling tile and gestured for her to move, and he was followed by Naruto, who pointed to the tiles above the exam room.  The team silently made their way into the exam room via the ceiling, dropping down the moment Sasuke indicated that nobody was watching below, from his view through a cracked tile.  Within the room, they settled against one wall in the relatively empty exam room and were immediately greeted by Kakashi appearing in the middle of them.  His visible eye curved up at them as he said, “Maa, with that ice wall outside, there’s going to be a fight to get in.  I can’t wait to see how many won’t get in in time!  It does my heart good to see you working together so well, and undercutting the competition, no less!”

Team 7, by now thoroughly used to Kakashi appearing without warning, barely startled at his sudden appearance and subsequent disappearance.  Kakashi vanished as there was a loud commotion outside and couple of thumps on the door.  The other teams in the room looked at the door apprehensively, and one approached, but jolted back as a loud crunch echoed from the hallway, followed by yet more shouting.  Moments later, there was a cracking sound and the doors exploded into the room, followed by a ninja wearing an eye-searingly revealing green leotard and sporting a bowl cut.  Sasuke twitched beside them, reflexively stepping behind Naruto.  As the various genin in the hall crowded and pushed to enter, a series of explosions announced Naruto’s work, as smoke billowed into the room from the hall.  The intensity of the yelling at least doubled as a few screams joined in, followed by a mad dash of genin out of the clouds of smoke, several with black eyes or bloody noses from the fight to enter.  Naruto started suddenly giggling madly and whispered, “Mission success!  I’m gonna be a chunin for sure with this, dattebayo!”

Before the smoke had fully cleared, the team from Sunagakure entered, with Gaara covered in paint and sporting a fluffy raccoon tail tacked onto the base of his gourd.  Naruto’s clones managed to do a fair likeness of raccoon markings all over his face and clothes.  Almost immediately upon achieving full visibility, both of his teammates frantically leapt away from him, taking cover behind a nearby bench.  Gaara glanced at them, clearly confused, then saw the paint, and turned, eye twitching ever so slightly, to see the tail, just as a most of the room started laughing at him.  Suddenly, there was a swirl of sand and the paint tail were gone, and Naruto swore beneath his breath as he saw that his work had been completely undone in moments.

Before anything else could happen, the door was filled by means of a sudden earth jutsu, leaving a crowd of shouting genin trapped in the hallway, and a huge man appeared via shunshin at the front of the room.  He slammed his hand on the desk and ordered them to their seats, as indicated by a set of chunin staff who had appeared at the sides of the room.  The rules of the exam were simple, a paper test with ten questions, the last of which would be revealed near the end of the time.  The rules demanded that they not get caught cheating three times, and that they either passed or failed as a team.  Sakura filled out the first nine questions of the exam in a matter of minutes and, upon flipping her test over, noticed that almost everyone in the room was cheating somehow.  One of her simpler Hyoton exercises called for her to create a small mirrored surface with ice, and she used it here to create an ice hand mirror which she used to covertly watch the rest of the room cheat their little hearts out.  Just in time, she saw Ino forming the Shintenshin jutsu, focused directly on Sakura.  Immediately, Sakura dropped her pen, and used it as an excuse to bend down, out of Ino’s sight, just as she slumped forward.  The genin in front of her froze up for a moment and swore softly, and Sakura sighed in relief as she confirmed that Ino had missed.

Phew!  Close call, there.  Although, really, I doubt Ino-pig would go so far as to sabotage our test after she had the answers.

She spent the next half hour watching other genin cheat, or at least try to cheat.  It became increasingly funny as genin failed for being caught in various ways, and she noticed a clear and pertinent bias in that for every Konoha genin ejected, two out of village genin were thrown out.  She noticed that Sasuke had flipped his exam over and was taking notes, probably on the various espionage jutsu in use around the room.  Naruto, meanwhile, seemed to be sweating under the pressure, but she was certain that Naruto had to have copied at least the minimum number of answers by this point, if only because Hinata seemed to be blatantly leaving her sheet available to him.

Directly beside her, she watched in fascination as Shino, who had, for all intents and purposes, been mostly motionless so far, shuddered.  She barely spotted the kikaichu making their way onto his legs from the floor and wondered how he was getting the answers from them while pondering whether Aburame clan techniques counted as kekkei genkai.  They clearly involved some amount of body modification to accommodate the insects, so perhaps Shino had to undergo surgery or experience a similar chakra technique to the one Kakashi performed for her.  Her daydreaming was abruptly interrupted by a call for attention from the front of the room.

Morino Ibiki, the scarred giant who was acting as the head proctor, announced that failing the tenth question would result in being barred from advancement to chunin in the future, and invited the examinees to leave.  None of team 7’s members panicked, although Naruto appeared to be distracted by something.  Slowly but steadily, the room lost approximately a third of the remaining participants, before Ibiki nodded decisively and revealed the trick of the tenth question as well as the purpose of this portion of the exam.  When the window exploded in and Mitarashi Anko burst in, announcing the next section of testing, there was a fwump and the hair on Gaara’s head was suddenly blackened in a cloud of sparks and smoke as a small paper bomb went off, but it appeared almost as if his hair hadn’t been touched.  In the moment of silence while everyone stared blankly at Gaara for a moment, Anko coughed and continued, announcing the excursion to training ground forty-four, the Forest of Death.

Chapter Text

After a short walk, the remaining genin stood in a crowd before the gates of the Forest of Death.  The trees themselves were much larger than anything in the area around Konoha, but the truly worrying part of the forest was the sound echoing out of it.  Sakura could identify most of the dangerous beasts they had been taught to watch out for in the Academy by the animal cries alone.  She shivered at the thought of running into a wild chakra-enhanced tiger or a swarm of flying leeches.  Anko spent almost ten full minutes being vaguely creepy and threatening with her description of the exam, although Sakura was mostly distracted by trying to work out which directions they should avoid, based on the noises coming from the jungle ahead of them.  Kakashi had drilled her on using sound to determine direction and distance while fighting blind, given how dependent her fighting style was on senbon.  Naruto, meanwhile, was stewing in anger at his pranks failing to leave any lasting impression on Gaara, while Sasuke was the only one seriously paying attention to Anko, albeit with increasing impatience.

When, at last, they were given their scroll, marked with Heaven, they moved to their assigned entry point, and quickly huddled up to rough out a plan.  Sakura began, “We should head straight for the tower, then try to trap an incoming team.  It will be easier, and it should provide the maximum number of opportunities to ambush an already weakened team.  Between the three of us, I think we should be able to rob a team of their scrolls without them realizing, even if they are too dangerous to beat outright.  Naruto-san and I can set up traps, and you can take the lead in combat, Sasuke-san.”

Naruto was nodding along halfway through, but Sasuke shook his head, “I want to try to catch other teams fighting and pick off the survivors for as long as possible.  We’re well-trained for surviving in this terrain, unlike the foreign genin, who are about half of the teams.  We would be safer on the move than sitting still, and this is a chance to try to learn about our competition.  Besides, I need to collect their jutsu, and this is a perfect chance.”

Sasuke and Sakura both frowned at each other, and they turned to Naruto, both about to demand he side with them, when their gate’s proctor signaled for them to enter.  As they enter the forest, Naruto speaks up, “Sasuke-teme’s right.  We can put traps around the tower on the last day if we haven’t got the other scroll by then, but I bet we won’t need to, dattebayo!”

Outvoted, Sakura shrugged, and they settled into a familiar search pattern from Kakashi’s occasional lessons on tracking.  They moved as quietly as possible, up near the canopy of the forest, and were leery of the various terrifying fauna filling the trees.  They found another team after about half a day of searching, and followed the genin, who appeared to be Amegakure natives, for about an hour before the other team settled in to camp for the night, and Naruto pulled them back, whispering, “Why not steal their scroll while their watch is down?  Sasuke-teme is pretty good at stealth, and I think I saw the blind one stick it into his jumpsuit earlier.  We can keep tailing them after that if you still want their jutsu.”

Sakura nodded, and Sasuke shrugged, grunting.  A couple of hours later, Sasuke, just one shadow among many in the night bound forest, darted in and out of their camp on silent feet, returning with a scroll marked with Earth despite the genin the other team had on watch.  Team 7 departed to a distance, and set up camp for the night themselves, agreeing to hide the scrolls in the safest place possible: buried beneath Sasuke’s bedroll.  As they finished hiding the scroll and divvying up rations between them, there was a scream from the forest to the North, where the Ame genin were waiting, followed by a series of rumbles and shouting.  Naruto sent a clone to see what was happening, with Sasuke close behind.

The moment Sasuke was out of sight, a veritable explosion of smoke heralded the arrival of a snake wider around than any of them were tall, barreling through the trees towards Sakura and Naruto, mouth wide.  Naruto immediately shoved Sakura aside, shouting, “Get Sasuke, it’s a trap!”

Before he could be swallowed, Naruto breathed a fire jutsu into the snake’s maw, causing it to rear back in pain.  Sakura sped away on a growing trail of ice, trusting Naruto to hold it off until she could get Sasuke.  She burst through the trees to a scene of carnage, the pieces of the Ame genin painting their camp and the surrounding trees, with a tall Kusa ninja standing amid them, kunai locked with Sasuke.

With silent precision, Sakura unleashed four barrages of frosted senbon at the enemy ninja in the space of a single breath, charging around the tree line of the gore-splattered clearing to get a clear shot on the woman’s back.  In the time it took for the senbon to reach the fight, there was a flurry of taijutsu, in which Sasuke landed several glancing hits on his opponent, and she disarmed him of his kunai.  Most of the senbon were knocked aside in the blur of limbs and steel, but eight lodged themselves in the Kusa genin’s arms, and she leapt aside, directly into a face-full of Sasuke’s fireball jutsu, causing her to rocket away and through a tree trunk, covered in fire.  In the beat of silence following the exchange, Sakura allowed herself a calming breath, but before they could move, a disturbing chuckling echoed from the enemy, which made Sakura realize she hadn’t heard a single sound out of the woman up to that moment, despite the senbon and the burns.  Ahead of them, through a shimmering heat haze, the woman stepped out of the bloody, burning tree, but her face appeared to be melting off, along with bits of skin on her hands.  With a sickening tearing sound, the Kusa ninja ripped her own face off, revealing a pale man beneath, with mirthful golden eyes.

“What a delight you are, Sasuke~chan!  Lovely musculature, and quite a delightfully mature set of sharingan.”  The man’s voice was dry as a desert and deeply unsettling, setting the fine hairs on Sakura’s neck on end as he continued, “Now that we’ve been introduced, perhaps you would be interested in learning something more complex than simple taijutsu?  Punching and kicking is all well and good, but I am Orochimaru, and I can teach you everything you need to handle Itachi~chan.  Why, I invented several of his techniques!”

Sasuke tensed before charging directly at Orochimaru, spitting with fury at him, only to be summarily ignored, as every single blow missed or was turned aside, in an insulting parody of Sasuke’s own taijutsu style.  Sakura, snapped out of her horror at the sight of Orochimaru’s molten flesh mask and sped out to the side once more, launching at least fifty needles, which Orochimaru moved around like water, laughing and unharmed.  Where the needles missed and impacted in the surrounding foliage, they left patches of frozen ground and shattered wood.  Without any warning, Orochimaru slithered, swift and deadly, across the clearing, directly between her legs, grabbed her left leg and pulled as he pulled himself up beside her.  A sickening crack heralded her knee giving way beneath her as Sasuke roared and launched himself directly over her with a fire jutsu exploding from his lips.  In that instant as Orochimaru slid to the side, Sakura saw her chance and threw a full barrage of eight Hyoton coated senbon directly into Orochimaru’s chest as she fell on her good knee.

In an instant, everything stopped, and Orochimaru stared at her in what looked like shock, before the world blurred and shifted, and Sakura found Orochimaru’s features melting into Sasuke’s horrified face as he toppled backwards, a patch of frost coating his torso.  Beside her, where Sasuke had stood over her, Orochimaru was now leaning down over her.

Oh Kami!

The serpentine man’s grin out of the corner of her eye opened up the bottom of her stomach, but she could not pull her eyes away from Sasuke’s collapsed form as Orochimaru whispered almost lovingly into her ear, “You really are adorable, dear, a veritable scoop of peach sorbet that I would love to get a taste of, but I’m afraid I don’t have time to dally with Konoha’s attempt at replacing me.  Do pass on my compliments to your failure of a sensei, Sakura~chan!”

He vanished in the same manner that Kakashi favored, and moments later, Naruto’s unconscious form toppled out of the branches above them, bruised and beaten.  By the time Sakura’s mind had caught up with what had just happened, she was already dragging herself to Sasuke, and rushing with shaking hands to pull out the ice-infused senbon from his chest before the cold penetrated to his organs.  She saw that he had apparently been bitten in the shoulder and was far more roughed up than he had appeared to be during the fight.  Once she was vaguely certain that he would not die from her senbon, she turned to the side and vomited all over the forest floor, coughing and crying at the pain and terror burning through her veins.

Eventually mastering her shaking body again, she forced herself up, despite her distinctly fractured kneecap, and hobbled to Naruto, who appeared to be coated in slime and purple with bruising.  His stomach also bore a strange seal, and he was unresponsive to her attempts to wake him.  Realizing that she was crippled and alone, responsible for both of her helpless teammates in the middle of what was effectively enemy territory, she fell back against a tree and sobbed.

Get up!  They’re not dead yet, and I refuse to let them die!  Shannaro!

Over the next few hours, she dragged both boys back to their campsite, and collected as much useable gear from the now thoroughly murdered Amegakure team as she could.  She gathered an enormous stockpile of senbon from them, as well as a fair amount of trapping supplies.  Every step hurt, and she settled down only after laying out as many alarm traps as she could to guard her team through the night.  Sasuke had developed a fever as she had cleaned and bandaged his chest, and Naruto was still unresponsive, but at least they were both breathing.  Come morning, she planned to get them out of the forest, exam be damned.

Cha!  We didn’t sign up for this!  Orochimaru is the most powerful nuke-nin Konoha has ever lost!  We need to get them to a real doctor; I don’t know what to do…

As the moon fell out of sight above the canopy, two of her alarm traps triggered, and she had time to turn and hurl senbon into the bushes as a team of Otogakure ninja burst from the trees, catching two of them in the arms, and eliciting a scream from the girl, although the frozen needles ricocheted off something metal under the other’s long sleeves.  As the female Oto genin stumbled, Sakura followed with a precision shot directly into her left eye, causing her scream to end, abruptly.  All Sakura could feel in that moment was cold panic as she reached for more of her senbon.

The other two swore and charged her, only for one of the long-sleeved one to freeze in place, before an enormously inflated Choji crushed him from above.  The other one was forced to dodge away as Sakura threw another barrage at his center of mass and was intercepted by a green and orange blur impacting against his back with a sickening crunch.  The blur resolved itself moments later as the strange Konoha genin that had broken open the doors in the first phase of the exam.  At the same time, Ino and Shikamaru dropped down from above beside Choji, and helped him away from the thoroughly flattened corpse of his target.  Choji turned aside from the trio of dead genin, looking green, as Shikamaru rubbed his back.  Ino, however, charged at Sakura, grabbing her, and shaking her as she exclaimed, “Sakura!  Are you alright?  Is Sasuke alright?”

At the sight of friendly faces, Sakura’s vision blurred, and she disconnectedly realized that tears were filling her vision as she collapsed onto Ino, choking out, “Kami, Ino, they won’t wake up, and I can barely walk!  We almost got killed by O-Orochimaru!”

Shikamaru’s head snapped up at that, and Ino looked horrified.  Sakura, meanwhile, took that opportunity to faint away entirely, exhausted but finally safe.

***

Sasuke, when he awoke to see Sakura succumb to her exhaustion, was very, very done with this exam.  First, that snaky asshole attacked them, and caught Sakura in a genjutsu mid-monologue, freezing her in place while he beat the shit out of Sasuke, bit him, and proceeded to no-sell Naruto’s attempted sneak attack.  Then, when Sasuke tried to dodge away to release Sakura, Orochimaru broke her knee and the genjutsu made her fill him with icy-goddamn-senbon.  Again.  Now, it might not have been entirely Sakura’s fault, but her tendency to throw senbon and ask questions never was starting to legitimately terrify him.  So, it was safe to say that he really, really wanted this to be over already.

He groaned, pulled himself up, feeling surprisingly energized, rolled his throbbing shoulder, and grunted at Lee, “If you help us to the tower, we need a medic.  I can carry Sakura for now, but I’ll need help with the dobe.”

As if summoned by his nickname, Naruto murmured beside him, “Five more minutes, teme…”

Neji landed beside Lee, walked up to Sasuke, and shook his head, “I appreciate that you might need help, Uchiha, but this is still a test.  We can help you most of the way there, but these Oto genin lacked the correct scroll.”  Side-eyeing Shikamaru and company, he continued, “It would be best if we split up as soon as possible.  Travelling as a group will attract a lot of attention, which might not be manageable with injured.”

Sasuke sighed, and rubbed his aching chest, before he nodded, “Actually, we should be fine.  Naruto and I can manage to the tower, as long as he’s mobile.”

Ino interjected from where she was checking over Sakura’s knee before Sasuke could start dragging Naruto up, stating in a surprisingly business-like manner, “We can stand watch for you long enough to splint Forehead’s leg and you two to recover.  These guys had the scroll we needed, so it’s not like we need to rush anymore.  We can go with you to the tower together once she’s awake.”

Shikamaru shrugged and spoke over Sasuke before he could argue, “We’re all Konoha ninja, Uchiha-san.  It only makes sense to help each other out.”

Eventually, they all settled down to rest until dawn, and Sasuke did his best not to show his discomfort around his pink-haired teammate while they wrapped a splint around her leg.

Chapter Text

Sakura was awoken the following morning by Ino touching her shoulder.  Her immediate thoughts consisted of the pain of her broken knee and the terror of Orochimaru, and she found herself flipping on top of Ino with a senbon pressing against her rival’s jugular, her knee throbbing at the sudden motion.  Ino blinked up at her, and Sakura took a moment to realize whose throat she was menacing, before pushing backward, and pulling away the senbon, stuttering, “I-Ino, I’m s-sorry!  I just, I-I-”

Ino cut her off, waving her hand, “It’s fine, Forehead.  I should’ve known better than to touch you from that nearby.  We covered waking up injured ninja in the Academy.  It’s not your fault.”

Sakura took a few moments to catch her breath, and then let Ino help her up on wobbly legs, looking around their makeshift campsite.  Naruto and Sasuke, both sporting bandages, were in the process of packing up their supplies again, and Naruto cheered at Sakura, “You’re awake!  Ino had to splint your leg, so we’ll carry you to the tower.  We’re gonna go straight there, now, then we’ll be done!”

Sasuke, meanwhile, continued to pack his supplies, and did not so much as glance her way as he stood and said, “We need to move.  Nara, is your team ready?”

Shikamaru slouched out of the tree line with Choji at his back, and he answered, “Yeah.  Let’s move.  Choji volunteered to carry you, Haruno-san.”

The next five hours were uncomfortable and harried, as the six genin sprinted for the center of the training ground.  Once they were close, the group slowed down, and very carefully moved forward, scouting for traps as they approached the tower.  All told, they found almost forty different traps, and the remains of two different genin teams before they reached the building, barely bypassing a team of Kusagakure genin waiting in ambush.

Within the bottom floor of the tower, the riddle written on the wall was straightforward, and both teams opened their scrolls, summoning a pair of chunin proctors, one of whom was Iruka sensei.  Before either of them could get a word in, Shikamaru cut across them, with a rare show of brusqueness, “We need to report nuke-nin interference in the exam, an encounter with Orochimaru, and a lot of injuries.  The exam can wait.”

What followed was a series of debriefs with the chunin, Kakashi, and finally the Hokage, who commended them for their bravery, and hummed noncommittally past his pipe at Naruto’s questions.  Kakashi, on the other hand, led them to a room in the tower, and stared them down before pronouncing, “Maa, forget your individual missions for the next couple of days.  Rest and recover.  You’re safe here until this phase of the exam is over, and you can get some proper medical attention.  Wouldn’t want you to break your bodies any more than you already have, right?”

The next few days were spent recovering, and Sakura found herself far more grateful for Naruto than she had ever been before, as he was always happy to help her walk with her splinted leg.  The three of them were in a sorry state.  Sasuke and Naruto were both incapable of using ninjutsu for the moment, as both had a seal of Orochimaru’s design on their bodies, according to Kakashi.  In addition to Sakura’s wrecked knee, her chakra was behaving irregularly thanks to the aftereffects of Orochimaru’s genjutsu, although she was back up to performing her Hyoton ninjutsu by the time the genin in the tower were all called together.

The room where the remaining fifteen genin gathered featured a large pair of stone arms folded into the Ram Seal below a large screen, and they were greeted by the sensei and proctors, with the Hokage in front of them all.  He explained the concept of the exams as a war by proxy, and the simple fact that too many teams made it to the final round.  As he wrapped up, one of the exam proctors stepped forward and asked that anyone who felt unable to compete in the elimination round of combat forfeit now, with the understanding that it will not be held against their consideration for promotion, or their other teammates.

Looking around, Sakura noticed that basically every genin was injured, aside from the three Sunagakure ninja, and splints like the one on her leg were by no means unique.

Half of them look worse off than me.  We can take ‘em!  Shannaro!

From the crowd, a grey-haired genin announced that he had too little chakra left to continue and was followed by two of the Kusagakure genin for similar reasons, although their remaining team member decided to stay in regardless.  Following their departure, the first match was announced on the screen, between Shino and Kankurō.  All but one of the proctors and the two combatants left the arena for the raised viewing balconies on the sides of the room.

Sakura, Sasuke, and Naruto all huddled around Kakashi, who had his little orange book out as usual.  As, the fight began with a flurry of thrown weapons on Kankurō’s part and a swarm of kikaichu on Shino’s part, Kakashi addressed them, “Neither of you boys should actively use chakra, Naruto-kun, Sasuke-kun.  If you do, I will end the match, Sasuke-kun, and if you do, Naruto you will lose because you will probably set yourself on fire with how badly that seal is interfering with your chakra control.  Sakura-chan, try to stay off your injured leg in the fight.  Just remember, surrender is preferable to death, this time!”

The proctor announced suddenly that, as both genin had retreated from the arena, the match was a forfeit for both.  Below, Kankurō’s skin had fallen away to reveal a puppet, and Shino was partially dissolved into a pile of insects.  Both grumbled in annoyance from where they had retreated to hide on the balconies.

The next match was between Gaara and Tenten, and the fight was incredibly one-sided, as none of Tenten’s admittedly impressive arsenal could penetrate the literal armor that coated Gaara, and she surrendered after an enormous mace was thrown back so hard that it cratered the wall beside her, well before Gaara could advance to attack her directly with his sand.  Sakura found herself analyzing Gaara’s sand control, which she tentatively identified as a kekkei genkai related to Sunagakure’s Magnet Release, famously used by the second Kazekage.  Given his lack of hand signs and how freely he could maneuver it, she thought that he had to inculcate the sand with his chakra beforehand, hence the gourd of sand on his back.  If that were the case, an enemy could theoretically ruin the sand with any sufficiently chakra heavy ninjutsu, either slowing its movement, or making it completely useless for Gaara.  A similar technique was used with fire and lightning ninjutsu to disrupt Magnet Release techniques in the previous wars, after all.

Sasuke and Lee were called down next, and what followed began on even footing.  Lee shouted out as they charged each other, “In our previous spars, we have held back to avoid injury!  Today I will show you the true power of Guy-sensei’s Taijutsu!”

Sasuke broke into a vicious grin at that announcement, although he did not answer verbally.  Both shed weights as they fought, until their limbs were a blur of intense motion, broken at last when Sasuke managed land a kick under Lee’s jaw, launching him at the stone hands at the end of the room.  There, Lee roared, “Your youth is shining like the morning sun, but I have just begun!  Behold, as I release the first two Gates!”

Suddenly, chakra began flowing from Lee in visible waves, and in the space of an instant, he flew at Sasuke with the force of a cannonball, and in the time it took for Sasuke to dodge, Lee, turned, spinning mid-air, and landed a kick to the back of Sasuke’s head.  As Lee landed and his chakra returned to normal, Sasuke lay collapsed on the ground, unconscious, and the proctor announced Lee’s victory.

Kiba and Neji were called down for the next match, but, rather than watch, both Sakura and Naruto followed Kakashi as he led them to a temporary infirmary in a side room, where Sasuke was being tended to by a medic.  The medic looked up as they entered, and said, “He’ll be fine.  Just a minor concussion, but that’s easily solved with standard medical ninjutsu, but it’ll take a few minutes for him to wake up.”

Kakashi nodded, then turned to his other two genin, lacking his usual crinkled eye smile, “Alright.  While he’s out, I might as well get this out of the way.  The seal on Sasuke is infinitely worse than the one Orochimaru put on you, Naruto.  A seal master is going to take care of yours sometime in the next week, depending on when he arrives in Konoha, but Sasuke’s is permanent as far as we know.  I need both of you to keep an eye on him going forward, since the seal will mess with his head, even with the precautions we’ll be putting in place once he’s awake.  Report it to me if he acts in a suspicious manner, and if I’m not available, go to the Hokage.  Got it?”

