Chapter Text
Ino is a dream come true. Wherever she walks, flowers bloom bright, store owners' smiles reach their eyes and the air she breathes feels cleaner. Her pin-straight blonde hair flutters through the wind as they rush through the forest, her giggles a cheery song, and right in that moment– clutching her hand as if she’s the secret to life, barely keeping upright against Ino’s superior training and speed; Sakura thinks this might be heaven.
Sakura had wanted fresh air and Ino saw her apparently from the market as Sakura was weaving against the crowd. She found Sakura in all her embarrassing glory, her hands blistered and shaking, the bandage untouched. It hurt too much to position her hands to wrap it properly, and now she was seeking the price for that if Ino’s blown out eyes had anything to say about it.
“Jeez, was your dad mad or something?” her hands on her hip, and sakura worries for judgement and instead she gets Ino digging out a napkin, placing it on her hand, grabbing– ouch– the bandage now in her other hand and starting a sprint back towards the market.
“He was just busy and we were out of bandages anyways, better replace it now.” she pants it out to the disappointment to her lungs, but Ino is asking her something, she has to respond.
“I can’t wait until we can all start sparring, you’re gonna kick all the boys asses!” maybe if she could start breathing when running at this speed, yeah but now? No way.
For some reason, Ino has this very bizarre opinion that she, Sakura Haruno, the civilian, is worth her time as her best friend. Ino is Sakura’s best friend, but she’s not really close with anyone else, not even her parents like she is with Ino, her mom’s busy running her whatever business or at some casino and her dad spars with her, but his brothers are making contact again and he’s always tired after every letter and hushed conversation with her mom, so Sakura doesn’t think she should bother him that much. Ino, however, was birthed into the world with the loyalty of a Nara and an Akimichi, her class was filled with heirs and she still chose The Nobody as her best friend.
She should care about Ino’s bad decisions, friends call each other out on that stuff, but Sakura’s so sinfully selfish, that she’ll bask in Ino’s presence, with no complaints.
Obviously this comes to bite her in the ass.
—
The Academy is nice, it keeps her busy and their library is just like her moms, except there’s books on chakra, ninjutsu, genjutsu, ranks, geography and history. Her mom’s history books are more on sociology, trade, politics, mass-effect events and economics but here? Military, engineering, tradition and things Sakura has never thought of. Of course not everything was available to her, but Sakura was already studying ten times more than her classmates just to stay in their league, so when she figures out a cheat to bypass the restricted areas and book seals, let’s just say it never gets reported.
Lunch is easy, she plays shogi with Shikamaru, because she’s the only one out of the four of them who knows the rules –and doesn’t eat the pieces to win, Choji– He curses the few rare times she surprises him as Ino and Choji pummel each other in a corner over whatever they were arguing about before. They got along over shared opinions and their tendency to zone out, kind of like how her and Choji got along for having bubblier and softer personalities.
And Ino- god Sakura adored her. They laughed and cheered for each other and ganged up on the boys. More people started noticing Sakura though, which is nerve-wracking but Ino’s popular so it’s to be expected, her mom labels her classmates as ‘connections’, her dad ‘competitions’, but even Ino was just ‘Ino’ to them, ‘Shikamaru’ was the ‘Nara boy’ and Choji, the ‘Akimichi boy’. Maybe her eyes really did glimmer when she talked about them, her dad seemed to think so.
Then mom got sick, she began to do the work from her bed, sending clothes to Tea’s Daimyo, weapons imported from somewhere north in Wind. Her back is straight, because you can never lose your face, Sakura. The worst you could do is show them you’re wilting. She sleeps longer and Sakura starts borrowing recipe books and learning to clean the entire house at 8 years old, because her dad has to take on more of mom’s work and the late nights he’s back and thinks she’s asleep, she’ll hear the clinking of sake cups, muttered apologies and his sobs muffled into the blanket or her mothers shoulder. They spar in the early mornings instead now, the nights are private in a doomed grief that has not yet arrived and her washing dishes with as minimal noise as possible.
