Hello, lovelies! I'm really sorry for how long this took but life has been crazy! The next update will be around mid June bc by then, I'll be back home! Thank you so much for all the continuous support, you guys are truly the best 3
"Sakura!" Her mum banged on her door. "There's a chunin in my living room saying he can only leave with you. Hokage's orders apparently."
Sakura blinked blearily at her ceiling and tried to situate herself. It was always dishoriating waking up after passing out and she could still feel a faint throb to her head when she moved to get up.
Yesterday had exceeded all expectations she had. Working with a clone had opened her eyes to so many new ways she could improve herself. She could use it to hone her chakra control and expand her reserves but there was so much more. She could use it to spar with herself and double her learning speed and never depend on anyone else. Not to mention the thousand of ways using a clone with perfect control could be useful during a mission.
"Sakura!" The annoyance in her kaa-san's voice was clear and just what she needed to get a move on.
"I'm coming!"
Sakura jumped around her room, putting on the lighter version of her uniform quickly and arming herself with all the weapons she regularly used, taking care to hide a few. She didn't know what to expect of the summoning.
She did a quick check to make sure she had an emergency backpack ready before going downstairs.
"Kotetsu!"
"Yo." The man raised his chin in greeting and regarded her with an amused expression on his face. "Are we going to war?"
"We're going to Tsunade-shishou, right?" Sakura grinned at him, his easygoingness a fresh start to her day.
"Good point." Kotetsu saluted her mother who had been watching with a sour expression on her face. "C'mon, kid. We don't have all day."
"Bye, okaa-san." Sakura sent a strained smile towards her mother's general direction and left, quickly pulling her fellow chūnin behind her.
He looked at her with a curious expression and Sakura knew he had picked up on the awkward tension between them. Kotetsu didn't say anything, though, only took to the roofs with her and chattered away about the latest gossips until they reached the Hokage tower.
Shizune was hurrying out of her office when they got there and she barely smiled in their direction before moving on, a pile of scrolls on her arms. They entered the office without knocking.
"Kotetsu!" Tsunade threw a scroll at the man who caught it easily. "You and Izumo are to meet Gai at the gates for your next mission. B-rank, anything you need to know is inside that scroll. Dismissed."
"Uh, hai, Tsunade-sama…" Kotetsu blinked dazedly at Sakura, reeling a bit from the woman's abruptness before he shook himself and turned to leave. "See you soon, Sakura."
"Good luck!" Sakura waved at him.
"Sakura." Tsunade's voice was as sharp as her gaze. "Shizune told me she gave you all the books you needed to read before Saturday. You've read them all already?"
"Yes, shishou." Sakura nodded. "I'm a fast reader. I'm working on another set of books now on chakra."
"Chakra?" Tsunade raised an eyebrow and put her chin on top of her linked hands.
"Chakra control, chakra manipulation and how to increase chakra reserves," Sakura said shyly, trying not to sink into herself as the Hokage waited for her to continue. "I figured it would be useless to learn how to do medical ninjutsu if I didn't have enough chakra to back it up. Falling into a chakra coma during a battle doesn't seem like a good idea."
"Iryo-nin are trained to use the least amount of chakra they can to heal a comrade," Tsunade challenged.
"I know." Sakura squared her jaw and took a deep breath to steady herself. She knew her shishou was testing her resolve. "But I have a civilian background against me. Right now I feel confident I can do simple techniques without spending any unnecessary chakra but medical ninjutsu is a thousand times harder than what I'm practicing on. I'm also at the edge of the ideal age for increasing one's chakra reserves, I figured it wouldn't hurt to try."
"What you're practicing on…" Tsunade trailed off, raising both her eyebrows in a sign for Sakura to keep going.
"Shadow clones." Sakura cleared her throat. "A shadow clone, to be more specific. I'm using it to empty my chakra reserves in a controlled way, I can stay safe while also training myself in actual chakra control by making it go further away from me. Then I realised I could actually double my results by using the clone's experiences, you know? So I put the whole training it to go further away on the backburner while I have reading materials but once I get on to practicing, I'll definitely go back to that. But, you know, right now, the whole doubling my reading/learning capacity is a pretty huge thing don't you think?"
Sakura stared wide eyed at the Hokage who stared right back at her.
"Shadow clone."
"Yes."
A beat of silence.