As both genin nodded, a little stunned by how serious Kakashi was, for once, Kiba was brought in, bruised, unconscious, and with a whimpering Akamaru on his chest.  The proctor hauling in the Inuzuka pair looked around, and gestured at them, “Uzumaki is up next, so you should head back.”

Kakashi gestured for them to go, and Sakura returned to the balcony, looking down at one of the older Konoha genin waiting for Naruto.  The man had a pair of black lenses hiding his eyes and veil hiding most of his face.  Immediately after the match started, Naruto charged him, and the genin, apparently named Yoroi, slid to the side and grappled with Naruto, his hands glowing with chakra.  While they grappled, the technique achieved nothing, and once he managed to pin Naruto, he grunted, “Why aren’t you already unconscious, kid?  I’ve been draining your chakra this whole time!”

Naruto growled at him and shouted that he couldn’t even feel it, and Yoroi kept his hold until, after about a minute of holding Naruto down, he started to sweat, then suddenly screamed and toppled over, the exposed skin on his fingers visible red and enflamed.  Naruto got up, looking confused and bit wobbly, and the proctor called the match when it became clear that Yoroi could not get up.  With a shrug, Naruto made his way back up, and Sakura asked him, “What did you do, Naruto?”

Naruto flopped on the ground and shrugged as Ino and Hinata were both called down to the arena, “I dunno?  I mean, I’m feeling kinda low on chakra now, but I didn’t even get to do anything, ya know?”

Sakura shook her head and turned back to watch the match, her mind trying to work out what went wrong, and concluded that either Yoroi didn’t have enough room in his chakra coils for all of Naruto’s chakra, or his chakra was too different to safely hold in someone else’s coils.  Either way, more evidence that he’s a real Uzumaki with regards to the high-density chakra.  Below, Ino tried to trap Hinata so that she could use her clan jutsu, and Hinata proceeded to thoroughly humiliate her opponent in a taijutsu match.  Without Shikamaru or Choji to keep her opponent out of melee range, Ino was forced to rely on her own taijutsu and kunai to try and fend off Hinata, and that was a losing proposition against a Hyuuga.  Within a few minutes, Ino’s chakra was locked behind blocked tenketsu, and Hinata was bowing to the helpless Yamanaka and helping her hobble out of the Arena.

Ino hasn’t really changed much from the Academy.  I wonder if Team 7 is just that far ahead, or if she’s just fallen behind?  I mean, none of us have really had time to be social for the last half a year, so we don’t really know what’s been going on with the others.  We need to thank her for helping in the forest anyway, so maybe we should stop by the flower shop sometime.

Sakura was called down next, and her opponent was another of the older Konoha genin, named Misumi, who shared his teammate’s choice of a veil over most of his face.  If he can drain chakra like the other one, then we can’t let him get in close!  The moment the match began, the man charged at her, and Sakura did exactly what she had trained to do for the last few months with Kakashi: she threw senbon.  Specifically, she threw as many as she could before he reached her, roughly one hundred and fifty in total, each of which was coated in a little bit of Hyoton chakra.  Misumi tried to spin and twist out of the way, which got him clear of about half of them before he caught one in the leg, toppled, and abruptly turned into a pincushion.  Sakura counted sixty hits, mostly to joints and major muscle groups, and his skin was visibly frosting over from the sheer volume of ice-natured chakra in his system.  When Misumi could not get up, the proctor called the match, and Sakura came forward to help the medic remove the Hyoton chakra and needles from his body.  After a couple of minutes, Misumi was awake, mobile, and, although he was frostbitten, he was grateful that Sakura kept him from freezing to death.  He thanked her through chattering teeth in the infirmary, “Y-You’re pretty incredible with s-s-senbon.  That-t’s usually an Anbu sk-kill!  Who t-taught you?”

Sakura smiled ruefully and answered, “Kakashi-sensei was pretty insistent that I learn properly, so I’ve been doing constant throwing drills for months.”

In her head, she was reeling.  Senbon are mostly Anbu weapons?  Kakashi-sensei and Yamato-sensei both acted like it was standard training, though!  Are they both Anbu then?  Does that mean our team is being trained to the standards of black ops agents?

By the time she came back out of the infirmary, the match between Temari and Choji was over, with Choji headed to the infirmary, and Shikamaru’s match with remaining Kusagakure genin was under way.  It was over quickly, as Shikamaru forced the genin to hold still with his shadow and take a thrown kunai to each hand.  Shikamaru walked away without a scratch on him as his opponent was taken to the medical staff.

With all the matches complete, the Hokage announced that they would compete in a tournament in a month’s time, and the first round’s matchups were displayed on the screen on the wall.  The first match was between Lee and Sakura, followed by Neji and Hinata, Naruto and Temari, and finally Shikamaru and Gaara.  Sakura looked speculatively at Lee while in the background Naruto shouted a challenge at an eager Temari while Hinata wilted beneath Neji’s glare.  Gaara and Shikamaru both looked bored, Gaara with an undercurrent of impatience, and Shikamaru without anything but exhaustion.  Lee was grinning and giving her a thumbs up.

Well, we'll definitely need to work on my stamina, but our full speed was still better than his with a couple of Gates open.  Maybe if we can work out Naruto’s kekkei genkai, that could bolster our chakra supply…

The Konoha genin were all taken to the hospital after that, where they all received treatment for their injuries.  Sakura received a better splint, was handed a pair of crutches, and ordered to let her leg rest for a day and generally not to run for the three days after her knee was finished recovering from her healing session.

Chapter Text

The following day, the team met up, as much on orders as to make sure that they were all alive.  Sasuke was more sullen than usual, informing them brusquely that all the jutsu he had copied were already on record, and he had therefore wasted his time in the exam.  Naruto grumbled about how he would be waiting until tomorrow for someone to get rid of Orochimaru’s seal.  Sakura, meanwhile, was still sporting a slight limp from her recovering knee and was feeling generally disheartened and tired.  Her hand was resting on her knee, cooling it with Hyoton chakra while they waited for Kakashi to arrive.

Kakashi met the three of them on the bridge to their usual training ground about half an hour late, and gestured to the three genin with his book, addressing them, “Alright, kiddies, first things first: Good job staying alive.  You all really surpassed my expectations, surviving meeting the problem-child sannin like that!  Keep that up!  The surviving part, not meeting Orochimaru.  Don’t do that again.  Sasuke-kun, you are on meditation and chakra control duty for the next month.  Your new snake hickey, despite the restraining seal on it, has really set back your fine control, so you will need at least a month of recovery.  To assist, a new technique for you to pick up while you regain your control!”

At that, he tossed Sasuke a scroll, and turned to Sakura and Naruto, “You two will be training together for the whole month, under me and another sensei, who knows a fair bit about the styles you’ve been developing so far.  Also, since Sakura-chan needs to study your…technique, Naruto-kun, she will need you to demonstrate it for her, and try to teach her how it works.  It’ll be a good exercise for both of you, too.”

Sakura and Naruto both looked skeptically at each other, then Kakashi, and Sakura spoke up, “Ah, sensei, that seems like more of a long-term thing, though?  I assumed I’d be working on it for a while, given how complicated it seems?”

Naruto broke into the conversation, blushing, “Nah, I’m mostly worried about being rude, ya know?  I mean, Konohamaru managed to work out Sexy-no-Jutsu, so I can probably teach you, but learning it…well, it’s kinda pervy, and I don’t wanna be a pervert to you, Sakura.”

Sasuke snorted in the background, stifling a laugh.  Sakura raised an eyebrow, “Wait, before we get into that, you managed to teach it to someone?  The scroll the Hokage gave me said that nobody had replicated it.”

Naruto scratched the back of his head as he answered, “Ah, well, Konohamaru can only do one form right now, and I can turn into whoever I want!  He also has a lot of trouble keeping the jutsu going, though that’s ‘cause he doesn’t have enough chakra yet, I think.  Anyway, the R&D people that jiji had me talk to said that they couldn’t get it to stick for them, and they said that I’m the only one who can look however I want with the jutsu, though I dunno why.”

So, his kekkei genkai lets him maintain the jutsu and modify the results, but it works anyway without it?

Sakura thought about that, then glanced at Kakashi, who sighed, and said, “Naruto-kun, the reason your jutsu works differently for you is because it depends on your…unique circumstances.  The Hokage is asking Sakura-chan to make the jutsu work anyway.  I can’t make you talk to her about it, legally.  You should tell your teammates, however, and it might make Sakura-chan share some secrets of her own, ne?”

Sakura and Naruto both stared at Kakashi in discomfort and confusion, then glanced at each other, while Sasuke glanced between the two of them.  Naruto shrugged, shuffled his feet, and spoke quietly, “I guess I should tell you guys, since you saved my life in the forest.  So, uh, I’ve got the Kyuubi in sealed in me, and that makes me a, er, jinchuriki…”

While Sasuke choked in surprise in the background, Sakura’s mind went straight from confusion to shock, and from there directly into overdrive.  Wait, that’s what’s going on?  I mean, I guess it makes sense that the Kyuubi would be sealed away in someone, and an actual Uzumaki would be traditional, like the Shodaime Hokage’s wife…Kami, is that why everyone’s parents warned us away from him when we were little?  Hold on, does that mean that to copy his kekkei genkai, you might need the Kyuubi’s chakra!?  There’s no way we could deal with something that powerful!  Then again, our tasks from the Hokage were pretty much impossible now that I think about it.  Sasuke was never going to get enough new jutsu, and Gaara turned out to be pretty much untouchable.  Asking us to wave our hands and magic up a bijuu-based bloodline is about on par.

She nodded decisively, then turned to Kakashi, “Sensei, does that mean that I have your permission to discuss the Hyoton with them?”

At Kakashi mixture of a nod and a shrug, she turned back to Naruto and Sasuke, “Since you told me your secret, I’ll tell you guys mine, though Kakashi did order me not to tell anyone, so it’s sort of his secret, too.  I didn’t inherit the Hyoton from anybody.  I sort of copied it from a scroll that Haku-san had, with Kakashi-sensei’s help, since I had enough chakra control to be able to artificially create that kekkei genkai in myself.  I think the Hokage wants me to work out how to copy your kekkei genkai too, Naruto, since the scroll he gave me talks about how your, er, sexy-no-jutsu is an expression of your bloodline.  Since you’ve got the Kyuubi, that’s probably at least partially where it comes from.”

There was a moment of silence as the boys absorbed that, Naruto joining Sasuke in his confusion.  Sasuke turned back and forth between the two, sighed, and kicked at the dirt.  He glanced at Kakashi, who was giving him one of his signature eye-smiles, and then grunted, “Hn, well, I guess it’s my turn.  The man I’m going to kill is my brother.  He killed my clan, so I’m going to kill him.”

…Yikes.  So that’s who killed the Uchiha.

Kakashi broke in before either of the other two could respond, “Well, now that everyone’s shared, and since I’m pretty sure Sakura-chan has figured it out, I might as well make this clear: you three were given tasks that were flatly impossible on your own, at least in the short term.  Gaara is Sunagakure’s jinchuriki, and widely thought to be untouchable.  Historically, all the Uchiha agents in the Chunnin Exams acquire two new jutsu at most.  Naruto’s kekkei genkai is thought to be the result of the Kyuubi’s chakra mutating the traditional Uzumaki bloodline and is not something that can be manipulated with just chakra control and kekkei genkai research.  Each of you was given a task that was more in line with a jonin’s level of skill and experience.  The core lesson that the Hokage wanted to teach you three is that you need to ask for help from outside of your team.  None of you even tried, and so, I’m laying it out for you.”

Kakashi shook his head, sighing, as Sakura, Naruto, and Sasuke all complained at the unfairness of the test.  He rapidly slapped all three upside the head with his little orange book, and spoke over them, his voice flat, “Let’s start with the easy one.  Sasuke-kun, you should have, at minimum, asked someone, any jonin really, but probably me, to let you look over our enemy jutsu archives so you’d know what we already have.  Beyond that, you could have asked me to help you gather the jutsu themselves, or at the very least give you advice, as I’m literally the best jutsu thief in Konoha’s history, per my horrible nickname, ‘The Copy-Nin.’  The Hokage even told you that your job was normally split between many ninja in the past.”

Sasuke glowered at Kakashi and spun on his heel, stomping away from the team.  Kakashi let him go, addressing the other Naruto with a sigh “Naruto-kun, I know that you know how to enlist others in your pranks, and you did a decent job using Sakura and Sasuke, but you never even considered asking anyone outside the team to assist.  If you want to be the Hokage someday, you need to learn this lesson, because all the Hokage does all day, every day, is ask other people for help with things he can’t do alone.  We are going to be working on your leadership skills going forward, because raw charisma alone is not enough.”

He sighed and opened his book as Naruto grumbled but nodded eventually.  Without looking up, Kakashi continued, “Sakura-chan, you honestly haven’t reached the point where you need to reach out yet, but you didn’t really come out and ask me for help with Hyoton until I confronted you, and that can’t be the case going forward.  Honestly, though, I expected you to work out that your task was almost impossible the night before the exams.  The Hokage practically told you to outperform the entire R&D department and you barely questioned it.  I expect you to look underneath the underneath.  Assume that everything has a second and third layer of meaning, if not more, whenever you are dealing with anything even vaguely important, got it?”

Sakura felt like smacking herself for not seeing it sooner, and answered in a slightly pained voice, “Yes, Kakashi-sensei.”

We're supposed to be the smart one.  It really is obvious in retrospect, since all we've really done before this was read instructions from a scroll and follow them.  There was no way we could have done this on our own.

Kakashi dismissed them to return home and rest, with the knowledge that they would be meeting at a different training ground the next day.

***

Kakashi walked up behind Jiraiya’s wiggling butt, from where his eyes were focused on the hole in the hot spring’s wall.  For a moment, he contemplated his sensei’s sensei, and how similar his coping mechanisms were to the Toad Sage before him.  They both displayed perversion as a mask for pain, regret, and instincts honed too sharp to reveal in public.  Without much more thought, Kakashi firmly nodded to himself, hand on his chin, and kicked Jiraiya through the wooden barricade, directly into a crowd of women.  How could he resist helping a master in his façade, after all?

After half an hour of feigned pain and artistically acted out attempts to flee, Jiraiya settled in the tree where Kakashi was flicking through the man’s latest novel.  Kakashi didn’t glance up, but neatly tilted his head out of the way of the older man’s swipe, as he griped, “If you wanted my attention, you could have asked, brat.  Not that I mind getting worked over by an entire crowd of kunoichi, but you lost me a lot of research material there!  How am I supposed to write my next book if I lack the inspiration to complete it, kid?”

Kakashi turned the page, still not looking up, “Mah, mah, I couldn’t help but think that since you were supposed to actually join the team meeting this afternoon, you must have lost track of time, Jiraiya-sama.  I was simply providing a helpful reminder not to be late next time!”

Jiraiya’s look was dirtier than any of his books (which were, in Kakashi’s expert opinion, actually quite tame), and his response was a huff, before he grumbled, “That’s rich, coming from you.  Did you know that Sarutobi’s complained about you in the last eighteen meetings I’ve had with him?  You might want to tone down the tardiness a bit before he decides to actually punish you, ya know.  Either way, you know full well that I was beneath the bridge the whole time.  I needed to gauge them before I dealt with them and getting a grasp on Naruto’s seal doesn’t need me to be looking at it, at this point.  I will say that the girl’s chakra control is impressive.  She was using Hyoton chakra casually the whole time, and it didn’t flicker when she got upset.”

Kakashi finally looked up at the old man, “Yeah, honestly, I didn’t expect much of her at first, but she showed an interest in stealing kekkei genkai, and I thought, hey why not?  All she’s got is her mind and her chakra control, but that was all I, Orochimaru, the Sandaime, or the Nidaime really had to begin with.  I was hoping you could help me push her away from Orochimaru’s model with this month of training.”

Jiraiya hummed in acknowledgement, “Sorry about that, by the way.  I thought I had him confirmed on the other side of the continent, so I wasn’t around to keep him out this time, and Sarutobi was distracted.  This is his, what, fourth attempt on the Uchiha kid?  Anyway, why’re you pushing pinky into your old training track?  It’s the hardest focus we put ninja into, and she wasn’t slated for it.”

Kakashi laughed bitterly, “I know the original plan for her was medical training or administrative work, but honestly?  I’d like an actual student at some point, and I doubt Danzō-sama and his ilk will let anyone promising come my way after this team.  Naruto is inevitably going to you before the year is out, and Sasuke’s just too much of a mess at this point to consider.  On the other hand, I’m pretty sure I can apprentice Sakura, so long as she keeps meeting my expectations.  Kami knows nobody else cares where a civilian-born genin ends up.  My one problem is your old teammate messed up my timeline by showing up, and they need a win to keep them from giving up.  You said that you might be able to teach her some useful sealing for kekkei genkai theft?”

Jiraiya sighed, “Yeah, sure.  Danzō’s still cutting you out for leaving Root, then?  I’ll talk to him, maybe he’ll ease up a bit, but honestly, you might not need to worry about him as much now.  He decided to support your decision to train pinky as the next generation’s bloodline thief and fast-tracked your request to give her jonin-level access to the kekkei genkai research library.  Either way, though, I get it.  It’s why I stuck around in Ame after the war, you know?  I wanted to train some kids the way I wanted, rather than the way the elders told me to, like with Minato.  I wanted to train him for espionage, personally, but they made me stick him on the frontline fuinjutsu track.  I was terrified he’d end up in an early grave in the war, like his teammates.”

Kakashi sighed and leaned back, finally putting his book away.  He hated and loved reminiscing about Minato with Jiraiya, and now that it had started, they were not going to get anything done for a while.  It would probably end with them drinking together again, and if Kakashi were to be honest with himself for once, that might be healthier for both of them than repressing and grieving.

The night was long, but they both woke up in the back alley behind their usual bar ready to deal with the kids, and maybe a little less melancholy than they were before.

***

Sakura spent the following week reading from the R&D scrolls Kakashi had told her she had access to now, recovering from her knee injury, and coping with Naruto’s new sensei, Jiraiya.  The man was a disgusting pervert and made her appreciate Kakashi by comparison.  She was rapidly approaching the limits of her patience with him, having already made allowances for how important and dangerous the sannin was.  Finally, with Naruto’s seal fully repaired and his chakra stabilized, she was ready to try and learn how his signature jutsu worked.

She had read a lot about the previous attempts to deconstruct Naruto’s kekkei genkai, and the effects of the Kyuubi’s chakra in general.  According to the eighty scrolls of research notes she forced her way through, initial experimentation took place in the Nidaime Hokage’s labs, followed by the Sandaime’s R&D division for the last forty or so years.  This included a laundry list of horrible side-effects to infusing people, seals, and objects with the Kyuubi’s chakra, the most common of which was spontaneous, explosive combustion.  Only two successful attempts were listed, both by the Nidaime in partnership with the Shodaime’s wife, Uzumaki Mito, who provided a sealing array that stabilized the bijuu chakra into an implantable ‘seed’ of sorts, which the Nidaime then surgically implanted into test subjects.  The issue with both successes is that they were rendered infertile by the procedure, and the success rate was two out of four hundred candidates, the remaining three hundred and ninety-eight of whom suffered from, at minimum, crippled chakra coils.  The other key factor, of course, was that all of the Yondaime’s notes on Naruto’s seal, of the few she had access to, stated clearly that the seal was only rated to handle half of the Kyuubi’s chakra in a jinchuriki of ten years or younger, given that it was an incomplete design.  From Jiraiya’s explanation, Naruto only held the yang chakra of the bijuu, and that probably seriously altered how it changed his kekkei genkai, possibly alleviating the previous problems.

From her reading, Sakura was beginning to theorize that the Uzumaki kekkei genkai offered a bridge of sorts between an infusion of Kyuubi yang chakra and a stable, reproducible bloodline.  She was, therefore, looking at a way to combine the Uzumaki bloodline creation technique with Mito’s sealing arrays, and had already begun compiling a set of tests that could be run on rabbits with a modified array, based on the R&D division’s checklist for testing.  All she had to do now was convince Jiraiya to take the time to help her adapt the old sealing arrays to the task of creating a sort of cocoon of the Kyuubi’s yang chakra that someone could then be safely suspended in.  Hopefully, this process would cause the chakra to compact into a ‘seed’ of bijuu chakra within the body, while also utilizing the process of ‘bathing’ in chakra that was the key to creating the Uzumaki bloodline.  Sakura was pretty sure that the premise was sound, and just needed fine tuning to create a chakra system and body that was as malleable as Naruto’s.

Now, all we need to test is whether Naruto’s jutsu works how we think it does.  If it calls for molding yang chakra, and actively restructuring the body, even temporarily, then We're probably right.  If only he would actually show us how to do it, already!

Naruto was being cagey about the technique, citing repeatedly that he was afraid of being “pervy” around Sakura, while Kakashi and Jiraiya snickered about it in the background.  Sakura finally broke down and asked him directly, “Why did you name the damn thing ‘Sexy-no-Jutsu’ if you didn’t want to sound like a pervert!?  It’s right there in the name!”

Naruto blushed and stammered, “B-but that’s literally the name of the book I got the idea out of!  It’s about a ninja who uses jutsu to look like a pretty woman, to make people like him, ‘cause they’re all perverts!  I’m not the pervert for using it, everyone else is!”

As both older men choked on their laughter in the background, Sakura put her head in her hands, “Naruto, are you telling me that you made this technique based off of an erotic novel, like the ones Kakashi reads all the time?”

Naruto shrugged, “Well, I mean, I guess?  I don’t actually know what makes a book ‘erotic’ or ‘sexy’ or whatever, ya know?  I just read it ‘cause it was one of the only books that had words I could read when I was younger, and I didn’t have a lot of options…”

Jiraiya guffawed, “Seriously kid?  Let me tell you all about erotica!  It’s my bread and butter.  Why, I do so much research into it, I write it myself!  I’ll have you-”

The senbon that had suddenly shot straight through Jiraiya’s foot and sandal, nailing it to the ground, made a faint whistling sound as it left Sakura’s fingers.  Her eye was twitching as she shrieked at him, breath misting with freezing water vapor, “Enough!  You’ve done nothing but ‘research’ this entire time!  I’ve put up with it because I need you for my work, but you will not be corrupting Naruto with your terrible behavior.  You start acting perverted around me one more time, one more time, and the next senbon will be between your legs, you understand?”

Kakashi chuckled nervously behind Jiraiya, staring at the senbon impaling his foot, while Jiraiya stared at her open-mouthed, “Mah, Sakura-chan, maybe take a moment to breathe and calm do-”

The next senbon whistled past Kakashi’s ear, as Sakura switched her wrathful gaze to him, “And you!  You’re our sensei, and you haven’t made sure that he got at least a basic lecture on sex and seduction?  You read enough of this idiot’s trash to be able to explain it to him, after all, Kakashi-sensei.  It’s your job to check that he knows that stuff before leaving the village at all!”

Naruto looked at Sakura with terror on his face, “Don’t stick a senbon in me, but I know what sex is, Sakura!  I’m not dumb!  I just, ya know, don’t get what really makes something perverted or not?”

Sakura took that moment, as Jiraiya gently eased the spike of metal out of his foot, to center herself before she threw a senbon at someone else.  She had only meant to open fire on Jiraiya, after all.  Turning back to Naruto, she smiled sweetly, “Naruto, I think I’ve been misjudging you since I first heard of your jutsu in the Academy!  Let me explain, being a pervert, like these two, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  It should just be private, is the thing, but Jiraiya and Kakashi are publicly displaying their sexual interests pretty much constantly.  Kakashi literally reads porn all the time, despite his masturbatory tendencies being his own business.”

Kakashi spluttered in the background, but Sakura talked over him, pointedly ignoring both older ninja, “Jiraiya, on the other hand, spies on and ogles women.  That’s called voyeurism, and it’s gross because it ignores how the women feel about being looked at in private.  He’s the kind of pervert my parents told me to run away from when I was little.  What makes it bad, in both cases, is the lack of consent.  I never agreed to have Kakashi pull out porn in front of me, and neither did you, and that ignores whether or not we want him to be a pervert around us, not that we ever would.  I know that the women Jiraiya spies on don’t say that he can, because they’re usually just trying to relax in a bathhouse.  That’s why he’s a disgusting pervert!”

Naruto, by the end was nodding along, stroking his chin, and frowned, “But doesn’t that make me a pervert for using Sexy-no-Jutsu?  I mean, I’m turning into a naked lady without other people’s permission.”

Sakura shrugged, “I don’t know?  You aren’t really doing it to for sexual reasons, so it’s not really perverted, I think?”