She’s good at cooking, better than her mother apparently. It’s weird, she never realised how slightly burnt their rice was when she ate. She thought that the Akimichi’s rice was just a fancy-ninja nutritious version or something. Turns out, her mother never wanted to cook, her father never learnt. But when she could, her mom did because even if she hated cooking, Sakura was her daughter.
Her father starts sparring more with her a few months after her mother’s condition dropped drastically. He started speaking to her only in his native tongue, until her accent was gone completely and she could read traditional Iron scripture. He started teaching her hand-to-hand and any skill he learnt to kill a ninja, right there in their living room or in the dojo right beside it, her mother, even in her condition now, even after the war, had been a cunning woman who scrounged for every ryo possible to get to where she is. The luxury she lives in is the direct reflection of it.
There’s an Apothecary, who greets them in Iron, she’s skin and bone and dad sneers at her but pushes Sakura in anyways. The woman only scolds him for being impolite and rough, she doesn’t mention the noises from next door, high pitched and dragged out, no matter how much her father cringes at it. He asks her to teach Sakura how to take care of herself, deal with sickness, infection, injury, poison, whatever she can.
Sakura stops hanging out with Ino on Saturday, it’s upsetting but Kame-baa-san keeps her busy, whether it’s going to the red light to give the pretty ladies contraceptives, muscle relaxants, emetics or cough medicine, yes, she does know what they do, yes she is quite young to be running around here, yes, she knows what she’s giving them. They learn sex-education next year, but oh well, might as well be ahead.
The academy is still fun, her friends are interesting, but Sakura’s busy with herb collecting, sparring before class- she’s started falling asleep in their afternoon classes, but it makes Ino giggle, so Sakura isn’t going to beat the habit out of herself yet.
—
She asks Kame-baa-san to fix her mom. The elders' eyes grow to the size of saucers before throwing a bag of shredded tobacco leaves to Sakura and sending her off to a Casino on the other side of the flower-district.
The next time her father picks up early, Kame-baa-san screeches, insults and wacks her father. She’s wacked Sakura on the head before or thrown metal spoons at her if she did something stupid, but she’s always right about this kind of stuff so Sakura looks away. No, she didn’t hear her father’s gasp when that hag told him what she oh-so-stupidly said, sakura should be getting wacked not him, he’s already sad enough as it is.
Her Mother dies a day before Sakura turns nine, but it was in her sleep, technically she had committed suicide, overdosed on her own medication, because she would rather die than die on her baby’s birthday. That’s what her father said, but Sakura wasn’t a variable here, that woman never once in her life, had been a sitting duck, not even the guillotine of mortality would make her bend to its will. In its own twisted way it was her way or the kunai’s way until the very end. Sakura wasn’t the reason, she was the excuse and Sakura couldn’t help but resent her a little for that.
Her father sends a letter to an uncle she doesn’t know, his tears littering the page, telling him of the death in the family.
Sakura should get ready for breakfast, but she goes to bed, her father didn’t notice that she skipped school for a week, wallowing in her own bed.
—
When she goes back, Ino practically pounces on her, bumbling about everything that happened while Sakura was gone. Once she finishes she asks Sakura with those beautiful puppy-dog eyes of hers where she had been and before she can respond, their teacher starts class.
She doesn’t know why she’s so light-headed, but hanging out with Ino feels like that now, especially when she keeps asking why Sakura was gone for so long and she’s starting to run out of excuses to ignore her question. Next time class ends, she sneaks off to the library before Ino and Choji can drag her outside, the new librarian recognises her as ‘Ino’s little shadow’ rather than ‘sacchan’ like the old one who retired. She’s been called that and every other synonym to it in the book and typically she’d beam at such words. Ino is a light in her life, of course she’d be by her side forever! …Today though, it feels demeaning, like she could be snuffed out into a footnote of Ino’s life, like her mom was– no one even knows except her, dad and Kame-baa-san– and nothing more. She’s always been aware that, politically, Ino is more valuable than a thousand of her, she’s a civilian, the lower class, no matter her wealth. If she dies in action, her body would never be brought back to Konoha.