"That's very clever, Sakura." A teasing smile Sakura had never seen curled on her painted lips. "And also very sly of you."
"I didn't mean to—"
"No, this is good. Short cuts like these are going to give you the edge you need to reach your teammates level. Your barely average chakra reserves are a problem and working on enhancing them and on how to lower your expenditure to a minimum is a great idea." Tsunade's smile turned sharper. "Good job, Sakura."
Sakura went to bow but at the last minute remembered herself and ended up giving a weird nodd of her head instead.
"Thank you, Tsunade-shishou."
"Now that you read all the books, I think it's time for your test." Tsunade clasped her hands together and leaned back on her chair. She opened a drawer and took out a piece of paper and a pencil. "I was going to give you a full week to memorise everything but I'm curious about your progress so far. Let's begin. Draw one human body for all the main systems, organs, veins, chakra. We'll do the quiz based on them."
Sakura drew them slowly but surely, her mind easily projecting an image of what she needed. She had studied everything carefully and Tsunade had started off with easy questions but the further they got into the questionnaire, the harder it was to answer.
At first it was strictly about the contents of the books but then Tsunade-shishou started asking about specific scenarios for specific types of surgeries and even moved on to creating fighting scenarios in which she had to perform on field aid.
You have three teammates, one of them has a broken femur, the other a stab to the gut and the last is unconscious for an unknown reason. The enemy is still able to fight. What do you do?
Your teammate can't walk because of a broken leg and you're outnumbered. What do you do?
You got separated from your team by the enemy and won the fight but is injured. You don't know your teammates condition or where they are. What do you do?
At first, Sakura floundered at these what-do-you-do questions but after a while, she got the hang of it, answering with what she thought was the most logical course of action.
"Well," Tsunade got up from her chair and went around the table to lean against it. "You got all the theory questions right, somehow. That's good. A solid base it's what makes a good medic." She didn't spare a single smile her way before continuing. "However, you failed all the scenario questions."
Sakura gaped at her, shame colouring her cheeks. How could she have gotten them all wrong?
"I—I'm sorry, shishou." Sakura bowed low, hoping so fervently this didn't mean she had lost her apprenticeship that she felt it in her veins.
Tsunade's warm hands settled on either side of her shoulders and straightened her up.
"What did I say about bowing, girl?" She leaned down a bit so they were eye to eye. "You got it all wrong because it doesn't matter what you answer here, safe behind these four walls. Being a combat medic in real life doesn't equate only to what injuries you have to take care of and how many enemies there are around you. Rules mean very little on the battlefield and that is something you'll only learn by practicing. It won't happen for a while, but you still need to be prepared for the reality of it. Do you get it?"
Sakura did. She really did. She had seen during her first C-rank how everything goes wrong so fast. Had learned first hand that the Shinobi Rule Book couldn't be followed completely to the letter. The battlefield was different from learning about things in the Academy.
"Yes, shishou." Sakura replied quietly, the heaviness of her short experiences suddenly laying hard on her shoulders.
"Maa." Tsunade clapped her shoulders hard enough to bruise. "I think it's time I teach you what every medic-nin learns during their first lesson. How to bring a fish back to life."
Sakura had read on that exercise thoroughly and was fairly confident she could do it but her stomach still rolled a bit with nerves.
Tsunade-shishou explained it once again for her while they waited for Shizune to come back with a large bowl of water with a fish in it. Sakura was handed a scroll and a brush to do the healing seal herself and was pleased that it passed Shizune's inspection.
"Good sealing skill," the older woman said with a kind smile. "You have steady hands."
Sakura felt her cheeks heat. It felt good to be praised, even if for something simple.
The fish exercise was harder than she expected it to be. She knew every single detail and step to it, had read it and knew exactly what to do—insert your chakra into the fish's network, get it to stimulate the fish's own dying chakra back into motion to bring it back—but it still took her most of the morning just trying to insert her chakra into its network. It also didn't help that Tsunade-shishou kept asking questions in between the mountain of paperwork she was taking care of.
"What are you doing now, Sakura?"
"Inserting my chakra very carefully, shishou."
"Yes, but why so carefully?"
"I don't want to fry his tiny chakra system up with large quantities of my chakra."
"Why work on a dead fish?"
"Small animals have simpler chakra systems, it makes it easier for chakra insertion."
"What else?"