Jiraiya finally spoke up at this point, looking up from bandaging his foot, “At risk of getting another new piercing, I’m gonna have to intervene here.  No, you aren’t a pervert, Naruto, and frankly, I feel like pinky’s little lecture, aside from being adorably simple and naïve, missed an important part of all this: ninja use sex as a weapon.  Seduction is something you’ll both be trained to deal with at chunnin rank and above, and it’s important to remember that any ninja engaging in sexual behavior is always pretending, at least a little bit.  A secret that you can’t share with anyone else is that my whole pervert shtick is mostly an act.  I spy on people for Konoha, and me poking my head into places I’m not allowed is ignored at least partially because I come off like a horny idiot, rather than a proper spy.  I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong, kid, but you need to cool it with the senbon.  Heh, get it?  It’s funny because-”

Kakashi stepped forward, directly onto Jiraiya’s injured foot, eliciting a howl of pain, “Yeah, no, enough of that.  Sakura-chan’s not wrong that I should have checked more thoroughly that you kids knew the basics on sexual situations.  So…I think it’s time I gave you two a talk, although I’ll have to hunt down Sasuke-kun for this later.”

Sakura blanched, while Naruto looked vaguely confused.  The next hour was mortifying for both Sakura and Naruto, especially when Jiraiya decided to ‘help’ by reading excerpts from his books.  The end result, however, was enlightening, especially for Naruto, who, by the end, had overcome his horror to ask several very pointed questions about anatomy that Sakura realized that he probably never got explained, given his lack of parents.

In the end, Naruto finally explained the way he taught Konohamaru his jutsu: study the shape you want (albeit with some very questionable sources), fix it in your mind, immersing yourself in how it would feel to be in that body, then forming the Ram hand sign.  The process was a mirror to the henge, which called for the chakra to be molded before visualizing the illusionary shape.  The difficulty lay in how Naruto shaped the chakra while performing the jutsu, as he lacked the vocabulary to explain it.  After four hours of trying, producing short-lived transformations far from Sakura’s aim, she realized that Naruto was moving his chakra out of the regular shape of his coils, and instead forcing it to circulate as if in the new body’s shape.  When she finally managed it, she was shaking with chakra exhaustion, and glanced at Kakashi and Jiraiya, in her form as an older version of herself, covered by an oversized cloak she had brought to avoid flashing her teammates, “I think I get how his kekkei genkai works.  His chakra coils can move within his body, rather than being fixed, and can grow and contract as he needs them to.  Holding this jutsu would hurt anybody else after a while, since I’m literally circulating my chakra outside of my coils in places.”

Naruto was too busy clapping at her success to focus on what that meant, so she turned and focused on him as she released the jutsu, “Naruto, I think you don’t actually need the jutsu!  If you kept trying to change how your chakra flows for long enough, you would eventually just transform on your own, but without a time limit or chakra expenditure.  You could look however you want if you get your chakra control good enough!”

In the background, Jiraiya was rubbing his slightly bristly chin, and interjected, “That makes a lot of sense, what with how his chakra reacted to Orochimaru’s seal.  Normally, he wouldn’t have any accessible chakra at all, but instead, it just moved around the sealed area, where the Kyuubi is, and continued on, disrupted, but still functional.  His coils must be physically rerouting around the blockage.  You think Mito-sama’s old Bijuu Infusion Seal is the key, pinky?”

Sakura nodded as she plopped down, pulling out some sliced, freeze-dried mango, “I think his kekkei genkai is a combination of the Uzumaki high-density chakra coils and the raw malleability of bijuu chakra, specifically the Kyuubi’s.  I think we need to adapt it to crystalize the bijuu chakra directly into the chakra network, rather than needing to implant it.  It will probably involve a long time spent soaking in refined chakra from the Kyuubi, letting it circulate through the whole body, like the Uzumaki did to alter their chakra, but with bijuu chakra instead of residual human chakra.”

The remaining hour at the training ground was spent in a crash course in how to make and alter seals from Jiraiya, with occasional assistance from Kakashi, when Jiraiya started going over their heads.  Sakura realized almost immediately that it would be years before she could personally modify and create the seals she needed to mimic Naruto’s kekkei genkai, but Jiraiya assured her that he would be able to draw up what she needed in a week, and refine it well before the next phase of the exams.  Naruto, to Sakura’s surprise, kept up with it as well as she did, for all that he could not actually draw out Jiraiya’s example seals accurately, thanks to his atrocious handwriting.  At the end of the session, Kakashi ruffled his hair, and said, “You’re definitely an Uzumaki, all right.  I think you if you take the time to keep practicing with Jiraiya, you could follow in your clan’s footsteps and master fuinjutsu.”

Naruto, emboldened by the idea, announced, “Just you wait!  I’ll be the best at seals in no time, dattebayo!  I’ll be the best with fuinjutsu and ninjutsu ever!”

As Jiraiya held back tears of joy at the announcement and began giving him exercises to get started, Sakura finished gathering her things and headed toward home, with a slight detour.  She had promised herself she would stop by the Yamanaka flower shop to thank Ino for her help in the exams, and she finally had time, when Ino was supposed to be there.

Ino was watering the plants at the front of the shop when Sakura arrived, and Sakura approached somewhat cautiously, saying, “Hey, Ino.  I, uh, wanted to say thanks for helping in the forest.”

Ino turned, looking surprised, and set down her watering can, wiping her hands on her apron as she answered, “You’re welcome, Sakura, but we’re comrades.  I’d do it for any Konoha ninja, you know?”

Sakura shook her head, bowing slightly as she countered, “I know that, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t thank you for it.  You probably saved our lives in the forest, and I know you’re the one who splinted my leg, which the doctor said prevented any permanent damage.  You deserve thanks, and I also wanted to, er, apologize for how I’ve acted for the last few years.  Your friendship was more important than a crush on Sasuke, and I should have been nicer to you, even if we were rivals.”

Ino seemed legitimately shocked at Sakura’s admission, and pulled off the apron, calling into the store, “Mom, I’m gonna run out and grab a bite to eat with Sakura, okay?  I’ve watered everything but the lilies!”

With that, Ino hooked Sakura’s arm with her own and dragged her down the street, chattering “Sakura, you’re being way too nice about this!  I mean, I’m happy to be friends again, but you would never have apologized for a little name calling back when we graduated!  Come on, I suddenly feel like I don’t know my best friend anymore, and the only solution is to go get dango together!”

Kami, we missed Ino.

The evening was spent chatting about how they were both handling the month-long break, while they both slowly felt each other out about renewing their friendship.  Sakura, for her part, found that she had really missed Ino.  Where before, they had fought over Sasuke, Sakura had since cooled on the idea of dating him.  Sasuke had just treated her worse once she finally caught up to his skill level, acting like she hardly mattered, and Sakura found how friendly he was with Naruto grating as a result.  Ino, without Sasuke between them to fight over, seemed amenable to a return to friendship.  They ended up agreeing to meet up again in a couple days when they would both be free.

The following two weeks were marked by constant activity for Sakura.  When she was not experimenting with sealing, she was performing tests with limited quantities of the Kyuubi’s chakra, as Naruto learned to draw it out.  In her spare time, Ino seemed determined to rebuild their friendship, dragging her home to eat, or joining her for dinner with Sakura’s parents most days of the week.  Eventually, the time came to use the seal Jiraiya had developed at her direction ten days before the final phase of the exams.  The result of all their tests (which had cost twelve unfortunate rabbits their lives and produced a trio of rabbits that now changed their fur color and size seemingly at will, now living in a cage at her parent’s house) was a seal surrounding a hospital bed set up in an R&D medical lab.  Naruto had charged the seal with as much of the Kyuubi’s chakra as it could hold, at least four times as much as Sakura estimated her use of it would demand.  The bed had an iv-drip set up beside it, and the seal incorporated life support elements to keep her from wasting away while her body adapted to the bijuu chakra.  A dozen different researchers and the head of R&D had examined her work with Jiraiya and okayed the first full human trial, with Sakura as the subject, thanks to her combination of high chakra control and a young, flexible chakra system, not to mention her eagerness to try it herself.

Well, here goes!  We’ll only be sort of awake for the next few days, then we should have a version of Naruto’s abilities.  We did it, shannaro!

As her awareness faded and she felt the seal coat her in a bath of the Kyuubi’s chakra, she began synchronizing the rate of her chakra’s circulation with that of the swirling red cocoon covering her body.  Time lost its meaning for Sakura as she focused purely on her chakra, enjoying the freedom to manipulate it without the constraint of a limited supply, thanks to the seemingly endless well pouring over and through her from the spiraling web of fuinjutsu beneath her bed.  She vaguely noticed Jiraiya, Kakashi, and the various researchers appearing and vanishing around her, but her mind was too lost in the sensations of her chakra to really mark their passing.  For the first time in her memory, her world was silent within, as her innermost self devoted herself to her chakra just as the rest of her did.  It was simultaneously the most exhausting and satisfying experience of her short life up to that point, and Sakura found annoyance washing over her as the whirl of red faded from view, and the world returned around her, although she could still feel something like the Kyuubi’s chakra in her chakra coils almost like warm water running just under her skin, soothing her and moving within her.

She sat up slowly, blinking heavy eyes as her body ached from its prolonged stillness.  Kakashi was seated beside her, and had lowered his book as she stirred, smiling with his visible eye, “Good morning, Sakura-chan!  You’re just in time for the exam, sleepyhead.”

Chapter Text

The time between waking up and the beginning of the exams was filled with a series of medical examinations, interviews, and tests by the R&D staff.  By the end, Sakura’s name had been attached to the new ‘Haruno Kyuubi Kekkei Genkai Creation Method’ and Sakura’s hair had slowly shifted from pink to red to white, and then back to her usual pink, while she had failed to make herself appreciably taller or stronger, although she did not attempt Naruto’s jutsu while her chakra was still settling.  She also had roughly twice as much chakra available, although her control had worsened somewhat.  She slept well and, upon waking, tested her version of the Sexy-no-Jutsu.  It worked with an explosion of icy mist, and when she released the technique, she was wearing a blinding grin on her face.

Oh, I cannot wait to see Lee’s face when he has to fight that.  We're going to wreck him!  Shannaro!

She got a hug and a kiss on the head from both of her parents on the way out of their house to the arena.  There, she was waylaid by both Ino and Naruto at the entrance, both trying to talk over each other.  Ino was in the process of elbowing Naruto in the gut to shut him up when Sakura neatly slid between them and separated them, saying, “Sorry for vanishing for nine days like that, but I had to finalize my alterations to Naruto’s, uh, technique.”

Ino looked confused, saying, “You mean his pervert-no-jutsu?  I thought that wasn’t really a combat technique, though?”

Naruto chuckled weakly, “Yeah, uh, Sakura got assigned to make it work for other stuff, ya know?  Pervy-sage said that it worked, but you’re okay, right, Sakura?”

Sakura smiled slightly and changed her eye color from green to match Ino’s blue mid-blink, eliciting a gasp from Ino and a cheer from Naruto.  She answered as her eyes slowly changed back to her usual green, “Yes, Naruto, it worked perfectly.  I’m going to blow Lee out of the water.”

***

The stadium was packed with more people than Sakura had ever seen in one place, although she could still pick out Kakashi and Sasuke sitting with the rest of the Jonin sensei and genin teams.  All eight of the competitors were lined up in the center of the packed earth arena, and Sakura glanced at Lee, where he was fairly vibrating with excitement beside Neji.  After the Hokage signaled for them to begin, the proctor gestured for the others to depart, and Sakura faced Lee in the middle of the Arena.  The crowd went quiet as the proctor raised his arm, before shouting, “Begin!”

As their proctor leapt backward, Lee launched himself toward her, opening his mouth to shout at her, and Sakura slammed her hands together into the Ram sign.  They had matching grins in the moment before Sakura appeared to vanish in a cloud of glittering mist, which Lee went through as if Sakura were no longer present, emerging covered in a layer of slick ice, and coughing from the sudden cold air.  As he spun around on his landing Sakura flashed out of the icy fog away from him, hurling a stream of hissing senbon at him in a blur of limbs.  Lee, after rapidly yelping in surprise and dodging away and to the side, goggled for a moment at Sakura’s new set of arms sprouting from her sides, performing hand signs below her other arms.

Sakura’s manic grin stretched wider as ice formed beneath her, and she began a second set of hand signs after opening a new packet of senbon for her upper arms to fire.  As she circled opposite him on her frozen trail, Lee was dodging like a madman, and clearly having trouble with the constant barrage, before he finally made it to the sparse cover of the trees in the arena, serving as a good shield from the needles.  He shouted from cover, “Most youthful!  I shall have to match your four arms with four times as much power!  Fourth Gate, release!  Haaaaaa!”

There was a wave of chakra exploding out from behind the trees as Sakura began a final set of hand signs.  Lee sprinted at her with greater speed than she could match, too fast to target with a thrown senbon, but she skated back, nonetheless.  The distance between them shrank, Lee literally oozing chakra and shattering the ground beneath his feet in his charge, and as he closed with her, she finished two different strings of hand signs, releasing a pair of Hyoton techniques, and burning through more chakra than she had before Naruto’s kekkei genkai was added to her.

Lee’s fist, cratered the wall beside her as she vanished in a swirl of snow, and the world went white as she cried out, “Hyoton Art: Whiteout!”

When the arena resolved from the small snowstorm that Sakura had unleashed, she was nowhere to be seen, while Lee had ripped his arm free from the hole in the wall, and was casting about to try to find her, shivering in the now freezing air.  As he turned toward the center of the arena, his immense chakra supply suddenly cut out and he toppled forward, three senbon neatly lined up in the back of his neck, and Sakura’s hand extended from the snow at his feet.

As the proctor announced her victory, Sakura pulled herself up out of the snow, now back down to two arms, and delicately plucked the needles from Lee’s neck, causing him to startle back into groggy motion.  As he rose, clearly somewhat confused, she bowed to him, saying, “Thank you for fight, Lee-san.  You almost got me at the end there!”

Lee rubbed the back of his neck, wincing, and returned the bow, still shivering slightly as the snow began to melt around them, “Your technique was most youthful, Sakura-san!  I will have to hone my senses further so that you will not evade me so easily next time!”

Together, they made their way out of the arena, as both Hyuuga genin made their way down.  The crowd was cheering loudly after the showy back and forth of taijutsu and ninjutsu in the first match.

While Neji and Hinata engaged in what might politely be described as a duel, which Sakura considered to be more along the lines of a deathmatch, she refilled one of her now empty senbon pouches from a storage scroll filled with her backup supplies.  As Neji and Hinata tried their level best to slap each other with chakra, she went over her fight with Lee, looking for mistakes.

In retrospect, opening with the Whiteout jutsu in combination with the Hiding in the Snow jutsu could probably have ended the fight before Lee had a chance to escalate, while also keeping her four-armed transformation a secret.  At the same time, the combination of those two techniques at once would have eaten up a lot of chakra and time to complete, which would have left her close to helpless if Lee had managed to catch the surprise volley from the snow.  As it was, the fight leading up to her final strike had set up the expectation that she would just keep her distance and throw senbon at him head on, like all her public fights so far.  Hiding within a foot of him to get a clear knockout shot at his neck was therefore a complete surprise at that point.  Lee, on the other hand, had managed to unlock his fourth gate, which meant that he might have been able to take her out at the start of the fight if he had opened with that instead of charging her, at the risk of her plugging him with senbon before he could engage her.  All in all, it was a strong showing from both genin, and Sakura was certain that she would need to rely on undermining the footing of her next opponent, given how grounded the footing of the Hyuuga style needed to be for their accuracy.  That should showcase an entirely different strategy as well.

In fact, it looked like Hinata had managed to turn the tables on Neji using the ice she had left behind on the field to break his rooted stance.  The flurry of chakra covered strikes was broken when Neji’s left foot slipped out from under him and Hinata switched to a closed fist, which impacted cleanly with her cousin’s descending face.  The crunch was audible in the raised balcony where the contestants were gathered, and Neji flipped over onto his back, out cold.

Hinata stood frozen, fist extended, and blinked a couple times, clearly surprised that it had worked.  As the crowd started to cheer, she seemed to come un-paused, and rushed over to Neji, blushing and stuttering, with her hands fluttering around his face in horror at his thoroughly broken nose.  As the medics carried him off, she accompanied them, and Sakura could barely make out her stuttered-out apologies.  She could see Hinata’s teammates jumping up and down in the stands, cheering, and tracked to the side to note that the Hyuugas all sitting together were all looking some variation of shocked or incredulous at the outcome.

As Temari leapt out to float down to her match on the back of her fan, Sakura caught Naruto’s arm on his way out, and looked him in the eye, “Remember what Jiraiya said about not setting the stands on fire, okay?”

Naruto guffawed and dashed out, shouting over his shoulder, “You bet, Sakura!  I’m way better than I was at the beginning of the month!”

***

From his place opposite her in the arena, Naruto could see the blonde Suna genin wind up with her enormous fan as the proctor ordered them to begin, and he grinned widely.  When the blast of cutting wind rushed toward him, he used his simplest wind jutsu to whip up a relatively light gust around himself, causing the rush of chakra infused gale to swirl around him harmlessly, slicing up the ground and wall behind him.  He stuck his tongue out at her, and, in his most annoying tone of voice, taunted her, “Puh-lease!  You call that a wind jutsu?  I’ve had farts stronger than that, girly!  I understand, though, not everyone’s all that talented with ninjutsu!  I’m sure you're much better with taijutsu if that’s your best ninjutsu.”

With each sentence out of his mouth he could see his opponent’s blood-pressure rising as she unleashed four more slicing squalls in his direction, each stronger than the last, until she finally roared in utter fury, opening her fan fully to reveal the three purple circles, spinning in place.  The hurricane that she launched in his direction this time was far larger than he could simply redirect, and so he did not, instead rushing through the seven hand signs to perform Sasuke’s favorite fireball jutsu, which promptly converted all the wind-natured chakra in the air into fire-natured chakra chasing back toward Temari.  The resultant blast of heat and light was blinding and hot enough to reduce the sparse trees and grass in the arena to charcoal, and when it cleared, Temari was covered in the ashen remains of her own fan where she had sheltered behind it.  She had switched from angry to terrified following the conflagration, and Naruto’s grin hitched a little at the sight of her fear of him.

Sighing softly, he performed his favorite jutsu, and became a dozen of himself, all prepared to release a ninjutsu, saying simply, “Surrender, maybe?  I’ve still got plenty of chakra.”

Temari’s eye twitched at the sight of the dozen clones and his untouched appearance, swore, and nodded, raising her arm, “I surrender.  Damn it.”

The crowd was relatively quiet in their cheering this time, as very few of the local Konoha citizens cheered for him, but that bothered him a lot less than it used to, given that he could see Sasuke and Kakashi-sensei actually cheering for him, albeit with book in hand in Kakashi’s case.  It was nice to have friends, and Naruto had noticed that most of the Konoha ninja in the crowd were at least clapping for him, unlike the civilians, which was the most recognition he had ever had.

As he made his way back up, he clapped Shikamaru on the shoulder, noticing how tense the Nara was under his grip, and grinned.  Shikamaru glanced at him sidelong, and Naruto said, “You can do it, Shika!  Show ‘em who’s boss!  I wanna fight you next round!”

Shikamaru snorted and smirked, but his shoulder remained stiff, “Sorry to burst your bubble, Naruto, but I’ll probably just surrender.  What a pain.”

***

From the stands, Sakura watched Shikamaru and Gaara square off against each other, both testing the waters, Gaara with his sand and Shikamaru with his shadows.  Naruto reached the balcony as Gaara made his move, launching a massive wave of sand across the arena.  Sakura gave her teammate a thumbs up that he returned, and they both settled in to watch the match, although Naruto was busy shouting for Shikamaru to “not be lazy!” and “actually try for once!”  Sakura could not help but notice, however, that Shikamaru was rapidly retreating and looking a little desperate.

The end of the fight was as sudden as it was unexpected.  Out of nowhere, Shikamaru, Gaara, and all the sand froze in place, and she could barely make out an unbroken pitch-black line running between the two genin, however before Shikamaru could find a way to capitalize on his trap, Gaara appeared to begin bleeding sand from his form, and his eyes visibly rolled back in his head.  In that moment, the world seemed to tilt on its axis, and Sakura felt as much as saw a frisson pass through the audience.  A vile, coarse feeling abraded her skin as Gaara’s chakra became…unnatural.  The sleep-inducing genjutsu that was hidden underneath the sensation of her skin being flayed from within by sandpaper failed to gain any purchase on Sakura, although most of the crowd, including Naruto, slumped over as an unnatural slumber claimed them.  She quickly grabbed him, shoved a burst of chakra into his system, and shouted “Kai!” even as she kept her eyes on the now obvious jinchuriki on the ground below.

In the center of the arena, the ground began to grind itself into dust, which rose in a growing mound around Gaara, slowly gaining definition as it grew and grew.  Shikamaru, clearly losing his hold on the jinchuriki as the wave of malevolent chakra rolled over him, fled vertically up the side of the arena towards them, only to be assaulted by a leaping ninja wearing a Sunagakure headband.  Sakura threw a pair of senbon at him on reflex, and Shikamaru apparently caught him in a shadow the moment he touched the wall, as he froze in place, defying gravity, and received the pair of frozen steel needles in his brainstem.  Shikamaru looked sick as he kept going, letting the ninja’s body topple to the sand below.

When he arrived, she was already turning and ducking under the blade of a ninjato-wielding Otogakure ninja while Naruto confusedly stumbled back.  In an instant, Shikamaru had trapped the attacker in yet another shadow-bind, and Naruto gathered himself enough to slice the woman’s hands cleanly off with a rapid wind ninjutsu spat from his mouth.  As the ninja screamed and fell backward, spraying blood from her severed wrists, Kakashi appeared behind her, his kunai cutting her voice off as it speared her through the neck.  He stepped over the new corpse, Sasuke appearing behind him with blood-stained hands, and ordered them in a curt voice, “The village is under attack.  Naruto, Sakura, Shikamaru, you three are with Sasuke.  Go directly to the Academy and assist with the evacuation.  Kill anyone wearing a Suna or Oto headband, but do not pursue fleeing opponents and do not stop to engage in prolonged combat until you reach the Academy.  Shikamaru has operational command, and Sasuke has tactical command.”

Without another word he leapt off the balcony toward the now enormous tanuki formed from sand, with Gaara sprouting from its head, only to clash in mid-air with the half-veiled Suna jonin who accompanied their team.  Shikamaru, flashed through Konoha sign language, and they arranged themselves with Sasuke on point, flanked by Naruto and Shikamaru, followed by Sakura in the rear.  They jumped and ran together as a unit deeper into the village, and Sakura began throwing her senbon at the enemy ninja that Sasuke began to methodically point out, his sharingan darting around.  As they made their way further into the village, Naruto began to release clones regularly to help in the ongoing fights they passed.

About five minutes into their run, the walls enclosing the village came down as an enormous three-headed snake rammed into the village proper.  At the same moment, the enormous Tanuki that Gaara had become launched itself out of the arena in an impossible jump and landed in an explosion of wind and sand amidst the buildings ahead of them.  The brief but violent sandstorm that followed stripped the paint from the walls of the buildings, and the skin from the people who were not already in cover.  Sasuke had thankfully directed them to jump through a window when he saw the jump, and they managed to make it in before they were torn apart.  While they waited for the sandblast to subside, a poof of smoke heralded the arrival of a small bright orange toad holding a scroll in its mouth, right in front of Naruto.  Before anyone could react, Naruto reached out and grabbed it, saying, “Pervy-sage must have sent it.  We both use the Toad contract, dattebayo!”

Opening it revealed a complex mess of fuinjutsu, and the toad croaked out, “Jiraiya said ta slap that on the red-haired guy, yanno?  He’s busy tryin’ ta save yer Hokage.  Better hurry up while ya’ve still got a village!”

Without another word, the toad vanished as it had arrived, in a cloud of smoke, and Shikamaru, nodded, “Mendokuse.  I guess we have new priorities, then.  I’ll take any ideas for getting in close that aren’t suicide, because while I’m pretty sure you could make it, Sasuke, you probably wouldn’t survive the trip back down.”

Naruto spoke up, “I can summon a really huge toad to keep that big ugly raccoon busy and get us close, but I’ll need to be able to focus and hold still for long enough to gather the chakra.  Maybe Sasuke and I can go up on the boss toad, and you two can buy us time?  It’ll take a few minutes, and it’ll be pretty obvious.”

Sakura nodded, “I can probably keep them busy for long enough.  If you’re going to use your, uh, special chakra reserve, Naruto, it might be better if we expect a lot of attention, though, so all three of us should guard you while you draw it out.”

There was a roar outside and a torn-up building flew by their window landing with a spray of blood and dust.  Sasuke gestured outside, “We need to go now.  Naruto, start doing your thing, and we can all guard you while we rush the bastard.”

They charged out and proceeded directly toward the towering monster of sand.  The thing cackled in a shrieking, deranged voice as it kicked over buildings and spat out enormous wind blasts at the ground around it.  As they approached, they saw a dozen battles playing out between ninja amidst the wreckage, occurring at blinding speed, mostly with kunai and sword alongside the liberal use of low-level wind and fire jutsu.  Most of the city surrounding Gaara’s enormous bijuu form was either flattened, uprooted, or on fire.  When they got close to the blast zone, Naruto began speeding through hand signs while drawing on the Kyuubi’s chakra, causing the air around him to visibly tint orange.  The moment it started to be visible, the four genin were immediately targeted with eight kunai from different directions, as well as three individual ninja charging directly at them.  Thankfully, all but one of the ninja attacking them were intercepted by friendly Konoha ninja, while Sasuke proceeded to plant a fist squarely inside of the final ninja’s chest cavity when he tried to charge Naruto with his tanto while Sakura and Shikamaru blocked and deflected the projectiles.