As she sits down, flicking through a random book, she’s already memorised word-for-word, it hits her like a brick. A kunai, jutsu or senbon wouldn’t be the only way she could be snuffed out, Ino could just drop her and whatever little old Sakura thinks about it would be collateral damage.
At lunchtime, she starts going to the library. She’s there enough that the librarian starts calling her ‘saku-chan’.
—
Her dad is busy and travelling a lot, he still can’t go back to Iron and visit his family, that’s what happens when your father exiles you at 21, and it's weighing on him. He took over everything, and her mothers workload, which was always very well-hidden, was now apparent on the kitchen table, living room floor and corner of the dojo. She never realised how ahead her mother had groomed her to take over the business but she understood everything on the papers, from the jargon, syntax, math, methodologies to the initiatives recorded and quarter-year data released. Her father’s education had only consisted of a katana, a fist, servitude, and a rotten form of honour.
If she begins scribbling through paperwork and leaving notes for her dad on how to go through with offers, then that’s between her and umeboshi onigiris he starts keeping in stock for her afterschool endeavours.
Some nights while she cooked dinner, her dad would smack a counter and curse, the business world is foreign to him and it makes him remember his wife a lot more. He’ll walk out to their garden to breathe, yet it isn’t enough to keep his sobs out of earshot. Tears don’t change the flavour of curry.
So she begins filling out notebooks, she steps into her mothers office, wiping dust off the shelves and grabbing her mother’s old textbooks and folders and making mindmaps, diagrams and little explanation pages for her dad and current proposals, projects or future investments it could relate to. She labels each with concepts, association committees, investors, historical events, social politics and financial information.
When he comes home that night, Kizashi Haruno finds his daughter cooking dinner with wrapped hands, she’s sparring and training on her own a lot more now. He can’t approach her, it’s sickening and makes him into a horrible father but she’s got her mother’s eyes and if he ever has to look into them ever again that’ll just kill him on the spot.
But the paperwork is organised on the dining table differently today. He finds notebooks, labeled with various things placed on top of each file, different tabs cut into the pages. He opens one, and there’s ink, black ones set out showing tables and graphs and the red ink that explains her budgeting sheets, how they’re organised set out, what he needs to keep an eye on them for and what information he can pull out of it, who he should show it to and who he should keep it from. It’s all Sakura’s handwriting though.
God she should just quit the whole ninja thing the village has going on, become a business woman like her mother, he’ll look after her and she’ll thrive. But… That’s his little girl, his little girl with that god awful will of fire in her heart who’s horrible at smack talk in spars and witty with her creatively-hidden insults. She’s his as much as she was hers, as much as she is. He can’t rip this away from her too.
He asks her how she knows when the rice is ready that night.
—
Sakura spent her tenth birthday sobbing in her father’s arms, he hasn’t hugged her since the funeral, it feels different and suddenly it feels like she’s mourning more than her mom’s smile.
He’s filled out more, her father was a tall man, muscular, toned and slightly burly. He’s been training more again, she doesn’t know why, but sometimes her lunch is already made now and her day starts off a little brighter.
Kame-baa-san says he’s coping and that’s enough for her to leave it be.
She gifts her a knife that gets sewed in the hanfu that she’s prone to wearing when working and running around. She doesn’t say it’s because of her birthday rather that the Uchiha forces are more sparse now, travelling in groups, they have been since a little after she began running around for Kame-baa-san, but the knife just took a long time to get made, she says. 10 months for something smaller than a kunai to get welded? Yeah right.
For some reason it’s nice to know such a grumpy lady actually cares for her.
One of the customers of their regulars eyes her one night, corners her into an alley and when she darts back to Kame-baa-san, shaking with her shoulder dislocated and a bloody dagger but otherwise fine, the old bat gives her this crinkly smile and yanks her shoulder back into place fast enough that Sakura ends up curling into a ball on her floor having a panic attack.
