Sakura opened her eyes to find Hotaru glaring at her.
"You look sick."
"I'm not sick."
"I don't care. Go to the Hospital. You've been looking worse and worse and worse and at this point even if you have to take weeks off it'd be worth it just to have you looking more… alive."
She couldn't possibly look as bad as everyone kept saying. "Fine, fine."
She was fine, really… just.
Sometimes it was hard, to get the sleep she was supposed to.
It wasn't the feeling of having to be constantly on alert like it had been before; it was more that she found it hard to quiet her self-recriminations, to give her time to sleep between the bouts of guilt over how little she had yet accomplished.
She still had her sleeping pill prescription, just not enough for every day. They were enough, though, kept her rested enough to stay active, to keep up with her duties.
Her therapist, when she checked herself into the Hospital, did not agree.
"Sakura." Yamanaka Souto said. "Sakura."
"I'm fine!"
"Sakura." He'd gone right past recriminations—well, actually, he'd tried those on her before. Now he was simply relying on his voice to carry the message.
It was unnecessary though.
She was fine.
And she couldn't word her guilt, couldn't explain properly the knowledge that she could have done better, should have done better—would have done better, if she were a better person.
The Hospital saw no reason to keep her.
Yamanaka Souto canceled her sleeping pill prescription—said she needed the wake-up call.
Sakura went home.
She'd skip training today; Kakashi needed a break anyway.
.
Kakashi took a breath, released it, then steeled himself again.
Then he knocked.
It wasn't that big a deal, he knew. It wasn't even the first time he worked with Kushina! She'd been around all the time when he was just beginning to learn how to use his new chakra, how to wrangle it into something that resembled control.
But he hadn't realized, then, that she and Sensei were dating.
Rin had.
Even Obito had.
He'd been distracted.
Didn't make it any less embarrassing, to be the last to know, especially when Sensei wasn't even trying to hide it from him, but—
Well.
Now he knew.
The door opened with a woosh, red hair streaming through the air and revealing how quickly she must've run to the door.
"Kakashi! Come in!"
That was another thing.
Kushina was nice to him.
Not normal nice.
Not even 'oh, you're just a kid' nice.
No, she was 'I'm dating your guardian' nice.
"Do you want anything to drink? A snack? Um—"
"Usually I train with one of the Yamanaka today, with the restriction that I'm not allowed to use ninjutsu and she's not allowed to physically hurt me. She's sick, or something, though, so I was wondering if you'd like to train me instead."
"Same restrictions?"
Kakashi fidgeted. "No. I really want to practice my chakra. I know we'd have to go out of the village—"
"Oh, that's no problem!" Kushina said, waving his concerns away. "I like the idea of keeping the no injury challenge, though—I don't think I've done that one before and all my teachers were never happy about my precision."
Kakashi held back the urge to refuse—he didn't like the idea that she was just refusing because he was a kid, like Sakura had—and did the calculations in his head.
Kushina was very, very good.
That might—well, not level—slope the playing field. Which would mean Kushina would be trying harder, pulling more out of her arsenal—giving him a more varied challenge.
"Sounds good."
.
Sakura stared at the ceiling.
It was late, very late, and—
Nothing.
Every time she tried to close her eyes, to rest for just a little while, she remembered Sakumo. Orochimaru. The prisoners. The dead children, made into genin well before they reached any sort of understanding of the risk. The many children who had been disappeared over the years.
And then, inevitably, her eyes would snap open once more.
She needed her pills.
She didn't have any.
Perhaps a fuinjutsu seal?
Sakura's door creaked open, and Sakura's head fell in that direction.
"Arato?"
"Knew you'd still be awake. We're having this conversation now."
"Do we have to?"
Sakura wasn't up for this. She wasn't—
Oh.
She wasn't fine, was she?
"Shit."
"Figured it out, have you?"
"I've been spiraling, haven't I?"
"Little bit. Well, more than that, actually. So, what's up?"
Sakura sat up, finally turning to look properly at Arato.
His ponytail—he hadn't even gotten ready for bed—was faintly visible in the moonlight, but the shadows of the room obscured the rest of his face as he leaned against the wall.
"I… I just…" How to explain?
The room fell into silence.
Sakura stared at Arato, Arato stared at Sakura.