As more of the Suna and Oto forces began to converge on them, easily outnumbering the friendly ninja nearby, Naruto slammed his hand down, and suddenly the four of them were on a level with Gaara’s unconscious body, where it was hanging from the bijuu’s head like an enormous zit.

Sakura did her best to hold on for dear life as the enormous toad beneath them (is he supposed to be yakuza or something?!?) duked it out in a high-flying and incredibly destructive duel with the sand demon.  This ultimately concluded with Sasuke taking a flying leap from the head of the toad, who was mid-grapple with the bijuu, and tackling Gaara off the monster’s head, apparently managing to attach the seal to Gaara, although Sakura could not follow their exact movements as the tumbled toward the ground, thanks to the explosive sandstorm the bijuu’s collapsing body formed around them.  As the pair fell, Sakura leapt off to catch Sasuke, while the giant toad vanished in an explosion of smoke.  By the time the smoke had cleared, and she had a chance to regroup with the others, helping her grumpy teammate walk on what was clearly a broken ankle, Gaara had already vanished, and there were none of the invaders to be seen in the area.

Shikamaru led the way back to the academy from there, with Naruto and Sakura supporting Sasuke to avoid any more damage to his ankle.  They noted that the Suna and Oto ninja had vacated the village, and that the three-headed snake had vanished as well.  On arrival, the four of them were swept up by a group of Jonin and Chunnin guarding the building, and Sasuke was taken aside for immediate medical care while they were ordered to take shelter and rest while they could.

Sakura’s last thought before her head hit the cot which they directed her to was of her worry for her parents.  They were at the stadium, after all, and that was where the fighting had begun.

Chapter Text

Her priority after the state of emergency was lifted was to check the three shelters hidden within the Hokage Monument where the civilians were evacuated to, wherein she immediately had to fight through crowds of people, ninja and civilian both, who were desperately seeking their families.  She pushed and shoved right alongside the rest of them until she reached a harried desk worker, a retired chunnin from his vest, and inquired after her parents’ status.  Thanks to the shouting, the man just pushed a note across, stating that they were never checked into the shelters.

Mom?  Dad?  Oh no.

The rest of that day was spent in an increasingly frantic search for her parents, especially after she discovered that her house had had the ‘honor’ of hosting the bijuu’s foot at one point and was now better described as a crater.  She spent hours frantically tearing through the wreckage of her childhood home, trying to make sure that neither of her parents had escaped the arena only to be crushed.  Finally, with shaking limbs, she collapsed back with a sob of relief that there were no bodies in the flattened remains.  At this point, she heard a huff beside her, and turned her head to see that Kakashi had appeared, Naruto in tow, wide-eyed and grief-stricken, and was looking over the ruins of her home with a critical eye.  He eventually squatted down next to her and calmly asked, “Parents?  Any siblings or other relatives?”

Sakura weakly hiccupped, not yet strong enough to push herself back up, “Just my p-parents.  The rest of the f-family lives in outside of the village.  Th-They weren’t at the shelters, and they were i-i-in the Arena!”

As the tears started again, Kakashi gently reached under her limp body and spoke with uncharacteristic firmness, “Well, there should only be one place left to look, then.  We’ll go with you to the hospital, and I’ll make sure that you have a place to stay regardless.”

Without another word, he led Naruto off across the village to the hospital, carrying her curled up against his chest.  When they arrived, Kakashi nonchalantly swept through administration, ignoring several attempts to stop him by harried medical staff as he made his way to the records room.  Once there, he placed her on a bench and said, “Naruto, please keep Sakura company for a moment.”

Naruto slumped next to her and whispered, “I hope they’re alright, Sakura.  I…I don’t want you to be an orphan too.”

Sakura leaned against him, exhausted, and answered shakily, “Thanks, Naruto.”

After a few minutes, Kakashi exited, and patted her on the head, his eye curled with his smile, “They’re alive, although your father’s been injured.  I’ll take you up to see them.”

At his words, Sakura jolted upright from the bench, unbalancing Naruto.  She stuttered an apology to him, and they followed Kakashi down several halls and up two flights of stairs, to a section of the hospital that looked like it had been under renovations when the attack happened, judging by the missing plaster on some of the walls and unshielded light bulbs above them.  Arriving at the correct room at last, Sakura burst in.  Her father was lying in the bed, and her mother was in a chair beside him, holding his hand.  She froze, her breath caught in her throat at the sight, because her father was missing almost his entire left leg, the bandaged stump elevated on a pillow on the bed.  Both looked exhausted and bruised, and her mother had bandages covering her forearms, although they appeared to be the sort used for light bleeding rather than more severe damage.  Kakashi pushed her forward lightly, and she stumbled over to her parents, wrapping her arms around their necks, and pulling them up into a hug, fresh tears running down her face.

Dad’s leg…

Distantly she realized a new fact of her life, as the family reunited, sobbing.  Her mother was a housewife, without training in a formal trade, and her father worked as a textile merchant, in the markets, and needed to be able to walk.  She on the other hand, was an able-bodied ninja.  She would need to provide for them, possibly for a long time, given her father’s injuries.  As the crying wound down, her mother let go of her, stepping past her and bowed low to Kakashi, saying simply, “Thank you for taking care of our daughter, Hatake-sama.  Without your teaching, she might not have survived.”

Kakashi scratched at the back of his head, laughing awkwardly, “Maa, maa, I’ve got good students.  I’m afraid I’ll need to steal her back in the morning, but until then, you three should stay here.  They’ll provide some cots.”

The rest of the evening was mostly spent with her parents holding her tight, as Sakura’s tilted world slowly regained equilibrium.  In the background, Inner quietly murmured words to share with their parents, and Sakura slowly relaxed as the exhaustion of the day caught up with her, driving her into sleep, her parents on either side of her.

***

The morning was bittersweet, as Sakura and her mother had to help her father to the bathroom and then back after he was refreshed and shaved.  The nurse who came to check on her parents took a moment to check Sakura over as well, and then explained to them that her dad would need at minimum a few months to learn how to maneuver on the simple civilian-grade prosthetic legs currently available, and that even then, it would be years before he had full mobility again.  In the short term, they would need a week of time to finish sealing the amputation site and insure a lack of infection.  When Sakura’s mother expressed confusion at the short recovery time, the nurse glanced at Sakura, saying, “You are direct relatives of an active-duty ninja, ma’am.  Her status affords you reduced medical costs, and access to medical ninjutsu in addition to non-chakric treatments.  As a result, once all the injured active-duty personnel have been treated, Haruno-san will be seen to by a medical ninja rather than a civilian doctor, which will greatly speed up his recovery time.”

Sakura flushed slightly as her parents looked her way in surprise, and she nodded, adding, “Yeah.  At the academy, Iruka-sensei mentioned that in addition to the free medical care that I get as a ninja, my direct family members get subsidized medical care.  I’m only a genin, but I’m still a ninja, so you guys shouldn’t have to worry about it too much.”

Thank the kami for the Second Hokage’s medical reforms and the civilian council.  Otherwise, we’d probably be left with nothing trying to pay for this.

After the nurse left, Sakura took a deep breath and addressed her parents, “Mom, dad, I went to the house when I was looking for you, and it’s…well, not there anymore.  Some little things might be salvageable from the rubble, but you probably shouldn’t assume anything survived.  The whole house was kind of…crushed?  Stepped on, honestly, but it’s just a crater now.”

Her mother looked devastated, but her father reached out and cupped Sakura’s face, “I’m so sorry, flower petal.  You must have been terrified when you couldn’t find us, only to find the house demolished.  Don’t worry, though.  I’ve got enough set aside to get us an apartment for a few months, and I’ll write my brothers to get some help until Mebuki and I can work out some sort of new job.”

Sakura shook her head, “I know you wanted me to keep my earnings for myself, but for now, I’ll be giving you guys my pay for a while.”

As they started to speak, Sakura spoke over them, grimacing, “I’m not using it for anything anyway, and I’ll only be making more while I’m helping to set the village to rights.  For once, let me help take care of you guys.”

Her father now looked devastated, while her mother had calmed down, in a reversal of their earlier reactions, and her mother responded in a calm voice, “Alright, Sakura.  I’m proud of you for being so grown up about this, but I want you to remember that we are not your responsibility, dear.  Even if Kizashi can’t work for a while, I can do the work in the family, so try not to worry, alright?”

Huh, mom’s pretty good at lying.  I’d have believed her too, if I didn’t know she’s asthmatic and has no work experience.  I doubt she’ll be able to support herself and dad without help.

As a knock sounded on the door, Sakura nonetheless smiled at her mother and said, “Either way, I’ll help to support the family budget.”

Kakashi opened the door and poked his head in, saying, “Paging for Sakura-chan!  I’ve got mountains of exciting paperwork for you to fill out!”

The whole team spent a day of filling out her after action reports from the invasion, as well as an appeal for a village subsidy to help support her parents due to the injury.  Kakashi uncharacteristically sat with her and the boys, walking them through the paperwork while filling out his own reams of paperwork.  He specifically handed out paperwork to her and Naruto to help with their housing situations, given that the damage to the village included her house and Naruto’s apartment.  That evening, the village was addressed by the council of elders, alongside a visibly grieving Jiraiya, regarding the current state of Konohagakure.  The primary speaker was a heavily bandaged old man, who Sakura recognized as Danzō-sama, one of the third Hokage’s old teammates from his youth.  The stone-faced man spoke somberly to the assembled crowd the day after the invasion, “The attack by Otogakure alongside their suborned Sunagakure allies, has cost us our Hokage.  Sarutobi-sama gave his life to cripple Orochimaru, the leader of the enemy, and in doing so, he saved countless lives.  He was my oldest friend, a brother in all but blood, and he was a father or grandfather to every single ninja in our village.  Once the Sarutobi clan grounds have been cleared, in three days, we will hold his funeral.  All are welcome and encouraged to attend.”

There was a pause at this point, and Sakura could hear many in the crowd openly weeping.  Danzō continued after allowing the crowd a moment to recover, “This is a time for unity and strength as we fight to overcome the aftermath of this vicious assault on our home and family.  We will all need to work as one in the days to come.  Many have lost their homes and livelihoods, their friends and family.  Each of you must help others bear the weight of their suffering, as together a forest may weather a storm that would topple any solitary tree.  A new Hokage will come into office within the next month, and in the meantime, we will rebuild.”

The crowd rallied somewhat following Danzō’s speech, but the air was still rich with misery and sorrow.  Sakura felt as if the ground had fallen away beneath her as she contemplated a Konohagakure without the Sandaime.  He had been a constant in her life, a steady rock at the core of village life that everyone knew and depended on.

The following days were hard on everyone in the village, as the invasion had wrought a cascade of tragedies upon the populace.  A whole housing district of buildings had been annihilated, along with less total damage to a variety of infrastructure, leaving village with something like four hundred buildings to rebuild, half the roads in need of reconstruction, and a vast amount of damaged plumbing and electrical lines in urgent need of repair.  Initially, Team 7 was assigned standard hauling and construction work, but after a few days, Kakashi called them together to reassign them, first by sending Sasuke to help with the Genin messenger corps.  Sasuke was downright mutinous at his dismissal to menial labor, glaring and stomping off without a word when Kakashi handed him his new mission scroll.  Naruto made to run after him, but Kakashi stopped him, saying, “I have a new assignment for you too, Naruto, and it’s urgent.  Jiraiya is going to collect our new Hokage, now that the council has finalized the new candidate, and you are going with him.  He should be waiting at the gates, so grab your gear and go.  Don’t worry about the huffiest Uchiha.  I’ll have a word with him.”

Naruto looked torn between his mission and going after Sasuke, but he turned to pick up his mission pack with a groan and took off for the front gates.  Kakashi then turned and gave Sakura one of his masked smiles as he addressed her, “Your experience and training in battlefield salvage and medical research have caught the eye of the ninja over in T&I, in a good way, for once!  Mitarashi Anko, the one in charge of autopsies over there, has requested an assistant, since we’ve collected a small mountain of corpses from the Otogakure and Sunagakure, and you were the one who got the job.  Come along, and I’ll introduce you!”

Sakura blanched at the thought of working in T&I, then turned a pale shade of green when Kakashi explained what she would be doing. …This is because he showed us how to loot corpses, isn’t it?  Damnit.

 The trek into the T&I building was subtly unnerving, as the interior of the building was almost disturbingly uniform, with every door and hallway entirely identical in appearance after the entrance.  Despite a complete lack of signs or markings of any kind, Kakashi casually navigated the slightly off-white hallways and slate-grey, windowless doors to a small office filled with neatly arranged scrolls and a somewhat risqué wall-scroll of a shirtless samurai.  At the desk, the woman who had proctored the second phase of the Chunnin Exams looked up as they entered, pinning Kakashi with a glare from a clearly exhausted face.  Anko growled at him, “What now, you menace?  I’ve already got eight hundred bodies to autopsy, so I doubt it’ll make a difference if you want to join the pile.”

Kakashi openly laughed at the threat, answering, “Now, now, Anko, is that any way to talk to your savior?  I come bearing an assistant!”

With that, he lifted Sakura by the collar of her shirt, and dropped her on Anko’s desk.  Sakura, for her part, flailed her arms at him, not expecting to be suddenly manhandled, and said, “Hey!  Stop that, sensei!”

Anko’s face drifted from annoyance to confusion, “Wait, what?  I need someone who’s had the rundown on field stripping procedures at minimum, not a genin!  Kakashi, she hasn’t been promoted to chunnin, and even if she had, your pink-haired menace would still need to be babied through the whole vomiting phase newbies go through with their first corpses!”

Kakashi was, if anything, smug in his reply, “Well, it’s a good thing that I got Sakura-chan certified in battlefield cleanup procedure months ago, then!  I even taught her the basic immolation jutsu.  She’s field stripped what, fifty corpses so far?”

Sakura hopped off Anko’s desk, crossed her arms, and rolled her eyes, “Fifty-three, Kakashi-sensei, but only two of them were ninja.”

Anko froze for a moment, staring between the two of them, then, said, “Wait, really?”

Kakashi gave her a wave with his omnipresent orange book, saying, “I’ll leave you two to get acquainted, then.  Anko, I’d like to have her returned intact when you’re done, and Sakura, no stealing any kekkei genkai without permission.  If you find one you want, make a note of it, and let me know after your stint here, okay?”

If it were possible, Anko looked even more confused as Kakashi slipped soundlessly out of the room, closing the door behind him.  Might as well make the best of it since we’re probably stuck here.  Sakura rubbed the back of her neck as she turned to Anko, and gave a bow, “Um, sorry about Kakashi-sensei, Anko-sempai.  I promise to work hard.”

Anko sighed, dragging a hand down her face as she rose, “Well, kid, if you’ve actually got basic training, then we might as well get to work.  Assuming you stick it out, we’ll be at this for around a month, and you’ll get a C-rank on your record, double the standard C-rank pay, and my personal thanks.  Come on.”

Resignedly, Anko led the way out of the office and down a couple of flights of stairs, into a much colder underground level.  Along the way, Sakura did the math in her head and realized why Kakashi had gotten her reassigned to this: she was the current breadwinner for her family.  Double the pay of a month-long C-rank would cover the cost of her family’s new apartment, as well as food costs for three or four months on its own, whereas the construction D-ranks would have barely made ends meet, doing two or three a day.  Shuffling along through the blank and uniform corridors, Sakura was surprised when they entered a room with actual décor and differently colored paint.  The room was tiled and painted with sky-blue paint, and contained a steel operating table, as well as a set of opaque bins lined up on racks on one wall.  Anko opened a door opposite of the one they entered from, releasing a blast of freezing cold air, to reveal row upon row of white-wrapped corpses piled up in the room.

Sakura followed her in, relaxing somewhat despite the morbidity of the scene.  Cold air is so much more comfortable nowadays.  I guess Hyoton is more adapted for cold weather.  Anko sighed and gestured at the small mountain of corpses, “Alright, pinky, these are what we have to get through.  They’re all tagged by assumed priority, so let’s grab one of the top priority ones and get to work.”

Together, they lifted and carried one of the wrapped bodies out to the operating room, and Anko showed her how to unwrap the body and arrange it on the table.  She then gestured to the corpse, saying, “Show me what Hatake taught you about field-stripping, and I’ll tell you what you got wrong.  Assuming you actually know what you’re doing, I’ll pull out another table and you can get started stripping corpses while I autopsy them.”

Sakura approached, looking over the body, and reflexively pulled her hair back in a ponytail to keep her hair out of the way.  Going through the initial motions Kakashi drilled into her, she took one of the scrolls beside the table and started writing out a basic description: tall, lanky build, short black hair, male-presenting, strangely protruding veins visible beneath skin, Otogakure headband, beige flak-jacket, grey pants, and 8 visible belt pouches.  Looking over her shoulder as she made more notes detailing the state of the body’s injuries, Anko commented, “Since this isn’t in the field, you can skip listing location, date, and all that garbage.”

Sakura nodded as she wrapped up the paperwork and began to test the various piece of clothing with a kunai, before Anko snorted and handed her a short wooden dowel to use instead, saying, “Again, not in the field, no reason to waste a weapon to trigger any personal traps.”

She continued to poke and prod at the Otogakure ninja’s gear, Sakura successfully located three different traps, burning, shredding, and shattering three of the dowels.  Moving on, Sakura began to pull the clothes off the man, stopping for a moment when she revealed the man’s bare chest, which had a clean hole straight through to the spinal column, bone exposed in a cleanly bored tunnel of charred flesh.  Sakura breathed slowly, turning away to write out a description of the lethal injury while she settled her stomach.  She glanced Anko’s way and, seeing an appraising look on her face, said, “I recognize the injury from when sensei used that jutsu before, on our first C-rank.”

Damn, Kakashi-sensei really doesn’t have any setting other than lethal, huh?

Anko frowned as Sakura turned back to the corpse, but she did not comment as Sakura continued her work.  The next few minutes were filled with Sakura gently peeling the rest of the reinforced clothing off him.  She found three more wounds, each the smooth slice of a thrown kunai barely missing a vital artery or tendon.  After stripping him, Sakura carefully noted the wounds, as well as the extent of the strangely bulging veins covering his limbs, back, neck, pectoral, and abdominal muscles.  She made a note in the steadily lengthening scroll that the veins most likely indicated either a unique taijutsu technique or kekkei genkai having to do with blood, and wrote a recommendation to biopsy the heart, kidneys, and lungs.

Finally, she stepped away from the body and swiftly checked over each article of clothing again, searching for hidden pockets or seals.  She only found two hidden pockets, one containing a set of unlabeled vials filled with a pearlescent green fluid and the other holding a packet of explosive notes.  These she set aside, at which point Anko interrupted, knocking her hands away from the three small glass containers and saying, “Since you’re still a genin, just ask if you find any unidentified liquids, powders, or pastes.  Don’t touch any bottle like these again, got it?”

Sakura nodded, pulling back as she wrapped up her notes and held out the scroll to Anko, saying, “I think that’s everything, sempai.  Is it okay to ask what was in the vials?”

Anko shrugged as she pulled over a bin of surgical instruments, answering, “That was a distillation of Northwestern Chakra Viper venom.  It’s a nasty contact poison that causes permanent nerve damage.  You did a good job, kid.  Since I’ll need to get the other operating table later, you might as well spend the autopsy time learning something.  Come over here and you can see if your guess was right, and this is a kekkei genkai.”

Gross, but I guess we’re getting paid for it…

Sakura steeled herself as she turned back to the body, and watched as Anko gave the man a once-over, turning him over a couple of times to check his whole body, taking quick measurements of the length of his height and limbs, as well as producing a pair of detailed sketches of him from the front and back.  Anko gestured to the sketches, saying, “The only good thing I got out of those godawful kunoichi classes at the academy.  We sketch them or photograph them if nobody who can sketch is on hand.  You any good at it?  We need to be able to check them against bounty listings.”

Sakura shook her head in answer, “My drawings were always really bad.  I was better at ikebana and the whole political puzzles they gave us.  Honestly, I wish they’d given us something more useful to learn now that I’ve been in the field.  I mean, flower-arranging, makeup, and calligraphy are useless on missions with Kakashi-sensei.”

Anko pulled a face, then grinned, slapping Sakura on the back with surprising force, “Sorry for the cold shoulder, before, but I kinda assumed you’d be a little shit like Kakashi.  You’re alright, kouhai!” As Anko began slicing open the chest with a scalpel, she continued, “I saw your senbon work in the exams, by the way.  It was pretty great for someone your age, though you lean in a bit too much.  If you ever want some advice, let me know.  I’m ex-Anbu, and I’m a poison specialist, so I can give you some good tips on senbon and stealth.”

Oh kami, that’s disgusting.  Are lungs supposed to be the color?

Sakura swallowed her bile as Anko casually sliced the skin and abdominal muscle off the man’s torso, leaving the organs all visible beneath, and tried to focus on replying, “Um, th-that would be…nice, sempai,” squeaking slightly, she commented, “Is he supposed to have three kidneys?”

Anko chuckled as she leant closer to the organs, using tongs to lift the out of place kidney as she answered, “Huh, looks like it was surgically grafted in, and the liver was shrunk somehow.  His lungs also have some old scarring around these really shiny bits, so it looks like some sort of artificial kekkei genkai.  Let’s see about that heart, eh?”

Pushing the lung aside, Anko removed the heart with some deft, chakra assisted slices, saying, “Hm…two extra chambers, clearly grafted on.  I’ll have to pass this one on the nerds over in R&D.  Good call on the organs that needed checking, kouhai.”

Nope.  Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.  That’s half a heart sewn onto another heart!

Sakura, no longer able to restrain her stomach, turned to the trashcan at the side of the room, and vomited.  She was surprised to feel Anko’s hand hesitantly patting her back, as the older ninja frantically mumbled, “Sorry, sorry!  I probably rushed you.  I don’t usually have an assistant, and you’re a genin.  I’m so sorry, kid, I shouldn’t have made you watch without giving you a break or something.  Fuck!  I suck with kids…”

Sakura shook her head and accepted a small towel from Anko to wipe her mouth before replying, “No, it’s not your fault, sempai…I’m just not used to seeing people’s organs like that yet.  I can handle this, I swear.”

Anko sighed as she went back over and closed up the body, speaking over her shoulder, “Yeah, you can, but you’re not here to do the autopsies, just to strip the bodies.  How about you take a few minutes to recover, then we can call it a day for today.  I’ll treat you to lunch.  Tomorrow I’ll have a screen up, so you don’t have to watch unless you want to, okay, kouhai?”

Smiling shakily, Sakura replied, “Thanks, sempai.”

***

On the outer edges of the village, as Anko was sitting down to get some dango with her new, pink-haired subordinate, genin were busily hauling fresh topsoil and hay out to the fields near the walls, helping with the re-planting effort for the damaged orchards.  Kiba and Hinata were both occupied with spreading the hay while Shino was retrieving more topsoil from the edge of the field.  In the midst of it, as Hinata sighed for probably the hundredth time in the last few days, Kiba just stopped working and walked over to her, poking her in the bicep, “Wouldja quit sighing?  What’s on yer mind?”

Hinata blushed as Akamaru brushed up against one of her legs, and stuttered out, “S-s-sorry, Kiba-kun!  I j-just…well, I n-noticed that N-N-Naruto-kun and Sasuke-san have been g-getting dinner t-together a lot lately…”

Kiba growled, and said, “The hell does that matter?  So they’re gay for each other, so what?”

Hinata’s blush intensified, and she sighed again before catching herself and answering miserably, “I always hoped that N-Naruto-kun would l-like me, I suppose.”

Kiba laughed, “Seriously?  Why?  You’re way too pretty for him!  I mean, honestly, he was asking Sakura on dates, so he obviously has no taste!”

Hinata slapped his arm, although not particularly hard, “Sakura-san isn’t ugly, Kiba-kun!  And she’s become much more mature since we graduated…Anyway, I’m not pretty, I’m a disgrace to my clan.  I’m clumsy.”

As Kiba stepped toward her, growling, he said, “You’re the prettiest, Hinata, and your clan is full of idiots to disagree.”

Akamaru butted him in the shin, toppling him forward on top of her.  With a squeak, she ended up beneath him on the hay, with his hands and knees on either side of her.  Both of them turned beet red while Akamaru yipped laughter at them, only for Kiba to leap away from her when they heard Shino’s cool voice float over them, “This most inappropriate.  Why?  Because you are teammates.”

Chapter Text

The two weeks after Kakashi literally dropped her on Anko’s desk were busy enough to distract Sakura from both her initial nausea whenever she looked in on Anko mid-autopsy as well as from the discomforting realization that dead bodies, exposed organs, and biohazardous waste in general were not bothering her as much as they used to.  During the first few days, Sakura threw up occasionally when she ended up seeing the especially messy autopsies that resulted from some of the more…creative modifications Orochimaru had inflicted on his forces.  By the end of the first week, they had pushed through almost a quarter of Anko’s backlog, and Sakura was actively watching Anko’s autopsies whenever she was between corpses to strip and had started to take her own notes on the more unusual kekkei genkai that crossed the operating table.  By the end of the second week, when the announcement went out that the new Hokage would be giving a speech, Sakura had finished stripping all the corpses and had begun actively assisting Anko in her autopsies, mostly by passing her instruments and holding incisions open for her.  Sakura did her best not to contemplate her newfound interest in horrifically mutilated bodies, and Anko seemed to be perfectly happy to avoid discussing it, instead focusing on teaching her the ins and outs of simple surgical procedure and post-mortem analysis.

