Sakura's development began to skyrocket shortly after her birthday. Continued practice finally enabled her to communicate, and immediately after she began to talk non-stop (a not-uncommon reaction in the Yamanaka family, apparently.) Before long, she'd overtaken Kohana in ability, easily managing to string together three or four words even if the grammar was more than a little questionable. She'd also taken to 'exploring' or 'running away,' depending on who you asked, and had quickly met all her family's immediate neighbors and tried to make friends with every person, animal, and plant she encountered. In the midst of that goal she'd found a tree swing built for someone her age, and now spent a good chunk of every day trying to convince one of her older siblings to take her to swing on it. She had also crawled out of her crib enough that her own bed was placed right where it used to be.

This led to a rather sharp change in how she was treated, one that Kohana felt at the same time. Their days were no longer solely about playing for hours on end; instead, Kaa-san would teach them how to catch and throw balls, would have them race each other in the field behind their house, and would teach them hand signs, even if she clearly didn't expect them to be able to perform them any time soon.

Both were also trained to use the bathroom alongside each other and were no longer allowed to call out in the middle of the night unless it was an emergency—Kaa-san said their siblings, who were in charge of the nighttime check-ins, needed sleep too.

Their grammar was also corrected, nearly constantly, and they were expected to ask for something before they could get it, no matter what it was. It was as if every moment of their day had suddenly and inexplicably become more difficult—not hard, necessarily, but trying.

In this Sakura and Kohana quickly found themselves bonding. Kohana would frequently slip into Sakura's bed when she woke up scared, and Sakura would always bring whatever shiny new object she found to Kohana for identification purposes (her mother, for some reason, always seemed more concerned about where she got it than what its name was.)

Their sharp difference in size did not seem to bother Kohana, so Sakura did not let it bother her. It did, however, bother Fujio quite a bit. At three he was noticeably taller, more coordinated, and more coherent than either of them, but as they both continued forward on the developmental chain, they began taking part more in more in Fujio's lessons, while his former partner, the five-year-old Ayame, was being prepared to be sent to school in a few months with a few of their other clansmen.

Fujio didn't like this. He would frequently steal both of their toys and was very upset over 'his' time with Kaa-san being taken away, especially given how close the new baby was to arriving. Kaa-san disciplined him, of course, and Fujio would always say sorry (and to a large extent mean it), but Sakura could see that their rapid development also scared him. Kaa-san talked to him each time he did something mean, though, so Sakura did not let it bother her.

And anyway, Kohana was much more interesting.

When Sakura was fourteen months old, the baby was born.

Kaa-san went to the hospital to have her sixth daughter, Himari, and didn't leave for four months. Instead, the ten siblings who still lived at home moved in with their Aunt Hina, and beds were doubled and tripled up to make room for everyone.

Sakura cried.

A lot.

Arden's passed-on memories and awareness helped some, giving her more experience in coping, plus she'd been told that her mother would come back when she could, and that Sakura knew she'd met her aunt before and liked her, but it was hard in a way that was difficult to explain. Kaa-san was Sakura's anchor, and her anchor was gone.

The middle of summer brought the next semester of the Academy, and with it some changes. First, Sayuri moved out. She was thirteen, she proclaimed, and she and her friend Nara Yua were perfectly capable of affording an apartment between them. Sakura thought it had more to do with how she now not only shared her room with Akina, but also Aunt Hina's two oldest daughters, one of which had a massive crush on Sayuri's boyfriend, and the other who hated the cramped living conditions almost as much as Sayuri herself. Second, Aoi dropped out of the Academy. Something felt… wrong about that, especially given that he'd shown no uncertainty about becoming a shinobi before, but she and the rest of her siblings were warned not to question it. Instead, he became an apprentice to a merchant, and that was that. He also moved out, theoretically to be closer to his work.

Kaede, Kamui, Akina, and Arato stayed in the Academy, though, and Ayame was old enough to join them. Only Kamui was thinking of quitting, and Kaa-san apparently asked him to tough it out for one more semester before making his decision.

In terms of those left at home throughout the day, Fujio's behavior had deteriorated rapidly enough that they put him with the upcoming Academy students in the hope that his poorer showing would either cause him to mellow out or force him to work hard enough to keep up. Kohana and Sakura, on the other hand, were taught alongside Aunt Hina's youngest (a set of twin boys who, while jealous, did not see the same decline in behavior that Fujio had.)

Life went on.

It wasn't until September that Kaa-san returned home, holding a four-month-old bundle named Himari as she did. Tou-san was beside her, and while he was nearly unrecognizable to Sakura and Kohana, the older children greeted him quite amicably. The entire family had soon made their beds in their own house once more—except for the three oldest, of course, but they still made a regular point of visiting.