"I just, feel like, like I should have done more. Like I should be doing more."
Arato's eyebrows twitched—confusion.
"Minato's already accomplished so much, so many of the things that I've wanted to do for years, and in such a short time period, and I've never been okay with kids in life threatening situations, or anything near that, and I've never been okay with the way the orphanage is run, and I've never been okay with… with so much, really, and yet I just… did nothing. Buried my head in the sand."
Sakura closed her eyes.
It felt awful, to say it out loud, bile faintly detectable in the back of her mouth.
She was a failure for so much too. For not stopping Orochimaru earlier, for not stopping Danzo earlier, for not—
"Are you kidding me?"
"What?"
"You have to be joking."
Sakura blinked.
Arato fell forward, muffling his laugh in Sakura's blankets. "Sakura, you've accomplished so much! You stopped an assassin when you were what, thirteen? You've invented, like, a billion things, including the radio and telegraph, which have saved so, so many lives… you worked together with the Sannin Jiraiya to figure out what the traitor Orochimaru was doing, you're even doing some sort of project with the other Sannin according to rumor, you rescued me during your first solo mission… you helped kick our Head into gear, you took in Ibiki and turned him into an incredibly well adjusted kid, you were involved in several instrumental Diplomatic missions, you've revolutionized the economy which is considered to be the main reason we transitioned from war to peace so cleanly… you were on the team that created false bodies, which has drastically dropped the number of people who die to disease… should I keep going?"
Sakura—
"Okay, I'll keep going. Um, let's see… Okay, according to rumor you helped Shuji in figuring out some sort of major technological innovation that I don't understand, you helped run the city's recovery from the pollution… Sakura, I've only been here for a couple weeks and a day hasn't gone by where I haven't heard or seen something amazing you've accomplished. If you really do think you've sat around the past couple years doing nothing, then you're an idiot."
"You're supposed to be nice to me; I'm sick."
"Self-inflicted sickness. You needed a shock."
"My therapist said the same thing."
"Smart man. Woman? Man."
Sakura forced a laugh, shrugged. "I just got in my head a bit, that's all."
"When was the last time you slept more than an hour or two without sleeping pills?"
"Shut up."
"And the thing is, according to Juro you had been perfectly able to sleep most nights without any aids… until Orochimaru fled. And since then you've been taking pills more and more often."
Sakura shrugged, not disagreeing.
"So…"
"So, I've been put on mandatory leave anyway. I'll go back to the Hospital tomorrow."
"Not tonight?"
Sakura growled, then forced herself out of bed.
.
Obito smiled, feeling the holes in the target.
Take that, blindness!
"Your aim's improving," Sensei said, pride evident in his voice. "I'd say you're on month away from being able to go back in the field at most."
"Nice!" Obito said. "And Rin and Kakashi and me get to still be a team?"
"Yep., Minato said. "You're a known team, you've got a healer, and you're very, very easy to underestimate—you'll be great. You'll be restricted to training and Diplomatic missions with Kakashi for the next two years, though."
"Yeah, I know. Kakashi's got all these ideas about group attacks we can practice, and I like the idea of practicing more stealth stuff anyway." Obito smiled, his cheeks aching—today he'd passed test after test and at this point it was basically a guarantee that he'd get everything he'd ever wished for… with maybe the exception of being the Hokage, but there was still time for that.
"Maybe we'll need to get you a mask like Kakashi's, though. You're quite… expressive."
"Rin could get one too! We could have shark teeth on them! Or, or creepy smiles! Maybe a word or something?"
"You can talk about that with your teammates later." Sensei shuffled, then ruffled his hair. "Hey, I have to go back to work. Keep practicing your running, okay? You need to trust your senses more when you're tree jumping."
"Will do!"
Sakura frowned, staring at her new pill bottle—anti-anxiety meds.
It was, she knew, a necessary step.
It still felt like failure.
But then, that was the whole problem—Sakura basically had two default options, either shoving her feelings down or letting them overwhelm her, and neither was healthy.
This, hopefully, would help.
She still had to take the next three days off—to "catch up on sleep," apparently.
Well, she'd gotten a good thirteen hours last night, so she kind of felt caught up.
She doubted her co-Head would accept that, though.
Training it was.