The strangest part of the time leading up to Naruto’s arrival with the new Hokage was Sakura’s relationship with Anko.  At first, Anko was, for lack of a better word, awkward around her.  Her first week was spent slowly becoming more comfortable talking to Sakura until she finally sat the Genin down during a lunch break before their first weekend break.  Anko fidgeted with a stick that previous held a trio of dango before sighing and tapping the table with it, looking at Sakura with a serious expression, “I’m gonna level with you, kouhai.  I pulled your personnel file after I took you on, and since I’m a Tokubetsu Jonin, I got the unredacted version.  You’re a Genin, though possibly only until we’ve got a Hokage to promote you, so you probably haven’t had the Jonin career tracks explained to you, but I think you deserve to know how it works, given what you’re slated for, kid.”

Sakura scrunched her face up in confusion as she nibbled on the popsicle that she had just made for herself from her drink.  Jonin career tracks?  I thought the point of being a Jonin was that you could do basically anything.  Genin are supposed to do simple work and spend the majority of their time training while Chunin specialize in advanced fields and learn leadership skills.  Jonin are supposed to be ninja who can be given any task and excel, through skills so advanced that they no longer need to specialize.  She asked Anko directly, “Do you mean the specializations that Chunin get assigned?”

Anko dragged a hand over her face and shook her head, “Nah, though those’re part of it.  So, what we don’t usually tell Genin who are assigned to a Jonin sensei at first is that you kids are being assessed for what you’re good at.  Kakashi’s job was half to teach you, half to determine how you could best serve the village long-term.  The academy does a little bit of this, but it’s more of a way to divide up the Genin who have the potential to get to Jonin rank and the Genin that will most likely never make it past Chunin, if they even get that far.  So, once your sensei has worked out what you’re good at, he puts forward recommendations for your Jonin career track.  With me so far, kouhai?”

Sakura nodded hesitantly, slightly wary of where this was going.  Wait a sec, are you telling us that Kakashi decides what we’re going to be doing for the rest of our lives?!?  Oh kami, he keeps making us deal with corpses!

Anko grimaced as she continued, “I know, I know, Kakashi determining your future probably doesn’t sound great, but my sensei was fucking Orochimaru, so trust me when I say it could be much, much worse.”

Sakura blanched, coughing slightly as she gagged on a piece of her popsicle, “Gak-Oh god.  That must have been terrible, sempai!”

Anko shrugged, “He’s why I’m still a Tokubetsu Jonin, rather than a full Jonin, really.  That pasty-faced pervert’s ruined a lot of people’s lives over the years.  Anyway, I’m trying to get at what the Sandaime decided on for your track, Sakura.  Your career track determines the sort of missions you get assigned, the people you work with, and the teachers who take you in.  In your file, Kakashi recommended you for retrieval work with us here in T&I, the combat-medic program, or as a kekkei genkai specialist with R&D.  For reference, we’d be happy to have you here, and you’ve got the chakra control and mindset to be a great combat medic, so I can see both of those.  Regardless, Sarutobi-sama apparently decided to stick you on the kekkei genkai specialist track.”

Sakura blinked a couple times, thinking it over before answering with relief, “Well, that kind of makes sense, I guess.  I was scared I was slated for something terrible for a moment there, sempai!  I really enjoy the Hyoton and Naruto’s kekkei genkai, so I’d be pretty okay with steal-I mean, studying kekkei genkai.”

Anko’s face became a blank mask for a moment before she visibly drew a breath to compose herself.  She then looked Sakura squarely in the eye and spoke almost tonelessly, “Kid, the list of previous kekkei genkai specialists who reached Jonin is as follows, going backwards: Kakashi, Orochimaru, Shimura Danzō, the Nidaime, and Uzumaki Mito.  Kakashi is medically compromised by his sharingan and is still the most feared active-duty combat Jonin we have.  You’ve met Orochimaru, so you already know how terribly he turned out.  Shimura was forcibly retired by Sarutobi-sama without any explanation.  The Nidaime is still infamous the world over for his attempt to create an exploding suicide zombie army.  Uzumaki Mito is responsible for the existence of jinchuriki, and she’s widely thought to be the sanest one.”

Sakura was staring at Anko, horrified.  Well, that seems bad.

Anko slumped in her chair, absently flicking her stick into a trashcan, and went on, “I just…I think you deserve to know what you’re getting into, Sakura.  You seem like a nice kid, and you should try to hold onto that, I guess?  Shit, I don’t know how to be polite about this.  Just, when you reach the point where you’re contemplating making your own zombie army or experimenting on children or just, I dunno, playing god, take a step back and ask a normal person’s opinion and listen if they tell you to stop, okay?  Don’t become the next Orochimaru, kouhai, for your sake and everyone else’s.”

What the hell?  We wouldn’t do anything like that!  Sakura was wide-eyed and stuttering when she answered, “Of c-course, sempai!  I-I-I would never do that…”

Anko gave her a searching look before her hand darted out and ruffled Sakura’s hair, as she spoke in a wistful tone, “Sorry, kouhai, but I’m pretty sure they all would have said that too, once.  Just remember this when you’re grown up and conquering the world.”

That conversation marked a shift from the more withdrawn, awkward Anko of their first week together to the Anko that gleefully dove into mentoring Sakura.  Their lunch breaks become impromptu senbon-throwing lessons or quick tutorials on simple utility ninjutsu for day-to-day use.  Anko proved to be a font of wisdom on the problems kunoichi ran into in the field that shinobi never had to deal with.  She taught Sakura tricks to help manage puberty and its attendant woes over the bodies they were working on, and by the time the new Hokage was due to make her announcement, Sakura had come around to viewing Anko as an amazing sempai.

***

Sakura’s evenings during this period were taken up by Ino as they felt out their rekindled friendship.  Both kunoichi had changed a lot since they split over Sasuke, but Ino was just as clever and gossipy as she used to be.  Their dynamic had changed, however, as Sakura found herself teaching Ino how to throw senbon and developing her very own Hyoton-based ice-cream-no-jutsu at Ino’s urging.  Ino, meanwhile, spent most of their nights catching Sakura up on the various terrible (hilarious, I think you mean) decisions that their former classmates were making.  Apparently, Kiba was doing his level best to romance Hinata despite being taught about dating by nis mother’s companion nin-dog.  Kiba had apparently offered Hinata’s father, the head of the Hyuga clan a literal dead elk in a deeply misunderstood attempt to declare his intentions.  Ino said that there was a betting pool among the Ino-Shika-Cho alliance going on how long it would take for the Hyuga clan, and Hinata in particular, to understand that Kiba was trying to ask her on a date.

Shino was purportedly engaged in a weird passive-aggressive pen pal correspondence with the Sunagakure puppeteer who he had gotten disqualified against in the exams.  Ino reported that they had been sending letters literally soaked in minor poisons to each other, mostly with unpleasant but nonlethal side-effects, and both girls were utterly baffled as to why they kept doing it.

Sakura and Ino found themselves chagrinned when they finally concluded that Sasuke and Naruto might be attracted to each other based on their shared observations, however.  The realization that they had been fighting for years over a boy who was gay was more than a little embarrassing for both girls, although Ino broke the tension by joking that they really should have realized sooner, given his clear disinterest in any of his fangirls.

Ino was a breath of fresh air after Sakura’s growing sense of isolation from Naruto and Sasuke on their team, given that she had not seen either of them since Naruto departed.  Sakura could confide in Ino about her work with Anko and the fear that their conversation about Sakura’s career track had inspired.  Unlike Anko, Ino just laughed and hugged Sakura, saying, “Don’t be stupid, Sakura!  Even when we were fighting, I knew you’d never go off the deep end like that.  I’m more worried about your crimes against my waistline now that you can make ice cream with eight hand signs!”

Sakura’s parents were, meanwhile, delighted to see Sakura talking to Ino again, and encouraged Sakura to join her for dinner whenever possible.  Her mother, Mebuki, in particular, had been expressing concern with Sakura’s lack of friends her age since the two started fighting three years ago.  Admittedly, part of their interest might have been that her parents had very little time for Sakura while they scrambled to get their finances and home back in order.  Their house was due to be rebuilt within a month, and Kizashi was busy teaching Mebuki what she needed to know to help him run his textile trading business.  Sakura was internally doubtful of their prospects but tried to be supportive when she could.  For now, she was helping to cover the family’s living expenses, and she was certain that it was going to stay that way for a few months at least, as things stood.

***

The new Hokage addressed the village from in front of the hospital, where most Konoha ninja had gathered along with about a third of the civilian population.  Ino was with Shikamaru, Choji, and their sensei, while Sakura found herself sandwiched between a somehow even more sullen Sasuke and an even more exuberant Naruto.  Kakashi, who she had not seen since leaving her with Anko, had an elbow on both boys’ heads, to keep Sasuke from leaving and to keep Naruto from jumping around.  Sakura felt deeply embarrassed by her teammates as Sasuke, who had his arm in a sling for some reason, grouched about this being a waste of time while Naruto kept shouting that the new Hokage was a grandma.  Kakashi, on the other hand, seemed to be reveling in the uncomfortable side-eyeing that their team was getting from the rest of the crowd, given the snickering escaping from behind his little orange book.

Beneath the Hokage’s hat, draped in formal robes, stood Senju Tsunade, the most famous woman who was discussed in the academy.  Sakura was personally a little shocked at how young she appeared, given that she had to be at least sixty.  Then again Tsunade’s chakra control was the supposed key to her skill both as a medic and a ninja in general, right?  Genjutsu is what everyone pointed us at after they realized how fine our control is.  How much do you wanna bet that she looks nowhere near that way under whatever illusion she’s cloaked in?

Before Sakura could dive into the mechanics, let alone the ethics, of wearing a disguising genjutsu all the time, Tsunade began speaking, stentorian and brusque, “I’m not going to sell you that I’m the first choice for Hokage.  Sarutobi-sensei had me down as a worst-case option, which is where we find ourselves.  I will be Hokage only until this village has produced someone else worthy of the title.  I am not going to baby you.  I am not going to sugarcoat our situation.  Konohagakure has not been as unstable as it currently is since the last war, and it will take time to fix that.  The civilian and ninja councils will have more of a say in day-to-day operations in the coming months while I work to repair what that snaky asshole did to our home.”

The blonde woman gestured in the direction of the housing district which was still under construction after acting as the Ichibi’s landing pad, and she continued in a low angry tone, “The greatest damage done by the invaders is not something we can casually reconstruct.  The people they killed and crippled are not coming back, and we have lost a full eleven percent of our total population, and, vitally to our survival as a hidden village, most of those were ninja.  Every single able-bodied ninja will be needed active and in the field as much as possible for the next year and a half, at minimum.”

A murmur went up from the Chunin and some of the Genin in the crowd, but Sakura noted that the Jonin were silent and unsurprised for the most part.  It’s probably not a secret in the upper ranks, then.

The remainder of the speech was more directed at the civilian populace, laying out Tsunade’s agenda with regards to the economy and infrastructure, but Sakura was distracted by Kakashi tapping her on the shoulder.  She distantly noted that Tsunade was promising monetary assistance to those civilians whose injuries impacted their business, which was promising for her family, as Kakashi led their team out of the crowd and down a nearby alley.  He gestured to each of them, speaking in what was, for Kakashi, a serious tone, “So, our team is going to be changing heavily soon.  I’m giving you three a heads-up mostly so you can get your inevitable tears of sorrow and agony out of your system, but I will not have a lot of time to teach you for the next month and a half.  Tsunade-sama’s dragging in every Jonin to do high-level missions.  Sasuke-kun, you are still on medical leave after your little tiff with your darling brother and you will be for a while.  Naruto-kun, Jiraiya wants to talk to you about a training trip of some sort.  And you, Sakura-chan, are probably sticking with your current assignment until Anko’s done with you, but Tsunade needs you in her office before your shift tomorrow, so make sure not to be late!”

The entire team snorted when Kakashi told her not to be late, and then dispersed as Kakashi vanished in a shunshin.  Sakura looked questioningly after Sasuke as he trudged back toward the hospital but followed Naruto.  She stepped up next to him, asking, “So, I’ve been stuck working on the, um, cleanup after the battle pretty much constantly for the last couple of weeks.  What was going to get the new Tsunade-sama like?”

Naruto grinned at the question and launched into what would best be described as an epic, for all that it only covered the last couple of weeks.  Naruto’s tale ran through a journey to Tanzaku-gai, one of the bigger resort towns in Fire country, while he learned a new jutsu from Jiraiya, which he waxed poetic about at increasing volume.  By the time they were at Ichiraku’s, where Naruto paused only to order ramen, he had doubled back to explain that Sasuke’s brother had attacked him before Sasuke, then Jiraiya intervened.  Sakura was incredulous by the time he arrived at dueling Orochimaru’s apprentice to defend the Hokage’s apprentice, and she had begun to internally debate how much of his story was a lie or an exaggeration by the time he finished.  Is…is he serious?  There’s no way all of that is true…Then again, Naruto’s a terrible liar most of the time.  But if he is mostly telling the truth, then…

“Naruto, is Tsunade-sama seriously a drunk gambler?” Sakura asked while praying that he would tell her that he was just joking.

Naruto blinked, shrugged, and said, “Well, yeah.  She was pretty much never sober s’far as I could tell, and we literally found her in a Yakuza gambling den.  Why?”

Sakura’s mouth worked for a few moments before dropping her head onto the counter beside her empty bowl.  She grumbled, “Why do all of the high-level ninja suck?  Kakashi-sensei’s lazy, Jiraiya-san’s horny, Orochimaru’s just gross, and now Tsunade-sama’s a drunk?  Why?!?”

Naruto looked stunned for a moment before he started laughing, and, despite herself, Sakura found herself smiling into the countertop.  She had missed hearing him laugh.

Chapter Text

The next morning dawned as Sakura walked up the stairs toward the Hokage’s office, nervous as to how the meeting was going to go.  As she entered, she passed Shikamaru on his way out.  He nodded to her, but she barely registered it past the green flak jacket wrapped around his torso.  She paused, briefly ignoring her worries, and smiled, saying, “Congratulations, Shikamaru!”

He sighed and shrugged, “Yeah, apparently I was slated for promotion before the final round even began.  I just wish Hokage-sama could’ve called me at another time than the crack of dawn.  Good luck, Sakura, she seemed annoyed about something.”

Of course, Tsunade-sama had to be pissed when it was our turn.  She’s probably going to hate us!  Oh kami, what if it’s us she’s annoyed with?!?  Sakura blinked a couple times, vaguely bemused at the panic in her mind as she answered, “Thanks for the warning, Shikamaru-san.  I’ll be sure to be polite.”

They passed each other as she approached the door to the office, and she went directly in when the receptionist waved her on before her inner dialogue could become even more frantic.  Within the office, Tsunade was seated at the Sandaime’s old desk, glaring to the side at an old, bandaged man staring out the window beside her.  The Hokage cut herself off as Sakura entered, “That’s not the point-“

Sakura stood at attention as Tsunade focused her formidable gaze on her, and the man glanced over his shoulder, then turned to face her.  As he turned, Sakura recognized him as Shimura Danzō, and he gave her a stern glance from beside the Hokage before turning back to the Hokage and giving a slight bow before saying, “I understand your frustration, Tsunade-kun, and I share it to an extent.  Regardless, the clan heads have spoken, and you will need their unyielding support for quite a while.  Let me know if you need any help in this regard, and I will do what I can.  My personal opinions will not interfere with our working relationship, and you are my Hokage, first and foremost.”

He strode past Sakura and out the door, pausing for a moment beside her to speak softly, “Your exemplary work brings honor to Konohagakure, Haruno-san.”

…Well, that was weird.  I mean, nice of him, but, just…what?

As the door shut behind Sakura, Tsunade was pinching the bridge of her nose, muttering something under her breath, and Sakura prepared herself for a lecture of some kind.  Tsunade took a few deep breaths before resuming a more professional position and looking Sakura in the eye, “Haruno, you, along with several others in your year-group, are qualified for promotion to Chunin.  In your case, your sensei has petitioned to have you as a formal apprentice, so your choices are between immediate advancement or spending the next year or three as a Genin apprentice.  For reference, your apprenticeship would mean both much more in-depth instruction and assisting Hatake in B- and A-rank missions rather than the usual C- and D-ranks that Genin are assigned.  Do you have any questions, kid?”

Sakura blinked a few times before saying, “Um, does this have to do with me being on the kekkei genkai thef-I mean, retrieval track?”

Tsunade coughed, losing her serious demeanor, then burst out laughing, “Ha!  And here I was, worried about how to inform you of your specialization.  Yeah, Haruno, Hatake-chan wants to take you in long-term and give you specialized instruction rather than let you be passed around between R&D, T&I, and the hospital while you get the training you’ll need going forward.  I assume you’re fine with stealing kekkei genkai for the village?  If you want out, I’ll happily move you somewhere else.  You more than earned some consideration during the invasion, and I think you’d make a stellar medic if you wanted.”

Woah, she’s giving us a say?  That’s…Has any adult ever done that?  Sakura shook her head rapidly as she answered, “No, I mean, uh, yes, Hokage-sama!  I’m happy to work on kekkei genkai.  What would specialized instruction mean, with Kakashi-sensei?  Ever since our first C-rank, he’s been spending a lot of our training time running our team into the ground, and it’s all been pretty specialized to our skillsets already.”

Tsunade’s expression twitched into smile momentarily, and she leant back and propped her head against her fist as she responded, “Ah, I see he never told you.  I assumed, since you are by far his preferred student out of your team, that he had told you, but I guess I can tell you.  The training schedule he had your team on leading up to the exams was a toned-down preparation regime for wartime Anbu combat operatives.  I believe you had the, let me check…” As Sakura stared at her, open-mouthed, Tsunade shuffled through a folder with Sakura’s name on it, then continued, “…Ah, here it is!  Yeah, you were given the same senbon drills and lectures as we require for Anbu assassins, with the constant dodging and awareness drills we require of all ranged-combat specialized Anbu.  The kekkei genkai work was focused primarily on familiarization followed with the Hyoton ninjutsu that were flagged as assassination-grade.  Basically, everything Hatake-chan himself had to go through as training initially, aside from his kekkei genkai being different and his training being focused on the tanto rather than senbon.”

Sakura slumped slightly in place, as the downright vicious training that Kakashi had thrown at them was suddenly making a lot of sense.  Her mind also jumped to the sheer glee he had displaying when throwing senbon at her all day, every day…That scarecrow kept saying that it was normal training!  That rat-bastard!  Anbu are supposed to have a minimum of three years’ field experience, according to the recruitment pamphlets!

Tsunade grinned at her as Sakura’s face twisted with suppressed rage, “Ha!  He told you it was normal, didn’t he?  Pfft, oh kami, that’s hilarious.  Anyway, you would be moving to a training plan that’s more about kekkei genkai retrieval than straight combat.  I’m sure he’ll still teach you combat jutsu, but he would be spending a lot more time teaching you all the supplementary skills involved, such as the tracking and research skills, as well as the weird medical techniques that kekkei genkai work revolves around.  Right now, you’ve got a strong base for your development, good combat skills for your age and an excellent mind for experimentation, and Kakashi’s job would be to focus your growth to make you as good at your focus as humanly possible, rather than just a good ninja.  You would also be getting basically all his attention, rather than a third.  Going directly to Chunin would mean more broad training with a wider variety of instructors, which would probably make you a better ninja overall, but a much worse specialist in kekkei genkai.  So, what do you say, kid?”

Sakura frowned, thinking it over as her annoyance with Kakashi faded.  She wanted to be an amazing ninja, but…We’ve never had as much fun with anything as we had with working out Naruto’s kekkei genkai.  I think we should go with Kakashi.  He’s gross, but he’s also been really good for us both, you know…Overall, an apprenticeship would also mean getting more personal attention than otherwise, which, if she were honest with herself, she has always wanted more of.  She looked up at her Hokage and nodded decisively, stating, “I would like to be Kakashi-sensei’s apprentice, Tsunade-sama.”

Tsunade waved her forward and proffered a scroll, saying, “Read the apprenticeship contract, sign it unless you change your mind, then pass it off to Hatake-chan.  He’ll file it with administration, and your formal apprenticeship will begin at that point.  Your work with Anko will continue until you two get through the autopsy backlog, but after that, you will be assigned to your new shishō for the rest of your apprenticeship.  I suppose it goes without saying, but to be clear, Team 7 is being dissolved, as both you and Naruto-kun will be entering long-term apprenticeships.  You’re dismissed, Haruno.”

Sakura accepted the scroll and bowed low to Tsunade, and responded, “Thank you, Hokage-sama.”

Turning to leave, she wasn’t sure how she felt that her team was no more.

***

Her shift at T&I began with Anko giving her a hug and saying, “Congrats, kouhai!  I heard you qualified for Chunin!”

Sakura blushed and grinned, saying, “Thanks, sempai!  I accepted an apprenticeship with Kakashi-sensei, though, so I’ll still be a Genin for a while.”

Anko grinned back, as they walked down to the morgue, “Eh, Genin apprentices might as well be Chunin, and you’ll get fast-tracked to Tokubetsu Jonin that way.  Have fun, and don’t take Kakashi too seriously, okay?”

Sakura giggled, “I doubt I ever could, sempai.  He’s kind of the opposite of the stereotypical ‘serious shishō’, you know?”

Anko cackled as they entered and began work on the substantially smaller backlog of corpses awaiting them.  The rest of their shift was relatively pleasant, as Anko showed her a variation on the diagnostic mystic palm jutsu for detecting toxins within a corpse and walked her through using it on a body as part of the eight autopsies they burned through.  She signed the contract after reading it over at lunch, and Anko treated her to some dango to celebrate.

After work, Sakura found Kakashi leaning against the side of the building beside the entrance, book in hand as usual.  Sakura looked up at him as she exited, then took a deep breath before hurling the apprenticeship contract scroll at his head as hard as she could.  To both her surprise, he failed to dodge the flying scroll for once and it bounced off his temple, sending him sprawling.  Sakura was caught in shock for a moment as Kakashi groaned and twitched theatrically on the ground in front of the T&I building, before stomping on the ground, creating an incidental patch of ice, and shouting at him, “You are such a liar, Kakashi-sensei!  Those were Anbu drills!”

Kakashi stopped groaning, sighed, and was abruptly standing again, without a visible transition from his prone state.  He shrugged as he unrolled the scroll, sardonically commenting, “Saa, Sakura, you really shouldn’t take everything so literally.  I told you they were the standard senbon drills, but I never told you who’s standard.  Why, I’d almost think you don’t try to look for deeper meaning in everything I say and do, but you’d never forget to look underneath the underneath, right?”

Sakura very carefully restrained her scream of annoyance and took a steadying breath as Kakashi closed the scroll and slipped it into one of his vest pouches.  He looked at her side-on and continued in a mildly less insulting tone, “Well, you’re my apprentice now, so I suppose we’ll have plenty of time to work on that.  You’ll have a new training schedule once you finish working with Anko, and I’ll start taking you with me on some missions as well.  Team 7 is having a final meeting tonight at Yakiniku Q, so you can see Naruto off before he leaves the village with Jiraiya and exchange details with Sasuke as to his new assignment.”

Sakura realized Tsunade had not mentioned Sasuke when she said that their team was being dissolved and asked, “What’s Sasuke’s new assignment?  Did someone offer him an apprenticeship as well?”

Kakashi’s expression became mildly pinched, and he said, “Ah, well, Sasuke has been reassigned to an in-village position until he can prove to the satisfaction of some of the Hokage’s advisors that he has control over the seal Orochimaru inflicted on him.  I’m sure he’ll be…delighted.”

An in-village position?  But those are all non-combat roles…He’s going to be furious!  Sakura blanched at that prospect, and said, “Is that a good idea, sens-er, shishō?  Sasuke is pretty…driven when it comes to his advancement.”

Kakashi huffed a laugh under his breath as he turned and began to walk down the street, but only said, “I’m sure that the clan heads know what they’re doing.”

Wait, just the clan heads?  Huh…Sakura nodded slowly, following him, “Right, I’m sure that Sasuke’s seal is all that they’re worried about.  So, um, what will I be doing as your apprentice, exactly?  I know I’ll be accompanying you on missions…”

Kakashi nodded and answered in a fairly business-like manner, performing a few swift hand-signs to throw a sound-modifying genjutsu over them as he spoke, “Right, I suppose you wouldn’t know the details, being from a civilian family.  Simply put, Genin apprenticeships function in three phases: training, fieldwork, and research.  Initially, I will be training you up to my standards for an assistant in the field.  That will mean mostly education in advanced tracking, surgical techniques, elemental affinity training, and basic combat and stealth proficiency.  It should take about six months, during which we’ll be doing occasional C- and B-rank tracking and surveillance missions in between intensive training sessions.”