—
The flower district isn’t just a red lights district, there’s butcheries, fancy delis, apartments, barbeques, regulated casinos, onsens, strip clubs and tailors all over. It’s mainly a tourist spot so foreign people do pass by a lot. There’s a fancy-all-night diner that is a regular client of the Apothecary. They have a mixture of elderly talented cooks and young rookies who can’t tell their head from their ass let alone a pot from a pan. What Sakura is getting at is that burns are extremely common over there, thus they need their med kits (and cigarettes) restocked every week or two. The older cooks ruffle her hair as if she’s their grand-kid and younger guys sneak her sips of fancy beer (disgusting) or new desserts they want to put on the menu (50/50 on whether inedible or very yummy ). Two of them were retired ninjas and would reminisce about their days as chunin and Sakura mentioned she was in the academy. They laughed themselves sick, croaking about how much of a joke the academy is now in the time of peace.
Next time she visited, they asked her if she knew what tree-walking was, when she said no, they took her outside and told her to walk up the concrete wall at the back of the high-end diner reserved for smoke-breaks. She just stared until someone would break, tell that this was a joke and maybe apologise for ridiculing her last time– they didn’t…
Turns out it was easy.
They both were a sputtering mess though, Sakura doesn’t get it, she just matched her chakra to be complimentary to the wall’s…
“Was it meant to be hard?” It’s a genuine question.
Goro-san, the taller man of the two, guffaws and slaps her on the back so hard she nearly eats dirt. He says to try it on water and sends her home with a box of takeout filled with maki rolls.
It takes her a few go’s (two), but she understands water walking now. She’s shaky and needs to concentrate but she’s doing better each day.
She begins to fill out some notebooks on chakra.
—
Her dad says that if she’s going to put her life on the line by going down the path of a ninja, she’ll have to train more.
Spars are rougher now, he’s making her do push-ups, sit ups, crunches and run around the whole flower district thrice before she’s allowed to come home.
At least she barely has to help with the paperwork now.
—
It’s halfway through the year, they’re going to start spars soon.
Kame-baa-san has more orders now, word of mouth spreads well in the district, so Sakura’s been finishing later.
Thus her runs are done at night, when it’s dark. Lanterns illuminate the main streets still alive with noise and pleasure, but her runs are done on the districts more shadier sides, the ones where money is passed and deals are made in a different language, some words from Konoha, a few sprinkled from Iron, she can hear Iwa, Kiri and Rice too. It’s around the areas where adults sneer rather than tease her, some leave her be, she recognises a few of them, those she doesn’t are probably Kame-baa-san’s early customers who arrive in the early morning before Sakura arrives or the ones that she has to get kicked out so the apothecary can serve. She’s lucky to be quiet apparently, if the fights between young guys, a few years older but just as immature as her, are anything to say by. She’s only been approached a handful of times and it’s safe to say she’s a lot more grateful for Kame-baa-san’s knife now.
Though she’s not sure the blood-leaking boy, half-passed out and gargling in the alleyway will fight back very well.
If any responsible adult was here, they’d look at his uniform (barely visible- anbu?), the mask and bloodied weapon, they’d hear his gasping breaths bubbled in red and tell Sakura to turn away, that she’s in and over her head.
She stares at him long enough, not doing anything, that he starts seizing.
She nearly rips her head out, a primal groan so done with this shit rips out of her. She does not want to be traumatised-
She ends up turning him over, his impossibly pale skin nearly blinding her in the dark, placing pressure on the wound just below his collar bone; she can’t do a tourniquet because of the wound location or his position on his side. She ends up unwrapping her own bandaged hands. It has the chance of infection, she knows, but it’s the only thing she can do in a makeshift pressure hold. Her hanfu sleeves are blood soaked, it’ll definitely stain, so Sakura holds no queries, grabbing her knife and ripping it to pieces to wrap the wound with. No hissing or whistling when he breathes either so lungs aren't damaged, but he made a strangled noise when she pressed on his left ribs, so those are probably broken.