"It needs to be dead so I can practice coaching its chakra into movement through its coils again. It's a similar experience to the one iryo-nin do on patients. We have to tune our chakra frequency to our patients, a more difficult task than this one but similar enough."
Sakura didn't take a break when lunchtime came around. She stuffed an onigiri Shizune brought right into her mouth and didn't even finish chewing it before going back to work. She was sweating a lot and she knew her chakra levels wouldn't handle much more but she still kept at it.
The first time she felt her chakra enter the fish's network she almost jumped around in joy. Somehow, she managed to keep still and focused. Her chakra felt heavy compared to the feeling of the fish's chakra so she instinctively reduced the flow she was sending into it, trying to make it as light and airy as the one beneath her hands.
The seals on the scroll helped her focus and pretty soon, she found herself deep into some kind of meditative place where she used her chakra as a guide. She could feel everything with it. It was so palpable, so real beneath her hands she could practically see it.
The fish's chakra network was almost empty, only a single thread circled around it so slowly it almost looked like it wasn't circling at all but it was enough for Sakura to know which direction to go.
Her first attempt was so careful and small she could barely feel any difference. She tried again, increasing her chakra influx and speed by exactly 5% at each try. When she got to her third attempt, the fish took a gasping breath and started debating against the floor.
Sakura opened her eyes, not even realising she had closed them, and turned to look at her shishou and Shizune. Her smile fell quickly when she saw the looks on their faces.
"There was no green light." Shizune gaped at her. "But the fish is alive."
"Did I do something wrong?" Sakura asked hesitantly.
Tsunade gave a quiet, disbelieving laugh before shaking her head.
"No, Sakura. You just managed to perform the first task with precisely no chakra wasting. What Shizune is so surprised about is that your hands didn't emit any green chakra, common when a med-nin uses healing chakra. What most people don't know is that it is only a visual manifestation of the chakra the user is spending but the body isn't absorbing. You inserted the necessary amount of chakra into the fish's system and only the slightest bit escaped. The only thing glowing green was your palm and even then it was very little."
"Oh," Sakura said dumbly.
"But how…" Shizune was still staring at her with wide eyes and Sakura couldn't keep her cheeks from flushing again.
"Sakura must have better chakra control than we previously thought." Tsunade rummaged around her drawers for a bit before finding a yellow, scrunched up piece of paper. "Come here girl."
Sakura went to her desk, her steps a bit cautious when she caught the excited expression on the Hokage's face.
"This is an old test for chakra control. It's quite simple, just insert your chakra into the paper and try to smooth it out." Tsunade put it on top of her desk and reached for Sakura's hands to put them over the small piece of paper.
Sakura was a bit thrown by the quick turn of events but still did as she was told. She spread her hands carefully over the paper and did the same steps she had taken with the fish. The paper obviously didn't possess any chakra network but it seemed like it welcomed her chakra easily, so she figured it was made from a chakra paper.
Its lack of resistance made it easy for Sakura to spread the tiniest amount of chakra around to see what she could do. Just like she had felt the fish before, she could feel every plane and crease of the paper. She could see it even with her eyes closed.
Sakura didn't really have a guideline to follow on this one but decided to take a risk and force the chakra she had introduced into it to the crease closest to the bottom left edge. She focused her efforts on flattening the highest part of the crease, using the table beneath it as a guide.
It was slow, tedious work and by the end of it, Sakura was sweating so much she had sweated through her sleeveless shirt but she was gratified when she opened her eyes and found the yellow paper completely straight on the table.
"Right." Tsunade laughed sharply when she turned the paper around to look at some red markings on the back. "A ninja who has above 70% is considered to have good enough chakra control to become a medic-nin. The usual rate that anyone can enhance on the chakra control department during medical training is about 2%. You, Sakura, have precisely 97,3% control over your chakra as you are right now. That means…"
Shizune continued for her in a shocked whisper. "That means that by the time you're done with your training you'll have about 99,3% control." She gave a disbelieving laugh. "This is amazing."
"Do you have enough chakra to make a clone?" Tsunade asked her, a sharp gleam to her eyes.
"Hai, shishou." Sakura formed the seal and focused on using exactly half of her chakra. It was with its usual soft pop that her clone appeared.
"Amazing!" Shizune smiled at her. "Not a single bit of smoke and very little sound. This could be very useful during covert missions."