He glanced her way as they paused at an intersection to allow a cart to pass, and said, “You can expect some hospital work during this time, as well as some other outside teachers I’ll pull in to help out.  Tenzō, for instance, has already offered to help with your stealth training, considering his extreme skill in that area, and Tsunade has agreed to include you in several of her seminars on medical ninjutsu for the trainee medics.”

Sakura asked, “So I’ll be training almost constantly for half a year?  Will it be like the lead up to the exams?”

Kakashi laughed as they began walking again, giving her a smirk visible through his mask, “Oh, no.  The pre-exam stuff was just a low-key boot-camp to make sure you could survive low-grade Chunin combat, and I had to split your time between training and building the team’s mission count.  No more kid-gloves after this.”

Sakura paled at that statement.  K-Kid-gloves? But it was exhausting!  Way, way harder than any other training in our lives!  As Sakura began opened her mouth to question that, Kakashi spoke over her, his eye curved in a vaguely sadistic smile, “After you’ve completed the training phase, we will begin taking back-to-back B- and A-rank tracking, assassination, and capture missions, with and without other teams, to give you a wide breadth of experience combatting and retrieving kekkei genkai in the field.  All of the missions we take will target someone with a known kekkei genkai where possible, and you will be tasked with stealing information on it whenever you can.”

Kakashi laughed as Sakura tripped over her feet in shock, and said, “Back-to-back B- and A-ranks!?”

Kakashi’s nonchalant shrug was chilling in conjunction with his answer, “Well, of course, that’s my normal mission load, when I don’t have Team 7 tagging along.”

What!?  Oh kami!  We’re going to actually die!  Sakura couldn’t help but agree with that sentiment, and stuttered out, “B-But I’m not a Jonin!  I’m nowhere near good enough to handle that!”

Kakashi’s look was amused, “Of course not.  That’s what the training will take care of, Sakura!  Anyway, the fieldwork phase of the apprenticeship can take anywhere from a couple months to several years, depending on your progress and proficiency in the field.  We’ll still be doing training during that time, but it will focus more on refining your technique than developing new skills.  The final phase is where I let you loose on a completely unknown kekkei genkai, not something already researched like Naruto’s, and we run any missions you need to develop an acquisition method for it.  Once you’ve succeeded, the apprenticeship will end, and I’ll arrange for you to be promoted to Chunin, then, assuming you did well, directly on to Tokubetsu Jonin.”

Sakura paused, then asked, “Wait, are there even any unknown kekkei genkai?  Haven’t they been around basically forever?”

Kakashi turned to look almost speculatively at Sakura, and answered, “Ah, that’s actually a common mistake people make.  New kekkei genkai crop up all the time among young ninja, but they are only rarely identified and even more rarely developed to a useful state.  The sharingan or the unique elemental releases are only well known because they are so easy to identify and develop.  Naruto’s kekkei genkai is a solid example of a new kekkei genkai, although the reasons behind it are more unique than most.  Most kekkei genkai have the potential to change with the introduction of powerful chakra, as occurred in his case, so even established kekkei genkai occasionally produce offshoots, similarly to the sharingan purportedly mutating from the byakugan several centuries ago.”

Sakura blinked, “Oh!  So, there are a lot of kekkei genkai out there after all?  Why don’t they check to see if we have one in the Academy, then?”

Kakashi nodded as he halted in front of the Yakiniku Q, Team 10’s preferred meeting place, and said, “That, Sakura, is going to be something you will be doing as part of your hospital work.  We did something along those lines up until the Second Shinobi War, but it we stopped because we didn’t have enough medical staff left.  Tsunade’s decided to restart the program, and you will be helping out as training.”

Kakashi opened the door to the restaurant as Sakura asked, “How do you identify a kekkei genkai without any obvious indicators, though?  Is there a-”

She stopped speaking at the sight of Teams 7, 8, and 10 waiting within around a large table, and Kakashi dropped the sound-masking genjutsu.  The various Genin were all chattering with each other around Shikamaru, in his new Chunin vest, congratulating him.  The rest of the evening was relaxing as Sakura caught up with the various members of her graduating class who had participated in the Chunin Exams.  Apparently only her team was moving out of the Genin team structure, as Shikamaru was going to be staying with his team for a while.  Sasuke left early, before she could talk to him about his new position, but that had become standard behavior between them.

***

Inoichi looked up as a cat-masked Anbu agent entered his office, and he set aside his paperwork and activated the room’s privacy seals at the agent’s signal.  The agent nodded to him, before holding out a scroll and speaking in the muted voice produced by the mask, “You have a priority message from the Hokage.”

Inoichi, upon opening the scroll, nodded slowly, then asked, “Did Danzō give a reason for changing his position?”

The Anbu agent twitched slightly before answering simply, “No.”

Inoichi snorted, “Right, of course not.  You can inform the Hokage that I will prep the department to begin intake examinations of Root ninja in batches of four per week.  The socialization training will take longer, and I can’t give a timeline until I know what we are working with.  While I’ve got you, please drag Kakashi in sometime before his new apprentice finishes with T&I.  I need his training plan for her so that I can coordinate her psych evals.”

The Anbu agent audibly sighed and shrugged, “I’ll try, but you know what it’s like trying to pin him down.”

Inoichi laughed, “That’s why I’m asking you.”

The Anbu agent shook his head before exiting the office, and Inoichi leaned back in his chair, tapping a finger to his lips as he stared at the ceiling.  He retrieved the scroll from Tsunade and set fire to it with a pair of hand signs before dusting off his hands and departing his office for the depths of T&I.

Chapter Text

Uchiha Sasuke found himself at a crossroads between his village and his vengeance.  On the one hand, the village had sheltered him since birth, especially following the destruction of his family.  On the other hand, how much had they really done for him?  He still paid the taxes on his lodgings, as well as for his supplies, and he barely got anything out of the Academy, free attendance or not.  Looking back, only Kakashi-sensei ever provided much of any instruction in new material, and even then, it was limited to the use of his sharingan and throwing him on the tender mercies of Might Guy of all people.  The purpose behind the limitations on his opportunities for instruction and advancement was clear with this new “in-village assignment” as they were calling it.  The council of clans had basically mandated his life without his knowledge up to the present, something invisible to him until the blunt meeting with Tsunade that afternoon.

She had opened by telling him that he had been barred from advancement or out-of-village missions until either the curse mark was somehow, magically dealt with, or he appealed the clans’ decision.  His immediate instinct was to attempt to appeal, as he was the de facto clan head of the Uchiha, until Tsunade cut his response off at the knees by pointing out the rank of Chunin was required to hold the privileges of a clan head, unless the clan numbered more than twenty members.  She followed this statement with a surprisingly sympathetic explanation that the Uchiha’s clan charter specified that only those provably born to the Uchiha bloodline or displaying an in-born Sharingan could count as members of the clan, which meant that Sasuke was village-bound until he could produce nineteen new Uchiha children, given that no real progress had been made on counteracting Orochimaru’s curse marks since their initial implementation over a decade ago.

In response to his fury at this pronouncement, Tsunade had the gall to laugh!  She told him to suck it up and wait it out.  She suggested that he could be cleared in a year or two as long as he presented a perfect picture of mental health, so that she could reasonably dismiss the concerns regarding the seal on his neck.  He had not had a clean bill of health from the psychologists that the Sandaime kept sending to interview him since the Massacre, and he could not expect he ever would.

So, the crossroads: stagnate in Konohagakure, breeding for the satisfaction of the saggy old lechers on the clan council for years on end while his brother grows stronger, or leave.  Leaving would obviously be suicide if he did not have some sort of support outside the village, given that his sensei was one of the best trackers in the village.  Village policy if he were caught would be house arrest for decades at minimum, potentially much more restrictive or torturous penalties if he caused any damage in his flight.  So.  One of the other great hidden villages or Orochimaru were his options for safely fleeing Konoha, but only Orochimaru had any real reason to let him train and develop rather than breed him for a supply of sharingan eyes, given that Orochimaru apparently wanted to wear his body like a suit.

In essence his choices were to attempt to go to Orochimaru, then outpace him before the old snake decided to put on a fresh new Sasuke-shaped set of skin and muscles, or rot in the village and hope someone else would kill his brother for him.  Given that both his brother and Orochimaru had a history of waltzing into the village, killing people, and walking away without permanent consequences, Sasuke was not optimistic that Konohagakure could provide the training necessary to defeat them.

Ultimately, the choice was obvious, as it came down to a choice between trying to kill his brother and giving up.  Sasuke never gave up, if he could help it.  If that meant leaving his home behind, then, well…He would only miss his team, honestly, and of them, he would only really miss Naruto, who would no longer be in the village anymore anyway.  Kakashi had been a decent sensei, as far as it went, but he had never passed on much of anything useful for defeating his brother.  Taijutsu was all well and good, but he needed a better grounding in ninjutsu and genjutsu and more advanced jutsu than one lightning technique to leverage his sharingan effectively.  As for Sakura, she made him uncomfortable and her meteoric rise in combat skill after stealing a kekkei genkai was honestly terrifying, and reading between the lines, she had recently copied another one, given the second set of arms she popped out in the arena.  Some part of him could respect that, but mostly?  She reminded him of his brother, back when he was shooting up through the ranks on the back of just his sharingan, his mind and his chakra control.  He definitely would not miss being around her, even if he would miss her usefulness as a teammate.

In the end, it was time to leave Konoha and push himself harder.  Nothing like the threat of bodysnatching to get the blood pumping.  Besides, Orochimaru sent ninja to make him an offer, and they implied that they had caused a diversion to buy him time to leave the village before an alarm could go up.  It would be idiotic to turn down such a clean getaway, even if he decided against going to Otogakure.

So, hiking his pack up on his shoulders, Sasuke tread silently out of his home, toward the front gate.

***

The path to the gate was isolated by design.  In order to leave the village, a ninja would either have to sneak past the gate guards or try to go over the outer curtain wall.  The guards were generally far less of an issue than the complex (and lethal) barrier seals alongside the patrolling ninja atop the wall, so everyone entering or leaving the village without an army at their back tried the gate first.  The fact there was a half mile of road that was the only way from the village proper and the gate, bracketed on either side by the two most used training grounds, was very much a security measure.  With the short staffing that the village was enduring, the stretch of road was not currently being monitored, as far as Ino knew, but she was certain that, if worst came to worst, someone would notice pretty quickly if a fight broke out.

So, there she stood, tapping her foot as a release for her nerves, in the middle of the road.  She had expected Sasuke to do something stupid, since he practically fled the party after he heard Naruto crowing about his new apprenticeship.  Thankfully, her chakra sense was good enough to work out where he was going and head him off, even if she had to run to get here before him.  At this point, she was hoping that he was just panicking, not actively planning out desertion.  If it was unthinking flight at the prospect of being caged in the village (which she could totally understand, to be honest), then she could talk him down, take him to her dad and they would work something out.  Him deserting the village meant that she would have to incapacitate him, which meant trying to talk him down, letting him go then using the Shintenshin from behind before he got too far away.  Easy enough, well, as long as he did not twig to her plan or dodge the jutsu.

And there he was, coming down the road, his gait downright nonchalant.  Not a great sign, if Ino were to be honest with herself, but she had to make the attempt.  She called out, as much honest concern and sympathy as she could muster in her tone, “Sasuke-kun!  Are you alright?  You seemed pretty upset at the party…”

Sasuke stared her down for a moment, then began walking again, saying, “Stay the hell out of my business, Yamanaka.”

Ino blinked, decided to change tactics, and forged on, “But, Sasuke, I heard about your new assignment, and this is the way to the gates.  You aren’t supposed to leave right now, in case Orochimaru comes for you again!”

Sasuke tensed but kept walking this time as he said, “It’s none of your concern what I do.”

Ino sighed, turning as he walked past her.  Oh well, she tried talking.  If he hated her for this, at least he would be spared being the Sannin’s newest body.  As her fingers formed the final hand sign for the signature Yamanaka technique, Sasuke twitched to the side and blurred toward her in a burst of movement.

The blur of his movement lit up with a blur of bright white light that slammed into her face from the left.  The stench of charring flesh accompanied searing pain and sudden darkness from the left side of her face.  The pain continued passed her face to rip through her body in a flash of seizing tremors, the feel of lightning chakra surging under her skin.  Past the sound of her own strangled, choking scream, she could hear Sasuke’s voice, cold and annoyed, with an edge of panic, “Damnit, you stupid fangirl!  You just couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you?”

His hurried footfalls faded away quickly as Ino struggled to stay conscious as her body twitched with residual electricity and the blinding pain in her face burned through her.  After a few minutes of helpless immobility, she screamed for help and cried as she began to crawl painfully in the direction of the village proper, relying on her chakra sense to guide her toward the nearest people.  Finally, she collapsed when she heard someone running toward her, and whimpered as her will to stay awake gave out.

Chapter Text

When Sakura was awoken at three in the morning by knocking at the front door of her family’s apartment, she was more than a little annoyed.  Somebody better be dying…Knowing from previous experience that her parents would not be up any time soon, she hauled herself up and went to the door.  Outside, an Anbu agent was waiting and stared her down as she jolted straight upright.  The bird-masked woman addressed her in a flattened, warped voice, “Haruno Sakura, you have been summoned to the Hokage’s office.  Top priority.  Bring your mission gear.”

After a moment of dazed surprise, Sakura immediately ran to dress and gather her mission pack.  She was out the door six minutes later, a hurried note on the table for her parents.  She ran and jumped over rooftops to reach the Hokage Tower as quickly as she could, landing in front of the building and running up the staircase within roughly fifteen minutes.  She was immediately waved in by Tsunade’s secretary, and she entered to see that a good portion of her graduating class as well as a few from the year ahead of her were also present, with Shikamaru and Choji following her in after a couple of minutes.  In total there were fifteen Genin present in the room, as well as Shikamaru, the sole Chunin, arrayed in a semi-circle before the Hokage’s desk.  Tsunade looked both exhausted and furious when she stomped into the room after the two members of Team 10, and the Genin scurried to part before her.

She flopped into her chair, and immediately addressed the group, “You are here because you are all of the uninjured, on-duty ninja that I have at my disposal right this instant.  Nara Shikamaru is going to be your commander for this mission.  Normally, I’d let him pick a few of you and go his own way, but the situation has escalated beyond tolerable limits.  Formally, Uchiha Sasuke has deserted the village, and left Yamanaka Ino critically injured on his way out.” What the fuck!?  The ripple of shock that ran through the assembled ninja was palpable as she continued, “He is a missing-nin, a traitor, and is to be hunted down as such.  Your job is simple: follow him and attack him before he can leave Konoha’s borders.  If you cannot capture him, delay him.  I will be sending a pair of Jonin after you to assist the day after tomorrow, the moment they are available.  We suspect that he has linked up with a group of ninja from Otogakure by this point, so you should prepare for heavy resistance.  Nara-kun, take your unit to the gates and brief them on your plans on the way.  The sooner you leave, the more likely you are to catch up to him in time.  Go!”

With that, everyone scrambled to leave the room after Shikamaru’s lead.  As they walked out of the building, he waved to them, speaking quickly with a hard, angry edge to his voice, “Alright, the following are the primary fighters: myself, Choji, Sakura, Naruto, Lee, both Hyuugas, and Tenten.  The rest of you have not been put forward for the Chunin exams yet, so I am assigning you to support roles, primarily providing cover fire and tracking assistance.  I’ll lay out details as we move, but for now, I am dividing the unit into four teams: Me and Choji, supported by Ono and Kojima;” The pair of their old classmates shifted to stand with Choji, both middle ranked back in the Academy, as Shikamaru continued, “Sakura and Naruto, you will have Ami and Hirano as backup;” With a pinched expression, Ami, one of Sakura’s old bullies joined her and Naruto alongside one of her teammates, both members of the Genin Corps, and Shikamaru barreled on as they began jogging down the road to the front gates, “Lee and Tenten, you two have Takeda and Ito;” these two Genin were unfamiliar to Sakura, but looked comparatively older, so she assumed they belonged to the previous graduating class.  Shikamaru finished as they neared the gates at an increasing speed, “Finally, Neji and Hinata, you will Mori and Shibata.”  Sakura remembered that these two had the best throwing scores in her class after Sasuke.

As they left the village, the new teams of four separated and began moving together as Shikamaru led them due North.  The day after that was split between running and pausing to allow Hinata and four of the supporting Genin to find the trail Sasuke had left.  The only scent tracker among the Genin commented once on a distinct burnt smell he was leaving behind, but nobody felt like following that up after Shikamaru tersely responded that that was probably from what he did to Ino.  After four hours of chasing the Uchiha’s trail, it became clear that he had been joined by some number of other ninja, between three and six according to their group of trackers, and the group began to lag after eight solid hours of running with minimal breaks.  Even with chakra and the endurance training they all went through there were limits to how long they could run.  Thankfully, all the trackers agreed that they would need to stop to rest at some point soon.

Throughout the steady, leaping journey through the trees, small talk was hushed but continuous.  Sakura found herself speaking first with Naruto as they went, both angry and confused, “Did you know?”  “No!  Are we sure it’s not a mistake?”  “What?  You think Tsunade-sama would send this many people after him if it might just be a mistake?”  “Well…” The back and forth went for a couple of hours before they both agreed to at least try to talk him down before attacking, when they finally caught up to him.  Naruto was reluctant to consider hurting a teammate, and Sakura was more of a mind to capture him, then talk to him once they had him back in the village.  The next conversation was awkward but ultimately productive, as Sakura fell back slightly in their formation to speak with Ami and Hirano about strategy.  All the supporting Genin were struggling slightly with the pace, which reminded Sakura of how much her team had been outpacing the competition in the exams.  Ami and Sakura both danced around how much they used to hate each other while Hirano awkwardly tried to redirect the conversation to the mission.  Eventually, Sakura just came out and said, “Look, you bullied me, I undercut you, we were both terrible to each other.  I’m sorry for my part in it, but we need to work together now, so let’s leave it at that.  What are you two specialized in?”

Ami looked stunned at the admission of fault, but grudgingly reciprocated, “You’re right, I guess.  Look, I am sorry for being mean to you when we were younger.  So, um, truce, I guess?  I’m training in tracking and retrieval these days, so I’m not much use in a fight aside from staying away and throwing kunai.  Hirano’s studying genjutsu, so he’ll be more use once we catch up.”

Hirano interjected, “I can perform a few different minor distraction genjutsu reliably, so when we catch up, I’ll start trying to throw off people’s balance, or make them see stuff out of the corner of their eyes.”

Sakura nods, and says, “Okay, I’ll give you a rundown on our tactics, then.  Naruto’s been studying wind and fire elemental ninjutsu, so always stay behind him, since everything in front of him is going to get very hot, very fast once the fighting starts.  I’ll be moving very fast and throwing a lot of senbon.  For safety, get up as high as you can in the tree line and stay high.  If you see an opportunity to get a genjutsu on someone or throw a kunai, go for it, but if it looks like we are in trouble, I want one of you to retreat to get help.  Also, don’t bother with genjutsu on Sasuke, since his sharingan is fully functional.  He’ll see right through it, so illusions would be a waste of chakra on him.  If it comes down to fighting Sasuke, stay at far range, since he’s a taijutsu specialist.”

Naruto eventually joined the discussion, and they all agreed, after some rock-paper-scissors, that if they had to split up, Naruto would go ahead with Hirano, assuming Hirano had an opportunity to follow, and Ami would stick with Sakura.  The final person Sakura talked to on the journey was Shikamaru, who waved her over while the group of trackers were arguing over a set of conflicting marks.  As she sat down next to him, Shikamaru dropped his face into his hands, and spoke in a rough voice, “Okay, look, Haruno-san, I need to ask you something that’s completely unfair to you and I am sorry, for what it’s worth.  When we catch up to Sasuke, can I count on you to fight him?”

Sakura blinked twice in rapid succession, confused why he was asking, before Inner piped up, He thinks we still have a crush on him, doesn’t he?  Sakura shook her head, answering, “Don’t worry.  I’ll take him down if I get an opening.  I’m specialized in hard takedowns on…” kekkei genkai users “…people like Sasuke, so if he enters my close to medium senbon range, I’m confident I can immobilize him.  We left so quickly that I didn’t get a chance to ask, but how badly was Ino hurt?”

Shikamaru raised his head and looked at her searchingly with red-rimmed eyes before sighing, “She lost her left eye, as well as most of the hearing in her left ear, and sustained some nerve-damage in her face and throat that may or may not be permanent.  Since Yamanaka techniques rely on their eyes, she might not be able to be an active-duty ninja after this.  We won’t know until she wakes up how well she’ll be able to adapt, and how well her nervous system will recover.”

Sakura froze, staring at him, then spoke in a halting, hushed voice, “Those injuries are…He couldn’t…Did he use the Chidori on her?”

Shikamaru huffed, and Sakura noted the lines of exhaustion on his face as he answered, “I guess you would recognize the injuries, considering your new shishō.  Apparently, it was improperly performed, hence Ino’s survival.  Hatake-sensei’s training reports said that he never taught Sasuke the full technique, just the building blocks of lightning release since he wasn’t in the Chunnin Exam finals and there was time to build up his fundamentals, so it must have been Sasuke’s attempt to mimic the technique without meeting the strict physical and practical requirements for full effect.”

Sakura’s blood ran cold.  That motherfucker tried to stick his hand through Ino’s skull!  The Chidori is an assassination technique, and nothing else!

She spent the rest of that day of running quietly seething and contemplating a more extreme response.

Shikamaru called for the group to settle in for the night and arranged a night watch rotation among the group of supporting Genin.  The night passed restlessly for Sakura as she had trouble wrapping her head around what had happened.  The idea that Sasuke would leave wasn’t the strangest thing in retrospect (for all that it was illegal, although legality was generally a secondary or tertiary concern to most ninja), but him trying to murder Ino?  That was unacceptable.

***

The next morning, they broke camp and returned to the chase.  Sakura wasn’t exactly at her best, but she had new motivation spurring her, and the unit of genin caught up with their quarry around noon, at a break in the trees.  Four ninja waited for them, one of them, who had a few extra arms, carrying a massive barrel bound up in seals.  Sakura frowned as the ninja began bantering with the others, especially Naruto and Shikamaru.  She recognized several of those seals from her recent efforts to transplant Naruto’s kekkei genkai into her own chakra network, as the same seals Jiraiya recommended to keep her body healthy and fit despite the semi-comatose state the procedure invoked in her.

Sasuke’s in there!  They’re stalling for time so that whatever chakra modification that barrel does can finish!  We need to break it open before then, Shannaro!

Sakura signaled to get Shikamaru’s attention, even as the Otogakure ninja started moving backward into the center of the clearing.  She whispered, “Sasuke’s in the barrel.  If we can open a hole it, those seals will leave him helpless, possibly even injured, for a long time.”

His eyes narrowed, then he nodded sharply, and shouted to all the collected genin to attack, “Get that barrel open!”

The whole clearing exploded into chaos as two thirds of the present ninja threw kunai, shuriken, and senbon at their four opponents.  In sync with the volley of projectiles, Choji, Lee, and both Hyuugas charged in, taijutsu forms fluidly shifting.  The largest of the ninja, a towering man with broad features and a rotund belly intervened before they could make contact, however.  Slamming his hands into the earth, an earth wall sprang up in a dome, enclosing all four of the taijutsu specialists, while deflecting the projectiles all in one fell swoop.

As Sakura surged forward alongside Naruto to shatter the earthen dome with ninjutsu, the three other Otogakure ninja vanished into the tree line.  Shikamaru swore and signaled for the squads other than his own to give chase as the dome, held together by earth chakra alone, crumbled underneath a freezing blow from Sakura followed by a burst of fire from Naruto.

Before the rest of the squads could give chase, Shikamaru relayed an order, “My team will deal with this one!  The rest of you, pursue.  Each team, take one of the enemies and leave the others for the other squads.  Divide them up if you can!”

Sakura slid to the side on a newly formed sheet of frozen soil and leaves as the large Otogakure ninja made a sweeping grab for both her and Naruto.  While she slipped past him more quickly than he could react, Naruto simply popped within the enemy ninja’s crushing arms, a sudden plume of smoke and water vapor bursting out as a clone replaced itself with the real Naruto and was dispelled.

The two of them reunited with the rest of their squad at the edge of the clearing, and promptly formed up to follow the escaping trio of ninja and their Sasuke-barrel.  Sakura and Naruto slipped by as Hinata and Neji’s team managed to drive one of the Otogakure ninja away from the group, even as the multi-limbed ninja tossed the barrel to his female comrade.  The woman fled as he dropped down, using a jutsu to throw a net of spiderweb at Lee and Tenten, leaving only Sakura’s squad in still in pursuit of the one carrying Sasuke.

When she saw that her squad was alone against the last enemy, Sakura signaled to Naruto and sped ahead of the group, moving faster than any of them or their opponent could follow to circle around ahead of their opponent, leaving a trail of frozen tree branches in her wake as she exercised her transformation kekkei genkai to subtly lengthen her legs, providing yet more speed.  She dropped in front of the Otogakure woman with the barrel without warning, and immediately made a grab for it.  Before she could get a solid grip, though, she flinched back from a hail of small, off-white projectiles passing through the space between her and the barrel, that she barely had time to register as finger bones before a new, white-haired ninja dropped between her and the woman holding the barrel, seized it, and immediately launched himself back up into the air, with nary a word.