She folds the remains of her hanfu into a pillow and lies it below his head, brushing his dark hair out of the way, there’s a nasty scrape from his chin to his forehead on one side.
She sits beside him, holding her knife while timing his seizure, right there in the middle of the night in a lonesome alleyway.
For such an eventful night, it’s pretty silent. The ninja stops seizing– and promptly passes out.
—
She drags his limp body back to Kame-baa-san’s place, but the old bat is not waking up, she tried clanking her pots and pans together for fucks sake.
She’s only ever stitched up herself, her dad and the side of a courtesan’s hip. All of that was after she and her dad started sparring with actual metal.
Mainly herself though, and enough times that she kinda forgot pain killers exist.
Luckily for this guy, she actually injects the pain killer solution into his blood stream before stitching him closed.
Unlucky for Sakura, when the guy wakes up 4 hours later (she's so skipping tomorrow- today? What time is it?) he nearly tries slicing her open.
He’s still out of it, so Sakura does end up tripping him and throws one of her sandals at his head too.
He whimpered…
Damn it. Now she feels like an asshole.
He stays there on the floor though. So yay. She cleans up the mess they made in their near-scuffle and sits to watch him again, she must doze off at some point because when she wakes up the sun is blaring into her eyes via. Front window and the only sign of her surprise-patient being scuff marks towards the door.
—
Spars start, Sakura’s nervous there’s 2 other civilian kids and she knows Keito’s family have a school in the capital set up for him if he ever drops out. She also knows Ami’s got a mean punch and that she goes for the eyes.
Yet, she’d be lucky if she was matched with them. Her other options are the Clan Heirs. The ones with violence bred into them through generations of ninja, and tips from at least one soldier in their life. Kids who have people who want them to succeed. People who want them to win. People who taught them how to.
She’s surprised when she pummels Kiba to the ground.
Their fight ends quickly, she helps him up, helping him off the mat, apologising, asking if she actually hurt him.
He kinda just stares at her with a dropped jaw long enough it’s awkward, she glances around and ends up deciding to drop him next to Hinata, whose sweet, but they’re not close, so no harsh feelings. The girl’s a sputtering mess when her dazed friend nearly flops back to the floor right after landing on the bench, steadying him, then remaining a stuttering mess as she tells Sakura that she was great.
She feels all bashful and as she smiles with rosy cheeks and mutters her own sheepish ‘thank you.’
She scurries to an empty bench, watching the rest of the matches, she catches Ino glaring at her, but that happens a lot these days, so does Ino calling her ‘forehead’, so do the rumours, and rude comments her little posse around her whisper anytime she walks pass. She learned how to ignore it a while ago.
It only kinda hurts.
Her throat feels itchy.
The matches distract her, specifically Naruto’s loud whoop as he’s paired with Sasuke Uchiha. She knows more of the pair than she does know them. Their shenanigans, their tardiness and rowdiness. She also knows they’re extremely important, the Hokage’s son (despite the name Uzumaki) and the second Heir to the Uchiha main line. Practically royalty.
Their fight is loud with smack talks, slaps to the face and roars of prepubescent boys, it’s quite violent, not as violent as the fights the boy from the alleyway just got into but enough some hits make the other kids hiss, or lean-in from excitement.
Shino is told mid brawl with Shikamaru that using his bugs in taijutsu is cheating. He disagreed vehemently. Even handicapped, he still wins when it’s Sakura’s turn to face him. But their fight was the second longest after Naruto’s and Sasuke’s, so when he offers her a hand, she jumps up and immediately asks him to teach her that elbow smack move he did. (He clotheslined her.)
She faces off Choji at some point but Ino’s busy fawning over Sasuke instead of fighting him and Iruka-sensei is goading Hinata and Shikamaru to hit each other– neither of which are, but for completely different reasons. So they just sit down and talk about how their week is going. They might be on better terms when the class ends, but they still go their separate ways.