Her usual training field was taken by a group of genin, so Sakura made her way to one of the further ones—she really needed more ninjutsu practice, and putting it off more wouldn't make it any easier.
She just sucked at ninjutsu.
Small reserves, the most common elemental affinity in Fire, her complete disinterest…
Well, at least the reserves made ninjutsu training quick.
Several hours later, after ninjutsu training and running exercises and genjutsu training and everything else, Sakura went home. Juro was out on a date, Arato was studying for his next assignment, and Akina had already left, so she and Juro made their way to Ikue' and Ren's for dinner.
They hadn't even entered when one of the second-story windows opened.
"Aunt Sakura! I need help!"
Sakrua laughed.
"What?"
"The Uchiha are scary, and the sealing is hard, and I have like a million things they say they want in their seal and I have no idea what's actually important enough to put in there! Give me advice!"
"Polite." Ibiki snickered.
"Eh, he's stressed," Sakura murmured, then, louder, "After dinner, okay?"
"Fine!" Rento really did look stressed—his hair was short enough for half of it to have fallen out of his ponytail, his shirt looked slept in, and Sakura knew for a fact that he'd taken personal time to focus more on the seal—he mostly hadn't wanted to deal with the Uchiha/Hyuuga tension, but the Uchiha were also paying him and the Yamanaka a significant amount, so even though Research was behind Hotaru had given his permission—Sakura had excused herself, claiming conflict of interest, and her co-head had been furious that's she'd gotten there first. "You better have good advice, though!"
"All my advice is good—it's mine!"
.
Rin frowned, rubbing at a bruise over her right shin. She'd known that she was far behind her teammates in taijutsu strength, but she hadn't realized she was this behind—even after months her regular spars with her cousins still regularly saw her barely holding her own against chuunin.
"Doesn't your shift start soon?"
Rin looked up, confused, then saw the sun's shadows. A quick bow and thanks, and Rin was sprinting to the Hospital.
She finally finished making rounds—she was with the geriatrics unit, for the moment, which always took a lot of time—four hours later, and wasted no time ducking into the locker room. She needed to change her shirt already, and based on the early afternoon it was unlikely she'd have to bump up against her chakra limit anyway, so healing her shin bruise would at least make the remaining four hours more comfortable.
She'd just changed—uniforms and laundry were, thankfully, supplied by the Hospital—and gotten to work on her bruise (it was a bad one; cousin Sou was a taijutsu expert and the damage reflected that) when the door opened.
Rin glanced up, expecting someone from geriatrics, or maybe the Maternity ward—they shared the locker room on the east side.
Tsunade didn't even pay a second's mind to Rin's clear shock at seeing her enter.
She marched to the laundry basket fishing pile after pile of used uniforms into a bag.
"Um… hello."
"Hey." A quick glance, recognition. "How's… whatever the kid has you doing?"
The kid, Rin knew, was Minato.
"Um, we're about to start training group formations."
A grunt. A glance, looking at the bruise. "You get that from training?"
"Not with the team. With my cousins—I'm trying to improve my taijutsu… just not having much luck."
That caught Tsunade's attention. She stood, narrowing her eyes at the much younger girl. "You're one of those that chose medic partially because of chakra reserve issues, aren't you?"
"Um, yeah."
"How's your control?"
"Good. Really good."
"But right now you don't think you have enough to protect all of a limb when protecting with it?"
"Not unless I want to run out. Usually I do, but I knew I had a shift after, so—"
"Yeah, none of that matters. The important thing is that the way the Academy teaches you to use chakra to fortify your body is stupid." Tsunade glanced at the bag she was holding, then back at Rin. "When does your shift end?"
"Um, four hours. Eight."
"Alright, then you'll probably want to sleep. You have training scheduled with your cousins tomorrow morning, too?"
"Yes. Then training with Obito and Kakashi the next day."
Tsunade waved a hand. "Yeah, okay. Just—you know where my house is? Of course you do—just come over tomorrow morning, at like… nine or something. I'll teach you a much better way to go about taijutsu using chakra control and targeted hits. I'll let the kid know, too—he's been on the receiving end enough to train you when you're with your team."
"Thank you!"
"Yeah, yeah…" Another glance at the bag. "Not like I'm doing anything else helpful anyway."