Shocked, Sakura was forced to turn and engage the female ninja before giving chase, lest she intercept Naruto and the rest of their two supporting Genin.  She opened with a volley of senbon and a low-powered Hyoton ninjutsu that froze the branches all around them, rendering the terrain treacherous for the Otogakure ninja.  The fight was ultimately fast and brutal, as her opponent continually tried to back away and gain space free from Sakura’s ice and senbon, attempting to perform some sort of summoning when she finally maneuvered into cover.  Before the summoning could complete, she was met from behind by an unceremonious kunai to the spine, thrown by Ami.  Sakura’s team had caught up and pincered her opponent, and they collectively moved on from the cooling body of the Otogakure woman after Sakura’s hurried remark, “Another one came and took the barrel with Sasuke in it!  He went that way!”

***

Meanwhile, Shikamaru and Choji found themselves bogged down against the large Otogakure ninja, who had apparently decided that in a four-on-one fight, he would be better served by playing it safe, and had maintained a solid defense for the entire fight thus far.  Whenever a member of the squad engaged at a distance, they were met with a rampart of dirt and stone and hailed with large boulders, formed through ninjutsu.  One of the boulders dislocated the arm of one of their supporting squad-mates, Kojima.  Ono, their other secondary teammate, discovered the danger of approaching when he was rendered unconscious after having his chakra drained to exhaustion before they could break their enemy’s hold on him.

Down to just Choji and Shikamaru, they found themselves falling into practiced patterns that were sadly incomplete, as their trained routines relied on Ino to close the traps that the other two formed, always leaving their enemy a chance to slip out before they could capture him.  Shikamaru found himself swearing as the Oto ninja dodged out of the way of his animated shadow for the eighth time.  For such a large man, their opponent was surprisingly quick on his feet.  For all that they still held the upper hand, neither Choji nor Shikamaru could finish the fight.  It looked like they were in for a long fight at this rate…

***

The problem, thought Tenten as the six-armed ninja ran for his life from a red-faced Lee, is that this idiot is drawing this out.  Their squad was practically guaranteed their victory, as the Otogakure ninja was a long-range combatant more than a taijutsu or bukijutsu fighter, which spelled his doom against Lee, who easily caught the one arrow the enemy ninja fired before they entered close range.  From that moment on, their was enemy on the run, incapable of regaining control with Lee hot on his heels and the rest of them corralling him at range.

Finally, after the lengthy chase, the Otogakure ninja flipped up, swinging on a thread of chakra-enhanced spider silk, and tried to grab hold of Tenten from behind, kunai out, presumably to hold her hostage.  Tenten couldn’t help her snort as she met his grab with a concealed sealing scroll to the face, releasing a forty-pound mace which thoroughly crushed his skull as he slammed into it at full speed.

There was a moment of silence as the whole team stopped and stared at the suddenly braindead ninja lying on the forest floor.  Tenten stretched, glancing at the others as her neck popped satisfyingly, and said, “Well, I guess Guy-sensei was right about hiding seals in my clothing, huh?”

Lee pumped his fist, shouting, “Yosh!  You are youthful as ever, Tenten!  Let us go and assist our comrades!”

***

The fight had begun with the four of them surrounding the grey-haired Otogakure shinobi, forcing him away from his allies, only for the ninja to prove capable of keeping pace with both Hyuuga ninja in the resulting two-on-one taijutsu battle.  Neither Mori nor Shibata could contribute covering fire meaningfully without risking hitting Hinata or Neji, before their opponent suddenly split into two ninja as their curse mark activated, turning them into red-skinned oni, one leaping away, and engaging both supporting ninja in a surprise attack.  Cackling, the opponent facing the Hyuugas allowed Neji to land a blow, only to flow up and into his arm, causing Neji to cry out in agony as the oni head now sticking out of his shoulder announced, “Surrender!  If you don’t, I’ll just take over your friend here, killing him and taking these lovely eyes of his for myself!”

Neji shook as he looked directly at Hinata.  His hands formed a single hand seal, and said simply, “No.”

Hinata took a step forward, crying out, as both Neji and the body-snatching ninja began screaming.  His eyes slowly lost their opalescent sheen and darkened as the seal on his forehead cannibalized the chakra pathways in his byakugan, causing incredible pain in the process.  As bloody tears dripped from his eyes, the Otogakure shinobi flung himself out of Neji’s body, only to topple over, too late to escape being blinded by the seal.  Hinata slammed a lethal hand into the helpless ninja’s throat, before running past him to Neji, forming the hand seal to deactivate his cursed seal.  As the pain ceased, Neji lay limp and gasping for breath in her arms.

In the background, the other Otogakure shinobi screamed in anger, seeing that his counterpart was lying dead on the forest floor, “I’ll kill you for that!”

His furious charge at the two Hyuuga was met by Hinata, tears streaming down her face as her hands blurred in chakra-laden strikes.  She barely had time to lay Neji down before she stood.  She steadily forced him back until the two supporting genin took advantage of his distraction to spear his knee with a kunai from behind, allowing Hinata to kill him with a light tap to the chest, directly over his heart.

As the enemy ninja convulsed, coughing up blood, Hinata turned back to Neji and gently began to wipe away the blood in his eyes, speaking in a tremulous voice, “Neji-nii-san, I’m so sorry…”

Neji wheezed an immediate dismissal through gritted teeth, “No.  It was my choice, and no one else’s.  Better that I blind myself than all of us die.”

Hinata hunched forward, weeping, as the other two helped huddled around Neji, helping her clean away his blood-soaked eyes, to reveal his pitch-black, blinded byakugan.

Chapter Text

The four of them darted through the trees, until they came up on a field, where the final Otogakure ninja waited for them, beside the barrel, which split open as they approached, releasing a wave of black fog, swirling around Sasuke, where he rose out of the split wooden frame.  The two exchanged words, and Sasuke turned and darted away, while the white-haired ninja turned to face them.  Sakura gestured to Naruto, “Follow Sasuke.  You wanted to talk him down, so give it a try.  We’ll catch up once this guy is dealt with.”

Hopefully he’ll keep the traitor busy long enough for us to finish here and catch up.  Sakura pursed her lips as Ami and Hirano spread out to either side of her, and Naruto charged after Sasuke.  The Otogakure ninja leapt at him, but Sakura imposed herself in his path in a burst of freezing mist, locking a kunai with a protruding piece of sharpened bone.  Trying to keep him focused on her instead of Naruto, she spoke up, “Never heard of that kekkei genkai…Do you call it ‘bone’ release?  Or is it some sort of general body modification technique?  Doesn’t look particularly healthy.”

As he parried her easily and forced her back, the ninja frowned mildly, “I am Kimimaro, the last of the Kaguya clan.  Shikotsumyaku provides endless versatility and power, I’m afraid.  Surrender and turn back, and I shall not pursue you.”

Sakura’ eyes narrowed, “I’m afraid I can’t do that.  Sasuke decided to commit treason on his way out, you see.  Step aside, and we won’t kill you like the last Oto ninja.”

Instead of responding, Kimimaro began a graceful dance of taijutsu, filled with a blur of off-white as his bones suddenly extended out to try to pierce Sakura, even as she spun away with a flash of freezing cold.  From the tree line, Ami and Hirano had retreated to cover while Sakura occupied him, and they began to throw kunai and shuriken as she backed away from him.  His dance shifted subtly, and the projectiles, including the senbon Sakura tried to sneak through his defenses, all deflected off a flash of impossibly hard bone.

Kimimaro hissed between his teeth, the cold penetrating his bones easily, as he charged after Sakura, face calm aside from a wrinkle between his brows.  He was fast and relentless, easily maneuvering around her volleys of icy senbon even as he occasionally deflected her allies’ thrown weapons without bothering to look back at them.  They both quickly found themselves at a stalemate, however, as Sakura added a pair of arms to her body, just as she did in her match against Lee, doubling her output of senbon and forcing Kimimaro to maintain a greater distance lest he allow something through his guard.  Furthermore, the Hyoton chakra coating the needles he kept blocking with his bones were beginning to leave noticeable patches of frost on his homegrown weapons.  He fell further and further back from her until neither could strike at the other effectively.

Sakura was waiting until he had been chilled enough to start shivering before closing in herself.  She knew that he was easily superior to her in a melee without breaking out some of her newer, less tested ideas, the plans she developed from discussions with Anko after the invasion, but never got a chance to implement beyond basic testing.  Unlike her match with Lee, he couldn’t close with her as easily, but he could simply knock her senbon aside, making this something of an endurance match between her supply of chakra and his resilience to having his bone marrow slowly frozen.  If it weren’t for Ami and Hirano worrying at him from behind, she would probably have to take a more dangerous strategy than simply wearing him down, but as it was, she estimated that she could bring him down in a few minutes, given that his breathing was already becoming slightly labored.

Kimimaro apparently saw that she was maintaining the upper hand, and he chose to flip the board.  He turned, and, before she could close and attack him, a strange interlocking pattern of black lines spread across his skin from the small curse mark at his throat.  Sakura felt an almost physical weight press down on her as his chakra whorled out around his body, and he didn’t bother to block or dodge as he leapt toward the tree line, slamming directly through a tree even as Sakura charged after him, still hurling senbon.  This time, the senbon and the kunai thrown at him bounced off after piercing the skin, tearing it away to reveal a layer of smooth, interlocking bone beneath.  The sight distracted Sakura for a moment as she chased him into the tree line.  Subdermal bone armor.  We tried that, along with an exoskeleton, but it was too much of a fundamental change to our physiology to achieve with Naruto’s transformation kekkei genkai.  A native ability to modify our internal physiology that isn’t bound up in changing the shape of our chakra coils would allow some extreme variation-

Her internal dialogue was disrupted by a scream ahead of her, within the trees.  She sped after Kimimaro, trying to close the distance that she had spent so much time trying to maintain.  She arrived to find Hirano desperately dragging Ami away from the Otogakure ninja, who was winding up for a second strike with a spiraling spear of bone that was still trailing part of Ami’s intestines.  Ami was unconscious and breathing shallowly, and some distant, clinical part of Sakura’s mind, speaking in Anko’s voice, catalogued her as about thirty minutes from death by blood loss, while the rest of her was internally screaming at the sight of her gut torn wide open.

As she slid between Kimimaro and her two squad mates, Sakura shouted, “Hirano, get her to cover and try to stem the bleeding!”

Kimimaro charged and was met by a small flurry of snow blown into his face, blinding him and giving Sakura a chance to barely divert his blow with a kunai.  What followed was a close-up chase as Kimimaro hurled himself after her, toppling trees as she led him back into the open field, away from Ami and Hirano.  We need space to use the big transformation if it comes to that.  It will also buy them time to get to safety, and it might just end the fight if his curse mark has some sort of time limit.

For a whole two minutes she managed to lead him around before he simply stopped, sighed, and stared her down, before pressing his hands together in an unfamiliar hand sign, as the black curse marks stretching over his body began to burn a bloody red, flowing over his skin as his body warped and grew.  Sakura saw her chance as he further activated the curse mark and performed her own modification to Naruto’s transformation technique in conjunction with both of her kekkei genkai.  She groaned audibly as her body lengthened and her two extra arms retracted.  Expanding substantially in size through Naruto’s transformation kekkei genkai was a painful process, as the expansion of the chakra coils to make the body change shape required that the chakra within the coils decompress to a lower density.  Lowering chakra density in general had to be done slowly to avoid pain as the cells of the body were momentarily starved of chakra, simulating momentary chakra exhaustion through the affected regions of the body.  Frankly, I'm still amazed that the Akimichi have a way to do this without a kekkei genkai.  Sadly, Sakura was in a rush, so she clenched her growing jaw, and pushed through the pain as her entire body cried out for chakra.

Across from her, Kimimaro took a step back, even as his body finished extruding a new tail and a set of bone spikes along his back.  His eyes were blown wide at the sight, unsurprising given that she was fairly certain that the sight of her exploding out of her clothes as she grew to four times her natural size was a gruesome sight.  Her limbs were twisting unnaturally in conjunction with her lengthening body shape and her muscles visibly stretching and bulging beneath her skin left the distinct impression that her body was only vaguely human.  All over her body, ice formed in overlapping, reflective plates, each effectively unbreakable to conventional force so long as they were attached to her body’s chakra coils.

Her back arched and stretched as she grew, falling to all fours as her hands shifted into ice-clawed talons and her arms and legs each shifted to be about as long as her natural body height.  Her skull shifted to resemble a massive canid’s more closely, a natural tendency that Sakura theorized was a result of the Kyuubi’s chakra acting as the seed for the kekkei genkai, with three dozen new razor-sharp fangs sprouting in front of her natural dentition, leaving her with a horrific grin.  Her hair spread out along her back in a tufted mane of pink amidst the glittering plates of her icy armor.  Turning her head to the side, Sakura spat out a wad of bloody spittle before she turned to fix Kimimaro with her now slitted pupils.

After a beat of silence as the pair stared each other down across the partially frozen field, Kimimaro spoke musingly, “That is the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen someone do to themselves, and I routinely pull my own bones out of my body.”

No time for banter, we can only hold this for two minutes.  Sakura responded with a deep animalistic growl and a blur of motion as she charged him, left claw outstretched.  Dodging to the side, he ripped his own spine out of his back and whipped it across her ice-plated back with a resounding crack.  Sakura staggered but her armor remained unbroken as she kicked him in the leg, her own limb moving at an unnatural angle thanks to her current inhuman flexibility and musculature.  As he fell to one knee, she swung with her razor-tipped left claw at his chest again.

He responded by raising his bone covered arm to deflect the blow, almost languidly, only to have his bone spikes shatter on impact with the ice coating her limbs.  Her claws slid neatly through his subdermal armor and into his chest, spreading visible frost from the impact out across his body.  Sakura spoke gutturally, her vocal cords warped by the transformation, “Sorry, but you die now.”

Kimimaro gave a full body twitch as she poured lethal amounts of raw Hyoton chakra directly into his body, then his torso burst under the pressure of the mass expansion of the water freezing inside of his body.  He was left a contorted, gruesome statue, impaled on a massive starburst of red ice formed out of his own blood and bone marrow.  Sakura ripped her arm back out of his frozen chest cavity and forced her oversized claws into the awkward positions of the hand signs to exit the transformation.  She collapsed as her body compressed back down, leaving her in a pile of slowly melting ice sheets as her body shifted from sharp agony to a dull ache spread over her whole frame.  She forced herself up, and hobbled back to the trees, and called out, “Hirano, I brought him down!  Throw up a flare!”

A bright flare went up above the trees, and Sakura slowly gained speed again as she forced herself to move towards her teammates, pulling on the tattered remains of her clothing as she went.  When she arrived, she found Hirano, blood-soaked, still trying to stem Ami’s bleeding.  Sakura knelt and helped Hirano wrap layers of bandages and gauze around the hole in her abdomen and hold it shut until the blood stopped pumping out of her.  Ami, still mercifully unconscious, was pale, but would survive for at least a few hours.  If they could get her to the nearest border station, a medic nin would be able to keep her alive for the transit back to Konoha’s hospital.  Looking up from Ami, Sakura gave Hirano a fresh order, in a scratchy voice, “We need to get her to a medic.  The others should have seen the flare by now and be on their way.  Shikamaru had maps, so he is the one who can tell us where to go.  Guard her and send up a fresh flare every five minutes.  I need to go after Naruto and help him bring Sasuke in.”

Hirano stuttered out his agreement, “Um, yes, right!  I’ll stand guard!”

Sakura hared off into the trees, exhausted, but unwilling to stop until the mission was complete.

She broke through the trees at the edge of the Valley of the End to the screeching sound of lightning-natured chakra exploding through a body of water.  Through a blanket of steam rising from the river, she saw Sasuke, his body similarly warped and twisted by his curse mark to the manner of Kimimaro’s transformation, standing over the floating body of Naruto, a deep, charred crater in her blond teammate’s chest.  She froze, staring, as Sasuke turned and began to walk away from him, before she screamed, “You bastard!  I’ll tear your eyes out for that!”

Sasuke spun around and looked up at her as she leapt down, unleashing a volley of senbon on the way down, but he burst into a blur of unnaturally quick motion, fleeing with a speed she could not match in her exhausted state, and all her shots missed by a wide margin as he vanished into the trees that marked the border of Fire country.  Gritting her teeth, Sakura splashed to a halt beside Naruto, only to find the hole in his crushed ribcage slowly stitching itself shut, a faint glow of red chakra permeating the wound.  From her month of studying the Kyuubi’s chakra, she knew that a jinchuriki like Naruto enjoyed extreme rates of physical recovery, but she hadn’t been aware it could be that rapid.  The wound had closed after a minute, and Sakura felt safe to lift and haul Naruto up the canyon wall to the trees, where she laboriously hauled him onto her shoulder in a fireman’s carry before heading back towards the rest of her squad.

***

Sakura returned to Hirano and Ami in time to meet the rest of the unit as they converged on the flare.  Lee was missing from the group, but everyone else was present.  Of the original sixteen, six of them were injured, and they had four corpses and one prisoner to show for their fights.  Sasuke had passed outside of the Land of Fire, so they could no longer legally pursue him.  From this point on, it was down to Jonin and Tokubetsu Jonin, as Chunin and Genin were restricted in what they were allowed to do outside of the Land of Fire and its allies without Jonin supervision.  Sakura gritted her teeth and focused on laying down Naruto as the rest of the group turned toward her.

The others wore concerned expressions at the sight of her shredded clothing and Naruto unconscious, and Shikamaru hissed through his teeth as he saw the gaping hole in Naruto’s blood-stained and burnt jumpsuit, for all that only smooth skin was visible through the opening, thanks to Naruto’s regeneration.  Sakura spoke with an audible hitch in her scratchy voice, “Sasuke- He got away after he attempted to kill Naruto.  He was over the border before I could close with him, and Naruto was down.”

Shikamaru nodded with a grimace, although Tenten spoke up before anyone else could, “Where’s the wound?  It looks like Sasuke hit his chest from his clothing, but he looks practically unharmed.”

Sakura sighed and gave the most truthful answer she was allowed to, “Assuming he has the chakra for it, Naruto heals insanely quickly.  It’s part of his kekkei genkai.  I could see shattered ribs poking out before the wound closed up.”

Several members of the assembled Genin went green at her words, but Shikamaru continued nodding distractedly, saying, “Mission failure.  Lee should be back with a medic within the hour, so hunker down.  Tenten, take Choji and keep watch, since you two seem the least exhausted…”

Given her depleted chakra supply, physical exhaustion, and bodily pain, Sakura knew that if she didn’t occupy herself, she would pass out, making things harder for those on watch.  Forcing herself to move, she approached the corpses of their opponents, noting the thoroughly trussed form of the large ninja that Shikamaru and Choji battled, who appeared to have survived his freshly broken back.  She gestured to get Shikamaru’s attention and croaked out, “I’m trained for battlefield cleanup.  I’ll make sure the bodies aren’t dangerous.”

Shikamaru shrugged, turning to coordinate care for the injured, and she got to work, checking each body for hidden traps, and disarming the two she found, on the many-armed ninja and the lone woman respectively.  They were carrying minimal equipment and no scrolls that she could find, presumably because they were at such high risk of capture.  She didn’t have the energy to do much more than secure them, however, her stamina flagging badly.

The return to the village was a blur for Sakura, as she collapsed, her chakra utterly exhausted, shortly after Lee returned with a medic.  She eventually passed out completely and woke up in a hospital bed in the village, to the sight of a heavily bandaged Naruto dozing a chair beside her.  Before she could do much more than achily ease herself partially upright, Kakashi arrived from out of nowhere, as was his habit, and reached out an arm to help her sit up.  Her sensei looked as unflappable as ever as he handed her a cup of water, his visible eye impassive.

The aching in her muscles and bones was less pervasive and exhausting than it was when she passed out, and her chakra had recovered enough that she could feel its movement through her coils, albeit sluggishly.  She was clad in a hospital gown now, the tattered remnants of her gear in a pile on one of the shelves along the wall, and she had an IV in her hand, attached to a bag of saline solution on a stand beside her bed.  Sakura looked at Kakashi, and asked quietly, “Why’s Naruto so heavily bandaged?  I thought his regeneration would solve that sort of issue.”

Seriously?  That's what you ask first?

Kakashi shrugged casually, answering, “Apparently it got overloaded by trying to fix his ruined ribs, lung, heart, and spine all at once, so the cracked skull and three or four deeper cuts need to be patched up the old-fashioned way until his body is less inundated by bijuu chakra.”

Sakura sighed, then sat up straight as she remembered the condition of the others.  She asked sharply, “And the others?  Did everyone make it back alive?  Did Ami?  She had a severe gut wound.”

Kakashi’s eye curved as he gave her a smile beneath his mask, and he said, “Maa, I’m glad you’re thinking about your teammates, but you might want to consider worrying about yourself first, apprentice-chan.  Tsunade tells me that you came as close to killing yourself with chakra exhaustion as you can get.  The other kiddies all survived, but you’ve been in a medically induced coma for a full week now.”

Sakura had the decency to blush and glance down as she remembered her collapse when the medic arrived, and squirmed a little as she replied, “I had to, though.  My opponent-he had just gored Ami.  I was worried about my own flagging stamina when he used his curse mark to transform into a discount oni, so I responded by turning into a bijuu-shaped ice monster and freezing him from the inside out.”

Kakashi gave her an agreeable nod and spoke without a hint of sarcasm, “Mm, perfectly reasonable.  Impaling him on an ice sculpture made of his own blood after he gutted one of your teammates was about in line with what people will expect from my apprentice.”

As Sakura grasped for something to say to that, Kakashi shrugged and continued, “Either way, Sasuke isn’t your problem anymore.  He has a bounty on his head and every village looking to catch him, either to put him on trial, hand him to us, or breed him like a prize rooster.  Once you’re recovered enough to escape the hospital, we’ll be starting your initial training as my apprentice.  Get plenty of rest!”

He vanished before she got get a word in edgewise, and she slumped back in her bed, sipping her water.  As she leaned back, Naruto groggily shifted and startled at seeing her awake.  He cried out, “Sakura!  You’re awake!  Are you feeling better?  Tsunade-baa said that you ran out of chakra, and that you, uh, changed to something too big, which hurt basically, um, all of you!  Why’d you do that?  Everyone said that you rescued me, and Ami and Hirano said that you saved them, but they won’t say how to anyone, and seem really afraid about something!  What happened?”

Sakura sighed and set her water aside as Naruto bombarded her with questions, until she cut him off with a quiet, “Naruto, are you okay?”

Naruto laughed nervously and glanced to the side, “I’m fine, Sakura!  I heal up quick, remember?”

Sakura frowned.  That was the weakest deflection imaginable.  She shook her head and asked again, “Really, Naruto, Sasuke carved a hole through your chest and electrocuted you most of the way to death.  I know that you two were close.  Are you okay?”

Naruto’s shoulders sagged, and in that moment, Sakura remembered how he had looked after her graduation exam for the Academy, sitting desolately on a swing while everyone else had celebrated.  He stared at his hands and answered, “He said that I wasn’t worth waiting in Konoha for.  He said…He said that if I cared about him, I’d l-let him go to-to Orochimaru.  I just-Sasuke never-”

Sakura watched as Naruto slowly devolved into hiccupping sobs.  She eased her way to the edge of the bed and reached out, wrapping Naruto in a hug.  She said, “I’m sorry, Naruto.  I’m so sorry.”

***

Two days later, Sakura’s body no longer ached, and her chakra was moving relatively normally.  Tsunade had stopped in to debrief her, harangue her over her decision to shapeshift to such an extreme form and for “taking after Kakashi too much,” and complete the majority of her healing as they spoke.  Afterwards, Sakura left her hospital room, having had some clothing dropped off by her parents, and found Shikamaru leaning against the wall outside.  He looked exhausted as he looked up at her.  Sighing, he pushed off the wall, “Haruno-san, I’m glad you’re alright.”

Sakura nodded, “I’m glad you made it through alright too.  Kakashi-shishō just said that everyone else survived, and Tsunade-sama wouldn't let me get a question in edgewise.  How badly injured was the rest of the squad?”

Shikamaru frowned as the two of them began walking down the hall together, then answered, “Neji and Ami were too severely injured to continue their careers as ninja.  Neji ended up having to blind himself to hurt his team’s opponent, and his eyes are utterly unrecoverable.  Ami lost her one of her kidneys, her liver, and two thirds of her digestive tract to a combination of tearing trauma and sepsis, most of which was recoverable once we got her back to Konoha, but her spine suffered multiple severe fractures.  It will be at least a decade before she might have full mobility in her back, even with medical ninjutsu, and even that isn’t guaranteed.”

Well, that’s awful.  Sakura looked at him askance, horrified, and murmured, “That’s terrible.  I’m sorry I couldn’t stop her from getting torn open in the first place.”