—
The boy ends up in the same alleyway again. Sakura is going to smack her head into concrete–
“That would be inefficient in our current circumstances, ugly.”
…
Breathe in. Breathe out.
At least he helps her in his efforts to limp to Kame-baa-san’s place.
He also doesn’t try to kill her, which is a plus.
—
Sai is a weirdo who doesn’t know how to smile. He also ends up in that alleyway at least once a week, Sakura has no idea what rank he is, but he should definitely be demoted. (she’s betting anbu).
Then he just shows up asking for advice on illnesses, ailments, chest pains and lung infections. Those visits are quick, where he’s always watching the door, windows and perimeter in a way that’s way too advanced for the academy, sometimes he leaves before either her or Kame-baa-san can answer.
He is Sakura’s age, but his eyes are so void and he dissociates enough that she would’ve mistaken him for a veteran soldier. Kame-baa-san calls him ‘troubled child'.
But they start expecting him now, she runs in the early mornings now and spends the nights gossiping and eating snacks and patching Sai up as Kame-baa-san chows down on sunflower seeds like a manic cow.
Then six months later, where Sakura routine has changed completely thanks to their break, she spends more days sparring and even more days at Kame-baa-san’s place, where she began sparring with Sai in the wee hours of the night in that godforsaken alleyway that he loves so much. At least in Sakura’s opinion, Sai insists she chose it to tease him.
He’s gotten better at emotions, He’s still sociopathic in that weird robotic way of his without being an actual sociopath, it’s freaky, but oh well, beggars can’t be choosers, plus he’s better at smiling now, it’s still slightly off too but it’s all the same in how contagious it is to the two Apothecaries.
Then Sai shows up a man in his arms, urgently commanding they fix it, rapidly repeating questions and just pushing the guy in her arms as he, himself, disassociates. She morbidly categorises this as Sai’s equivalent to begging in her mind as she grips the dying stranger.
She practically had to throw the grown man onto the futon mat as she ran her mental diagnosis, she was able to figure some things out, but had to bark out Sai until he broke out of his own mental fortitude to get more information– Which she needs right now Sai.
She ends up rushing to make a modified Kampo deconcoction with a higher concentration for the moment, while she makes it, Sai seems to have snapped out of it enough to help the barely conscious choking guy on the futon to sit up so his own blood doesn't kill him. She waits until coughs out a larger clump of blood, before pouring the liquid down his mouth and forcing him to swallow manually, she still gets Sai to hold him down as she injects some through his arm, just to be safe.
At some point after she injects it and he’s still coughing while Sakura scrambles for what else to do, cursing how that old hag can sleep through all of this, Sai begins panicking, Sakura, being his kind (and probably only) friend, should comfort him. No. Instead, she screeches at him to get his head out of his ass, instructs him how to position the guys and to make him drink water.
He keeps coughing until he pukes and passes out.
Sai drops on his knees in a full-body shake and just stares at the door.
—
Kame-baa-san likes to joke that one day Sakura will sneak a boy from the district into the Apothecary, one she could have a mess around with, it’s all teasing to fluster her and Sakura prides herself on remarking back just as witty and never faltering to embarrassment.
She wonders if Kame-baa-san thinks bringing in half-dead guys into the place counts.
Her answer comes in a heavy sigh, and the desire for a diagnosis and prognosis from Sakura.
Sai leaves in the afternoon, Shin –Sai’s brother apparently– is still unconscious and only wakes to puke and cough and for them to force him to down whatever hell-damned solution they can think of. He looks like the fifth of a living person by the second week. Sai’s still missing.
Ironically, she finds him in that fuckass alleyway again.
He asks her if she knows how to create a dead body.
“Uhh… yeah? It’s gonna be murder though.”
He gives her the most disappointed blank stare, then huffs out of his nose and pinches his nose bridge, which is so insulting because she knows he copied that straight off her.