That night each child clamored to tell both Kaa- and Tou-san their life stories, and Sakura smiled as she watched her parents laugh and try to get only one of them to speak at a time. She enjoyed hearing about Ren's plumbing issues and his new girlfriend (the daughter of the plumber, surprisingly enough.) She giggled at Sayuri's drawn-out explanation over her breakup with Yuma Inuzuka and how she couldn't believe she'd dated him in the first place. While Aoi remained quiet, Sakura still appreciated seeing him, and her parents clearly felt the same—they obviously knew what was going on, even if Sakura didn't.

Kaede begged for help studying for Academy finals, and Kamui talked about an Akimichi restaurant willing to offer him an apprenticeship. Akina moaned about having to take Kunoichi classes, and Arato moaned about not being allowed to take them—boys had their own classes instead, but they didn't cover the same material. Ayame moaned about everything and everything, but mostly about how school was boring and her classmates sucked. Kaa-san clicked her tongue at that, and Tou-san warned her that her opinions would probably change in the coming years.

Fujio, surprisingly, was in a fantastic mood and described in great detail all he was learning from Uncle Haruto, and how Uncle Haruto thought he may be able to enter that winter if Tou-san and Kaa-san agreed (They said they'd think about it.)

Finally, it was Kohana and Sakura's turn, and they went back and forth explaining every little thing they'd said and done over the past few months ("and then I saw a caterpillar!," "and I found a centipede the next day!"), which, by the end of it, had them dubbed 'fake twins version 2'.

"More to do with personality than looks in your case, I'd say!" Tou-san had laughed. After all, the first set of fake twins—Kaede and Kamui—may have looked identical, but below the surface they were as different as could be.

The next day, after Kohana's and Sakura's wake-up time at eight (a time that would slowly decrease to five-thirty as they neared Academy age even if their bedtime, 20:00, remained the same), Tou-san took the two of them out to a field to test their progress.

"Alright, girls. Now, I know your mother is a bit better at fighting than me, but I'm not without my uses. Today we're going to go over all the physical basics you'll be expected to know before you enter the Academy. Don't worry, though—there's no rush, I just thought you'd like an overview."

That was… unexpected. Sakura was pretty sure that Fujio hadn't been given this opportunity.

Tou-san first went over all the muscle groups, most of which was review from Arden's memories, but with different names. He then went over their physical fitness requirements. They were to be able to sprint at a minimum speed 25 times in a row and run a mile at a slightly slower speed (though Tou-san did not mention what the speeds were), and they were to be able to complete at least 15 curl-ups, push-ups, and other stretches each (Tou-san showed them all, but only named a few, and Arden's memories did not include most of them), and prove they could hang off a rail for a certain length of time. Beyond that, Yamanaka standards also emphasized the ability to perform a number of acrobatic feats, including tumbles and hand-stands, as well as being able to imitate the beginning kata of the clan technique and successfully form the shapes for each hand sign when presented with them, and hit the target at least one out of ten times with both a kunai and shuriken.

While Sakura did not know why her father was showing her and Kohana all of this, its immediate effect was exciting the two girls as much as the pre-Academy lessons had Fujio—they spent the rest of the time they were supposed to spend training imitating Tou-san to the best of their ability, and allowing him to pick them up and kiss their bruises when they failed.

After that, however, another modification came, this one to their schedule. Generally, training time was from nine to eleven thirty every day, followed by an hour of lunch and play and a half hour of cleaning. At around one, they would be taught manners for about half an hour, followed by naptime, then half an hour of family history (which was really just memorizing from a scroll that held the Yamanaka family tree), followed by another hour of play, followed by a half-hour of math, followed by more play, followed by half an hour to an hour of reading (her older siblings were put in charge of this portion, and varied wildly in how much time and effort they were willing to put in), followed by play until dinner, getting ready for bed, and being put to sleep.

Apparently, this was all to change.

After a longer-than-usual family history class, when Kohana and Sakura turned to rush out as usual, their mother's hands on their shoulders stilled them. Instead, they were led back into their seats, and their math lesson began immediately. After another longer-than usual-math class, when Sakura's eyes began to droop and Kohana's weren't doing much better, they were finally allowed time to play.

As she and Kohana built a world out of sticks where each clan actually consisted of the animal they felt represented them—the Nara deer, Yamanaka crane, Akimichi cow, Senju monkey, and Uchiha cat among them—Sakura tried to figure out why they seemed to be being pushed faster now. As far as she knew there was no war going on, and her parents had not seemed to mind Kamui's plan to drop out at the end of the semester too much, so why was her and Kohana's workload suddenly increasing?

After an hour their play was interrupted again, this time for a new session about plants, which they hadn't even touched on yet.

By the end of that lesson, it was dinner time, and Sakura put her musings aside for the night.