Shikamaru shook his head, “No, it wasn’t your fault.  If anyone, I am the one at fault for their injuries, as team leader.”

Sakura frowned and started to reply, “That’s not-”

Shikamaru cut her off, waving a hand, “Regardless, Ino is awake, and she asked for you when she heard that you had woken up.”

Sakura closed her mouth and nodded solemnly, asking, “Is she any better?”

Shikamaru looked away from her, staring out of a hallway window, “The nerve damage seems to be entirely temporary, and Tsunade has managed to help get most of her face and throat back to…functionality.  Her left eye and optic nerve are gone, though, and she has almost no hearing on that side.  She’s been positive around me, but it’s clearly forced.  Please be gentle with her, okay?  She’s practically my sister.”

Sakura nodded slowly as her eyebrows rose.  They went down the rest of the hallway in silence, and Sakura schooled her face into as sincere a smile as she could before they entered Ino’s hospital room.  Entering, Sakura saw Ino was turned away from the door, looking out of the room’s window with her good eye.  This put the left side of her face on full display, and Sakura forced herself not to gasp.

Ino’s left eye was covered in a gauze eyepatch, but spreading out from it were jagged, branching lines of pink scar tissue.  The scarring reached down her cheek, over her jaw and the left side of her mouth, and down her throat, disappearing beneath her shirt.  It also reached up from the eye, splitting her left eyebrow in two places and trailing up into her hairline and along the side of her head, running through her ear and over her scalp, almost all the way to the back of her head.  The scarring past her hairline was made more obvious, as the left side of Ino’s head had been shaved at some point, leaving only short blonde fuzz poking up in between the pink Lichtenberg scarring.

Oh kami, Ino…

Ino turned after a moment, and Sakura took a tentative step forward as Ino’s lips rose in a tremulous smile.  As Sakura got closer, she spread her arms, asking quietly, “Can I hug you?”

Ino nodded jerkily, and Sakura sat on the side of the bed and wrapped her in her arms, feeling Ino’s tense muscles relaxing beneath her embrace.  They stayed that way for a solid minute, Sakura gently running a hand down Ino’s back, before Shikamaru broke in with a cough, saying, “I’ll, uh, leave you to it, then.”

He abruptly turned and left, closing the door behind him.  Ino released a harsh laugh, her voice rough and shaky, “Ha.  Shikamaru just can’t stand emotions.  He’s such a dumb boy.  He-He used to say that my hugs gave him hives, when we were little, you know?”

Sakura smiled more genuinely as she leaned back out of Ino’s arms, and answered, “Honestly, I can believe it.  Most of the guys I know are kind of idiots, even the smart ones.”

Ino sighed, looking away, “…I think I was holding a torch for him-Sasuke, I mean-even after he and Naruto were practically dating.  I should have just- I don’t know, called for backup, or let him leave instead trying to catch him alone.”

Sakura shook her head, forcefully, “It doesn’t matter.  He doesn’t matter.  Not anymore.  Leaving the village is one thing, but hurting you is another.  I see him again; I’m doing to him what he did to you.  You matter way more than any pretty asshole, Ino.  I’m here for as long as you need me, okay?”

Ino’s eye closed, and she pulled Sakura back into a hug.  Sakura felt Ino’s tears dripping onto her shoulder.  Honestly, what did we see in Sasuke?  I mean, yeah, he had some nice muscles and soft hair, but his personality was hot garbage.

Ino cried for a while before she began to speak, “I doubt I’ll be pining after any pretty assholes now.  I doubt anyone’d fall for a missing eye and a face full of scars.”

Sakura snorted, “Fuck pretty boys!  You’re more than your eye and scars, Ino.  You are my first friend, and you are way, way too good for them.”

The door rattled as it opened, and Inoichi poked his head in, “Oh!  Sakura, I’m glad to see you up and about!  If you two don’t mind, Ino’s been cleared to go home until her next physical therapy appointment, so I brought her some clothes.”

The two separated, and Ino said, “Okay.  Can you come over to my place tomorrow evening, Sakura?  I-I’d appreciate some company.”

Sakura nodded firmly, “Of course.  I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Chapter Text

The next day, her last day before her apprenticeship truly began, was divided between her family, Kakashi, and Ino.

Her morning was spent with her family, explaining in broad, non-classified terms that Sasuke had betrayed the village, as well as a fairly straightforward discussion of their family finances since Anko had finished the autopsies while she was recovering.  Her well-paid time assisting with the autopsies in the wake of the invasion, as well as the disastrous but equally well-paid mission to capture Sasuke, had not been for nothing, as the family finances were now comfortably stable for another half a year, after her parents had sold off her father’s surviving stock of textiles from before the invasion.  Their home had been rebuilt while she was comatose from chakra exhaustion, which also reduced their cost of living in the myriad small ways that come with having a permanent residence.

Between both of her parents, they had begun arranging to shift from market sales of textiles to shipping the textiles into and out of the village, as that could be more easily accomplished from an office.  Her mother had thrown herself into learning her husband’s trade, but it was slow going, from Sakura’s perspective.  While her parents were smart and driven, they lacked the formal education and native enhancement of chakra that she enjoyed thanks to their efforts to get her into the academy, resulting in an ever-widening gap between them.  It was uncomfortable to see her mother struggle for months to learn trade routes, lists of contacts, exchange rates, and mathematics when Sakura had been trained to a standard of nigh-on instant memorization, possible thanks to chakra meditation techniques taught in the academy, alongside an understanding of advanced trigonometry by the age of ten.  Such were the differences that awakened chakra and the village’s education made for, however, and it explained why the ninja clans easily dominated the economy of the elemental nations even in the era of villages, given that even their civilian members would have those same basic advantages in their daily lives.

Her father had made decent progress in his physical therapy with his new prosthetic leg, although he would still need crutches for a year at least while he acclimated to it, which allowed him enough mobility to begin helping her mother around the house again.  Sakura and her mother had spent numerous evenings helping him with the basic stretches and exercises to adjust his sense of balance to account for the wood and metal half-leg that the village had provided.  It was slow-going, however working together to adapt to Kizashi’s injury had helped them grow closer as a family.  She and her parents had always been somewhat disconnected regarding what being a ninja meant, especially after she graduated, but they were beginning to understand each other.

To her parents, it had been an investment and an opportunity: Sakura served the village for five years after graduating in return for the best education outside of the highest ranks of nobility and access to numerous benefits provided by the village infrastructure, a simple transaction to ensure a better future for their daughter.  To her, especially after accessing her chakra for the first time, it was a lifestyle: as a ninja, even the fairly unimpressive genin she was after graduating, she had found fulfilment and a career that she wanted to commit to for a long time, possibly the rest of her life.  Her parents had begun, over the last month, to realize that Sakura did not intend to stop being a ninja once her contractual term of service was up, but rather that she wanted to progress through the ranks and make a name for herself as a ninja, the sort of ninja that started a new ninja clan, joined one of the existing ones, or took on apprentices later in life.  She still hadn’t really explained what her specialization was to them, but she felt like they might be even less understanding of her desire to literally steal people’s body parts than they were over her expressed interest in a full military career.

Regardless, things were looking up for her family, and her new apprenticeship came with a solid monthly stipend alongside reduced direct mission payouts, guaranteeing a more stable, if lower, income for the foreseeable future.  The big downside, however, was that the coming months were going to be hectic, given Kakashi’s proposed training schedule.

***

Kakashi was lounging on the edge of the roof of the building opposite her house when she left after her late breakfast.  As she exited the house, she felt a mild frisson of chakra running over her skin, setting the small hairs on her arms on end, a telltale sign of the genjutsu Kakashi used to conceal their conversation from everyone else.  We should probably ask him to teach us that one.  He was reading his little orange book, but dropped down to join her as she walked out into the street, greeting her lackadaisically, “Have a good chat with your folks?  Great!  Today we’ll be going to the hospital to schedule you for some medical seminars, training sessions, and such, then we’ll talk about our long-term goals for this apprenticeship.  We’ll decide on some things to shoot for in the next couple of years, and I’ll walk you through my requirements for you to actually graduate this apprenticeship.”

Sakura squinted up at him, following along at his side as he began meandering down the street, then asked, “You said that I’d need to research a new kekkei genkai, right?  That seems pretty straightforward…”

“Oh?  Straightforward?  I think you might have missed the part where I said that you would probably be jumping to Tokubetsu Jonin at the end of the apprenticeship,” Kakashi grinned down at her, “I’m sure you’ll be delighted to hear that Tsunade-sama dragged me down to something tamer than my original standards, which were based off of what my shishō used for mine.  Apparently, standards are different now than they were during the last war!  Crazy, right?”

Oh, that sounds bad.  Sakura winced, then responded tentatively, “Um, you did say that we were going to do some intensive training, though, so, I, uh, took that to mean that you wouldn’t move past the training phase until I was up to your standards?”

Kakashi snorted, and pocketed his book as he shook his head, “Sakura, intensive training doesn’t qualify you for anything but higher paying missions.  Ranks among ninja are a matter of deceit and experience, not who’s got the biggest, nastiest jutsu.”

Sakura cocked her head, as they exited the residential district of Konoha and approached the Research and Development buildings, of which the hospital was the only one with a public entrance.  She thought about it for a time, before voicing the obvious question, “But then how come Sasuke’s brother and you, and a ton of other people for that matter, became Jonin when you were all, like, ten?”

Kakashi’s eye curved with the smile beneath his mask, “They call us geniuses, like it’s a matter of raw talent, like there aren’t dozens of incredibly skilled ninja in every generation, but it all comes down to one thing, Sakura-chan,” he stopped and met her eyes with his single visible eye, “It comes down to politics.”

Sakura scrunched up her nose, as if she had smelled Naruto after a long day of sparring, then rejoined, “Ugh, isn’t that more of an old people thing?  The civilian and clan councils and all that?  I thought the Hokage decided promotions, not them!”

Kakashi burst out laughing as they started walking again, approaching the front doors of the hospital’s administrative wing, “Maa, I think I said the exact thing to Minato-shishō when he walked me through this.  No, not our village’s politics, even though I’ll need to give you a basic grounding in navigating that at some point.  I mean international politics.  You see, Chunin are promoted either through the exams, where they publicly destroy their peers in a series of deathmatches, or in the field, where they will have displayed their ability to outthink their opponents repeatedly to earn the rank.  Chunin are, fundamentally, ninja who have shown that they can apply tactical thinking competitively against enemy ninja.”

Sakura nodded slowly as they joined the line in front of the hospital’s front desk, and he continued, “Jonin, on the other hand?  To become a Jonin, Tokubetsu or full, you will need to translate that tactical thinking into strategic thinking.  If Chunin are dangerous ninja, then Jonin are scary ninja.  A Chunin might win a battle, or guide a team to victory, but a Jonin will trick you into fighting the wrong battles in the first place, thereby winning the war.  In order to show that, you need to be given an opportunity to prove it.  The ‘Jonin Exams’ exist to differentiate between Tokubetsu Jonin, who perform as a Jonin within their specialty but are not up to snuff otherwise, and full Jonin, who meet our village’s expectations of a Jonin’s combat ability, after someone has earned the rank by personally dealing a strategic blow to our village’s strategic enemies in the field.  As such, you need to learn how to do that before you can even qualify.  And that is only possible if you have experience with inter-village politics and are clever enough to twist them to your advantage.”

Sakura blinked at that.  Then none of us were going to be promoted for those special missions during the exams, were we?  Sakura frowned, acknowledging to herself that it was true that the missions the Hokage gave them seemed irrelevant to proving themselves Chunin.  She looked up at Kakashi speculatively while he bantered with the nurse assigned to the front desk, trading some paperwork back and forth, all covered in his hideously scrawled handwriting.  Then again, maybe it isn’t something you can really test for directly, but rather only see as it happens organically.

Kakashi led her away, handing her a packet of the papers he had collected, saying, “This is your schedule for the medical seminars and a dozen or so specific hands-on classes with a few specialized medic-nin who will walk you through some of the weirder kekkei genkai-related medical jutsu better than I can.  I’ve also scheduled you for an assessment with Shizune-san, who will help to identify your native kekkei-genkai, aside from the two you’ve…adopted.  It’ll give you a chance to see how the process works, since you’ll be doing it as part of your own research and training.”

Sakura blanched at that.  Uh, you don’t think we’ll get in trouble, right?  I mean, I’m pretty sure Inoichi-san knows about me, from when we were less subtle as a kid, so it should be fine, right?

Kakashi’s grin was visible through his mask, and she got the distinct impression that he was laughing at her, “Oh?  Did you think nobody noticed that you have a running internal conversation with someone only you can hear, basically all the time?  Admittedly, the other give away is the frankly disgusting levels of extra chakra circulation in the coils in your brain, visible only to a sharingan, byakugan, or a specialized medical diagnostic jutsu.  We’ll work on making it all less obvious once I know more about how that voice in your head works.”

He knows?!?  Sakura’s jaw dropped, “Wait, Inner isn’t some kind of psychosis?!?”

Kakashi snorted before answering, “No, Sakura, your psych report lists you as perfectly sane, and it notes that you most likely have a mental kekkei genkai as of your third year in the academy.  The Sandaime increased screening for that sort of issue a great deal over the last decade.”

Sakura blinked, confused, “But I never did an interview with anyone.”

Kakashi sighed, and dragged a hand over his face, sounding aggrieved, “Sakura, we are ninja living in a ninja village.  Almost every part of our lives is partially or completely covert in nature.  A third of the teachers in the Academy are trained psych profilers.  It’s one of the required rotations for T&I staff.  After that, Inoichi-san has been dropping in on you weekly for the almost the entirety of the last year.  While, yes, he has been assisting in your training in various ways, most of his focus is on probing your emotional and mental health.  He’s not even all that subtle about it.”

Huh, that makes a surprising amount of sense.  Sakura sputtered, “B-but that’s so-ugh…it’s not like I’d lie to him if he was more direct about…”

Kakashi shook his head, and they walked out of the hospital.  After a few moments, he responded, “Your records are a nigh-on perfect mirror to Orochimaru, but with different kekkei genkai and half a century later.  Orochimaru spent thirty of those years slowly going off the deep end while delivering pristine psych reports through normal interviews.  After that came out, a few years before he defected, the policy has been to engage in covert monitoring with us ‘high-risk’ ninja.  Almost everyone you know at Jonin rank is keeping an eye on your mental health so that that won’t happen again.  They were the same with me until I ruined my chakra network with a sharingan eye.”

His sharingan ruined his chakra network?  Sakura frowned, “…I’m not that like him, am I?  He did call me his replacement during the exams…”

Kakashi pulled his little orange book back out, rolling his visible eye, “I mean, do you feel like experimenting on babies?”

Sakura stumbled, coughing out a puff of frosty air, “What?  No!”

Kakashi shrugged nonchalantly, “Then you remain fundamentally different.  Don’t worry about it too much, Sakura-chan, you’ve got a pile of Yamanakas keeping you sane!  Now, let’s talk about goals for the first phase of your apprenticeship, and then I’d like to hear if you have anything you want to achieve outside of them.”

That seems like a really low bar for not being like Orochimaru…Sakura nodded hesitantly, “Okay…”

The student-teacher pair walked down Konoha’s main thoroughfare towards the Hokage Tower as Kakashi laid out his training goals for the first months of her apprenticeship, not looking up from his porn as he spoke, “Your intensive training will be focused on three things: first your medical and research skills, as provided primarily by the hospital while I get your taijutsu and bukijutsu up to snuff; then your ability to identify, track, and capture a target stealthily, for which I will be your main teacher, although I have tapped the Inuzuka clan to provide access to some of their more exciting training courses; and finally your ability to elementally transform and control chakra, focusing on providing you with baseline proficiency in the five basic chakra types you aren’t already familiar with, which Tenzō and I will be drilling you on for the final part of your training period.  Ideally, each of the three parts will take at most two months, but if you burn through some part faster than expected, that will give us more time to work on the other parts, or even learn something outside of the curriculum if you pick it all up quickly enough.”

Woah, wait, back up.  Did he just say that we need to learn to manipulate fire, earth, lightning, yin, and yang chakra in two months?  That sounds impossible.  Sakura frowned, thinking back to her time at the Academy, “I thought that learning to use elemental chakra took a lot longer than two months, though.  During the Academy, they said to expect to eventually spend at least three months learning the element we’re naturally good at!”

Kakashi laughed dryly as they weaved through the crowded street, “Well, that’s true for doing things like seal-less advanced elemental jutsu, free-form elemental manipulation, and developing new elemental jutsu.  Naruto, for instance, will probably end up going that far with wind-natured chakra control, given how ninjutsu focused his combat-style is.  You, on the other hand, only need the most basic level of proficiency in everything, which means a couple weeks of quick and dirty training in each element you aren’t already familiar with, earth, fire, and lightning, then around a month exploring yin and yang chakra independent of elemental chakra.  It will mostly be learning a few really, really basic earth, fire, and lightning techniques, then drilling them to the point you get the barest feel for that chakra in the environment around you.”

As they approached the front doors of the Hokage tower, he wrapped up, “After that, I’ll show you how to open your first chakra gate, the Gate of Opening, to let you tap into raw yang chakra where it is gathered in your body, although we won’t do much more than learn to open it in a controlled setting to give you a feel for it.  Similarly, I will walk you through a set of yin-based meditation techniques to acclimate you to yin chakra.  Altogether, this sort of training is a key component of jutsu theft if you lack a sharingan or native sensory abilities, as it tells you about the elemental make-up of a given technique, in combination with any of a number of sensory jutsu.”

Kakashi led her to one of the administrative offices, where he retrieved a massive packet of papers from a half-asleep office worker, turning to Sakura and saying, “Now, these forms cover the fiftyish other training options available to sub-Jonin-rank ninja that you can sign up for, outside of what I’ve already got you slated for.  Flip through them and fill out any that appeal to you tonight.  We’ll go over them together tomorrow and whittle them down to what we have time for before we start your first day of in-depth training.”

***

After hauling the reem of papers back to her home, Sakura detoured to Ino’s home, carrying a small bag of dango.  She walked up to the door and was ushered in by Inoichi, who smiled, saying, “Hello, Sakura-chan!  Looking forward to the start of your apprenticeship tomorrow?”

Sakura stepped past him, offering up the dango, “Yeah!  The schedule is a little intimidating, but I’m looking forward to it.  Ino’s up in her room?”

Inoichi gestured at the stairs, his smile softening, “She is.  I’ll call you girls down for dinner in a couple hours.  You are staying for dinner, right?”

Sakura nodded as she started up the stairs, her legs stretching in length slightly to speed her ascent as she answered over her shoulder, “Sure, that sounds nice.”

She hesitated as she came to the door to Ino’s room, letting a misty breath of frigid air as she centered herself before knocking.  Ino’s voice, still painfully rough answered, “You can come in.”

Sakura opened the door to the sight of Ino slowly moving her trembling fingers through the twelve basic hand seals.  Not wanting to break her concentration, Sakura moved silently to take a seat beside her on the bed, simply watching as Ino went through the sequence, having to stop twice, once to redo a seal that her fingers fumbled, and another time to shake her hands out, letting the trembling in her fingers die down.

Once she finished the set, she turned to face Sakura, revealing a simple black eyepatch over her left eye.  Ino pulled a lopsided smile, saying, “Hey.  Thanks for coming over.”

Sakura smiled, forcing herself to look Ino in the eye, rather than letting her gaze drift over the scarring or the eyepatch, and held up the bag, “I brought dango!  I got the sesame coated ones that you like.”

Ino genuinely laughed at the grimace on Sakura’s face, “Ha!  The same kind you can’t stand?”

Sakura stuck her tongue out, even as she felt relief at the sound of Ino’s familiar laughter, “Bleh!  Dango are supposed to be soft, not crunchy!”

Ino chuckled, before grimacing, and reaching up to massage her left cheek, saying, “Ugh, this sucks.  I can’t even smile right!  Nerve damage is the worst.”

It’s still looking better than yesterday, though.  Sakura sighed, “Ah, I’m sorry.  Shikamaru said it was temporary, though, right?”

Ino nodded, still rubbing her cheek, “Yeah, but my face will apparently feel weird for like, a whole year before it’s back to normal, even if the shaking hands and stuff if only supposed to last a few weeks as long as I do the physical therapy.  I just hate not having control over my own mouth…”

Sakura bumped her shoulder against Ino’s, asking, “Does cold help?  ‘Cause I can make ice, no problem.”

Ino shook her head, “Not really, sorry.  I just need to move my body a lot to get things working right again.  According to Tsunade when she stopped by, the lightning chakra went straight through the optic nerve into my brain, and then travelled along my chakra coils to scramble how my body moves.” Ino shivered, “When I first woke up, trying to talk made my arm move.  It was…Well, they did what they could to unscramble things, but now I need to relearn my fine coordination, especially in my face, hands, arms, and back, since those were the most effected.”

Sakura grimaced, “That sounds awful.  Is there anything I can do to help?”

Ino sent Sakura another small, lopsided smile, and stood up from her bed, “Well, if you’re offering, could you help me do the stretches for my back?  I kind of need someone to keep me upright for a couple of them.”

Sakura rose as well, nodding firmly, “Tell me what to do.”

The next hour was quiet and slow as Ino moved through all fifteen of her back stretches four times each.  She stumbled and almost fell eleven times, clutching Sakura with shaking hands as one muscle or another in her back spasmed, or she lost her balance.  Ino never stopped, though, brow furrowed and mouth set, as she forced herself through the sequence, and Sakura could not help but be impressed at her determination.  As Ino finished and flopped back onto her bed, panting slightly, Sakura commented, “That was great, Ino!  I’m proud of you.”

Ino, laying back, huffed, “It’s not impressive, Sakura.  The beginner katas at the Academy were harder than this, and neither of us had any trouble back then.”

Ever the perfectionist.  She really hasn’t changed since we were little.  As Sakura began to respond, Inoichi poked his head in, saying, “Hey girls!  Dinner’s up.  Come on down.  We can have those dango with dessert!”

Ino pushed herself up from the bed with a groan, “Sure.  Just give me a minute, dad.  And knock before you come in here!”

Inoichi laughed as he slipped back behind the door, and the two girls followed him.  Sakura held Ino’s hand as they went down the stairs, as she was worried about tripping.  Once at the dining room table, they sat with Inoichi and Ino’s mother, Hanami, and enjoyed a large meal together.  Inoichi gently asked about Sakura’s upcoming apprenticeship, and Hanami prodded her for more details whenever she answered.  Sakura also found herself discussing how her parents were recovering and her feelings about Tsunade’s appointment.  Wow.  Kakashi wasn’t kidding.  Ino’s dad is literally just giving us a psych eval over the dinner table here.  Sakura sighed slightly, preparing herself for more questions about her mental state, Ino entered the conversation with the subtlety of a bull, “Seriously, dad?  You couldn’t interrogate her some other time?”

Inoichi reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose as Ino stared him down.  Turning to Sakura, she pointedly asked her about whether she was thinking about changing up her outfit now that she would be working in a two-man team with Kakashi.  From there, the dinnertime discussion was more relaxed, as Inoichi and Hanami talked to each other, leaving Sakura and Ino to chat.  After wrapping things up, Sakura gave Ino a hug on her way out the door, heading home for an early night before the first day of her apprenticeship.

***

Neji was, despite all expectations, happy.  He was blind now, unrecoverably so, but he found that, surprisingly, this had improved his life in a number of marked ways within a day of losing both of his Byakugan to the caged bird seal.

During a refreshingly blunt talk with the new Hokage, Neji had been informed that he was now listed as a disabled veteran, not an active-duty ninja.  Tsunade had expressed her condolences before continuing on to the fact that his lack of Byakugan actually made it medically necessary to remove the remains of the caged bird seal from his chakra network.  He was free from it, and it could not be legally reapplied, according to both Konohagakure and internal clan law.

The second delightful change was Hiashi formally adopting him into the main family line in recognition of his sacrifice for Hinata’s safety.  It gave Neji a certain vicious satisfaction to reclaim what had been denied to his father, although he put forward a front of gratitude toward Hiashi.  Hanabi-chan told him, after her father left, that Hinata had incapacitated the clan elders by slipping them poison before the clan vote on the matter and politely insinuated at that same clan meeting that she would do much worse to anyone who proposed a vote to seal her or Hanabi-chan.  Neji internally acknowledged that the Inuzuka boy was a good influence on his cousin, while outwardly asking Hanabi-chan to thank Hinata for him.

The final improvement came with the arrival of Tenten, Rock, and Guy-sensei.  They were, of course, very sympathetic regarding Neji’s injury and subsequent removal from the team, and they offered to help in any way they could.  These were the expected responses to crippling injuries, which he expected to be forgotten within a month as his former teammates moved on with their careers.  Neji asked, sourly, if there was even anything that could be done about being blind, to which Guy-sensei laughed and proclaimed that he would just have to learn to see with his chakra, ears, and nose.  As he began outlining a four-hundred step, intricately detailed training plan, Neji realized that his team wasn’t abandoning him.

That was, perhaps, the best realization to come from his blindness.  He had people on his side, and they were sticking with him, even though he was caustic, dismissive, and blind.  Neji might not enjoy being blind, but knowing he was not alone anymore?  It was worth it to him.