"Indeed," Tsunade agreed, "but it can also be a hinder. Sometimes during direct combat missions, you can hide surprise elements with the smoke from a clone. Can you try doing it?"
Sakura nodded at her shishou and focused herself with a seal again. It was actually harder to release more chakra than necessary after getting used to setting herself on a strict hold but she managed it. She released exactly 3% more than she would normally do and watched in satisfaction as a clone burst into existence with a cloud of smoke that was slightly bigger than the ones she had seen from Naruto.
"Excellent. Tomorrow we will start on scrapes." Tsunade smiled at her. "Training you will be fun."
Sakura had it in herself to feel happy to hear that but her shishou's voice sounded distant to her. She registered the sky outside and how night had fallen, she noticed the village had quieted and that the tower was almost silent but Sakura couldn't react anymore. All she could do was give the tiniest of smiles before passing out.
I'll let you guys know in advance, this is going to be a long ass rant and probably a bit too salty for some.
Oh-kay! First things first, thanks for everyone who pointed out last chapter about the book! I'm writing very much in advance and, because I don't have a Beta, when I go back to the chapters to post them I basically edit grammar and typos. I actually had a reason for the book to have been dropped by the clone but changed my mind while I was writing (the character who was supposed to pick it up is only going to make an appearance later on in the story) and when I went back to it, it just completely slipped my mind. My bad.
ABOUT SHADOW CLONES: You guys have been wonderful for the most part but some people were really bothered by it (and one in particular was even pretty rude about it) so I thought I'd do some explaining. In the series, and I'm saying this bc I did go back and checked the episodes and spent countless of hours on Naruto Wiki, doing shadow clones is supposedly a jounin-level technique. Doing the taju kage bunshin (the one Naruto does) is a forbidden jutsu because just imagine how fucked up life would be if people could just conjure massive armies on the go. Anyways, I call bullshit. We see Kakashi telling Naruto that he's the only person in the village that could successfully use the clones for learning and that even he had problems with it and could only have a few for a few hours…. uhm, okay? So, you're telling me that Tsunade with her crazy chakra control and massive chakra reserves couldn't do it? What makes a jutsu difficult, by the way, because I find it hard to believe that Naruto would ever be able to do something Tsunade couldn't (at least before he became the op idiot we all love). For me that was all because Naruto is about, well, Naruto, and a lot about the show has to be, you know, about him. Making him special is a necessity.
So yeah, while it makes sense that people wouldn't be able to make taju kage bunshin, it makes no sense that someone with excellent chakra control and bullheaded determination like Sakura couldn't do it. My take on Kage Bunshin is based on the academy level clones and their difference. They're more a genjutsu than anything, they can't take any hits whereas naruto's kage bunshin can take some hits before disappearing. The better chakra control, the more corporeal the clone and the bigger chakra reserves (meaning, the more chakra gets put into the clone seeing as kage bunshin supposedly take half of your chakra) the more clones you canmake.
There's also another aspect of the jutsu which is the whole memories (and chakra) come back to the user once its dispelled. To put it simply, it makes no fucking sense. Chakra just doesn't magically travels the atmosphere back to the user without a conduit and for there to be a conduit, there has to be a thread linking the user to the clone, you feel me? Keeping that thread and extending it has got to take some control and I have no explanation as to why Naruto can do it when he's told time and time again that he has terrible chakra control. The only way I can explain it without chucking it up to plothole/inconsistencies is that some things (like the rasengan and all the op moves Naruto has) requires chakra control and others (like medical ninjutsu and shit) requires more chakra finesse. Yeah, I dunno either.
My whole point in this fic, however, is going to be a fix-it for Sakura (and to some extent Tsunade and the other girlies). What if Kishimoto wasn't a misogynistic bastard and actually followed through with female characterisation? You said Tsunade is a baddass bitch who takes shit from no one? You bet your ass that's going to be 100% how she acts. You said Sakura can pick up tree walking on her first try? Oh, darling, you just get ready for what more she'll be able to do.
So yea, this fic is an AU, things are going to be based on but ultimately different from cannon and I hope you guys are okay with that!
This is probably one of my last rants on this story, you guys! I feel like the more I write here, the less I'm being a good writer, you know? I don't know! What do you guys think? Vote on the comments, please, if you like big rants or ir you'd rather read them on Tumblr or smth…
Hope you all have a lovely day!