The morning of her first day at the Academy, Sakura wakes with the dawn, it's a habit she'd started when she first got the orientation packet. Making breakfast, packing a bento for lunch, cleaning up after that, and her warm-up routine took a surprising amount of time. Especially once she added in tending to the garden that was slowly taking shape in the backyard. 'Thankfully, my warm up is a part of everything else. So I don't need another hour on top of what I already have.' Preparations for the day completed she sits on the back porch with a steaming cup of green tea and her breakfast. Breathing in the earthy smell of the freshly watered dirt, she smiles a small genuine smile, the barest twitches of her lips. She has half an hour before she has to put on her Outer mask and head to the Academy for the first day of school.

Her classmates at the Academy are perfectly normal little children, for the children of shinobi clans. Sakura soon choses Yamanaka Ino as her guide. She's a bright, bubbly girl, and the daughter of a T&I shinobi, as she'd bragged in class. A good midline between knowledgeable and slightly dark that anyone truly aware of what shinobi do is, and a normal, innocent, little girl. So Sakura sits by her at lunch times, adapts her mannerisms and quietly says that her mom makes her bento when her classmates chatter about their lunches during break.

No one here knows that all of Sakura's family is dead, and no one needs to. The small lie keeps the awkward questions and pitying stares at bay. It's not perfect though, modifying Outer for the Academy, and she ends up as the class target for the kunoichi's. The same way that the Uzumaki kid is for the boys, and just about everyone else it seems. The teasing is basic, and the pranks unimaginative, so Sakura is really bothered. It means no one tries to get invited over to her place. With Ino as her model, and the general disdain of the class, Sakura can happily exist within the assumptions her classmates have already boxed her up into.

It's a relief to get home at the end of the day. To be able to take off the bright red tunic and put on an old grey shirt and head into the garden. With Outer packed safely away in a back corner of her brain, Sakura can relax. Today she's going to set up the first of five raised garden plots. There's an abandoned training ground not far from the main house, still littered with debris. She's been bringing back rocks, and the kind of logs that ninja often used for Kawarimi, as their sensei had told them about in class when Inuzuka-kun had whined about wanting to learn jutsu already, for a while now.

"It looks like there's enough to create the walls now." Sakura says to the clear blue sky and heads down to the back of the garden, there's some thick clay not far down below the topsoil near the fence. With a small wheelbarrow and a spade she sets about hauling it up to where she's laid out the materials for the wall in a basic rectangle. It hard work, and her muscles are already protesting from their first taijutsu lesson, but she manages to get on the short walls done. It looks pretty funny, a chest high wall of bits of rock and timber with the beginnings of the two long sides poking out from the corners. She's covered in mud when she finishes, so she strips off her clothes and leaves them and her shoes on the back porch, leaving them to be picked up for washing after she has a bath.

She stays in the heated water for a long while, letting the heat drain the tension out of her tired body. It's already 6pm when she finally makes her way out of the steamy bathroom, leaving the door and window open to vent the steam out. After dressing in her pajamas, she picks up her dirty clothes, and the tunic she'd worn to the Academy that day and puts them in a bucket to soak. She'll wash them properly after she's eaten. When she falls into bed at 8 o'clock, the dinner dishes are drying in the rack, her clothes have been washed and are hanging out in the laundry.

She sleeps soundly, without dreams until she wakes the next morning as the pale light of predawn starts to filter into her room.

The rest of the week goes much like that first day. The sensei at the Academy introduce them to the various aspects of shinobi life, outlining the things they'll have to cover to pass the final exam. According to Iruka-sensei, it takes most students two or three years to make it that far. A few of the other students in Sakura class have already been there for a year, even two. The garden at the main house progresses steadily, by the time the Sunday at the end of Sakura's first Academy week comes, all of the five plots have walls. It will be the project of the of the next week to fill them with earth.

Iruka-sensei had mentioned in passing that higher level jutsu had elemental properties. Earth release, or Doton; Fire release, or Katon, which the Uchiha clan were known for; Water release, or Suiton; Wind release, or Fuuton, were the four basics. He'd also mentioned Lightning release, or Raiton; apparently a few Konoha nin had created specialist combat jutsu that were lighting based.

"A Doton jutsu would be pretty handy, but by the sounds of it an Academy student has a chakra pool that's about the size of an acorn." Sakura mutters with a sigh, surveying her handiwork. It's going to take most of the next week to fill in the plots, she's going to have to dig it out into the wheelbarrow and then cart it to the plots. "It's going to be hell doing it after taijutsu sessions. Well, it will level off the rest of the yard, if nothing else."

Sakura starts the next weekend in a huff. Apart from the taijutsu classes, the Academy classes are boring. Half of it she already knows from her time camped out in the Civilian library, and she hasn't even needed to go looking for things in the Academy floor of the Shinobi library. "It's pathetic." She grumble-snarls, stabbing the spade into the earth. There's only one more plot to fill, and then she can start on the planting. "Anyone who doesn't know the basic history of the village has been living under a rock all their life. And even if they were, there is such a thing as a library! I'm sure even Naruto can read."

The end of the third week brings a pop quiz, and the reshuffling of the classes. Funnily enough, Naruto, Kiba, and Shikamaru all manage to stay in their class. Several others who Sakura hasn't bothered to remember the names of get demoted to the other class. Mizuki-sensei, the teacher of the other class is there when they do the test, all of the year in the one classroom. There's something about him Sakura doesn't like, a twitch under her skin when his eyes pass over her. He doesn't feel dangerous, in the way all shinobi do, but unstable. He feels more like the bandits that killed her family did. She's glad he's not her full time sensei.