By the end of the following week, though, it was all too clear what her parents were doing. Her development, in the months before and the month following her first birthday, had been almost miraculously fast as she picked up and used every piece of knowledge anyone gave her, gratefully pushing Arden's overwhelming amount of information back with bits and pieces actually relevant in her day-to-day life. Once she started to be taught with Kohana, however, she faltered, and her development eventually slowed to match her sister's—why would Sakura keep trying hard, after all, when she could maintain the same level of learning and gain a best friend along the way? It hadn't been a conscious decision, a planned-out process that started with purposefully flubbing a run and ended with her intentionally dumbing down her grammar to the point of near incomprehensibility, but the end result was the same.

And somehow her parents had figured it out.

So, the increase in training, the increasingly short amount of time in the day solely for play? That was for her benefit, not Kohana's. As the week passed, Kohana began to fall behind more and more, finding it difficult to try to up and therefore not bothering to try in the first place. Sakura, though, was unable to hide her understanding of the material for too long, and soon the gap between the two girls began to grow.

By the time the last leaves had fallen from the tree Kohana and Sakura's lessons had separated entirely, with Kohana's mimicking what they'd had before their parents came back and being taught by Tou-san, while Sakura took one-on-one (with baby Himari providing much-needed breaks) lessons with Kaa-san.

Upset with this shift, and desperate to find something to comfort her, Sakura turned to Arden's memories as relief.

In the past twenty months, her entire lifetime, Sakura had not once deliberately touched the mass of information that had been foisted upon her. Some of it leaked out, both in the initial flood and over time—bones and muscles and how they worked one day, a picture of a smiling red-headed girl the next, then how to measure slope, then the legendary Sannin, and so on—but she had to a certain extent been able to shield herself from the majority of it and seal whatever did come out back in whenever she could. When it did leak, she got headaches—something that was both painful and very worrying for her parents, so Sakura constantly worked to minimize the leaks as much as possible.

It was just such a daunting project, the lifetime of memories. Arden, she knew, had been twenty when she died. The difference between twenty months and twenty years of memories was substantial, and Sakura did not trust herself capable of dealing with the mountain when she was already having problems with the molehill.

But desperate times called for desperate measures, and when Sakura was told to be awake at 7:30 while Kohana was allowed to stay asleep until 8:30? Those were desperate times. She needed more understanding of the situation than what her current mind was capable of, so it was time to see what the remnants of Arden's could do. Carefully, achingly slowly, she let down her mind's barriers.

Sakura stifled a scream. She probably should have planned this out better, so she wasn't inexplicably freaking out in the middle of her afternoon nap (not technically scheduled anymore, but always taking place during a playtime regardless.) Her mother rushed towards her, picking her up and asking what was wrong as Himari cried for the rest of her feeding in the corner. Tears pricked Sakura's eyes—it was too much too much too much and she didn't know how to explain, how to stop this flood of information and thoughts and feelings from taking over and it was too much too much too much why isn't it stopping why won't it stop why why why (how had she forgotten that Arden had removed all physical sensations when she did this? How did she think this was a good idea?) and no matter what she did it wouldn't STOP, wouldn't even SLOW DOWN—

Sakura opened her eyes to a white ceiling.

She shifted, turning sideways. She was back in the hospital, but in a new room—one with cribs for older children. Through the walls of her cage she could see her parents and a doctor, the same one as last time, talking, though she couldn't make out any words. Sayuri was passed out in a chair beside the crib, with one hand hanging limply inside, and some of Sakura's favorite toys were scattered around the small mattress. Sakura hoped she'd not gone into a coma again—she was fairly sure that was what had happened last time—but it didn't look like she had. Sayuri looked the same, at least.

"Hi Sayuri…" Sakura mumbled. It was hard for her to talk, her exhaustion making any movement an effort, but she was happy she'd spoken when her sister jerked awake and grabbed her in a sweeping movement, snuggling her to her chest.

"Oh, Sakura. Why are you always unwell?" She mumbled. Her movement had caught their parents' and the doctor's attention, and now they huddled over Sakura while the doctor checked her reflexes and shone a light in her eye.

"She looks fine now… exhausted, perhaps, but otherwise fine. Sakura, sweetheart, can you tell us what happened?"

"Too much," Sakura said. The doctor was talking very loudly, so she didn't really want to answer, but maybe if she did, he would leave, and she could snuggle and sleep again.

"What was too much?" The doctor asked.

"Everything."

She fell asleep before he had time to respond.

When she woke again, it was to an argument between her doctor and her parents. Sayuri was gone but Kaede was there, resolutely ignoring the raised voices and instead trying to read through a textbook.

"—the best option! You keep saying that like—like you have any proof! Do you understand what you're asking us to do?!" That was Kaa-san's shouting.

"I understand your worry, but—" That must be the doctor.

"Our worry?! Our worry?! In one breath you are telling us that chakra sensing put her into this mess, and in the next you are saying you want to force her to sense chakra!"

"The problem," the doctor sighed (Sakura was fairly sure this wasn't his first time explaining this), "is that your daughter keeps on accidently triggering her chakra sense at an age where she has no capacity to deal with it, realizing she is unable to cope with the new sensations, and forcing it to shut down through a coma. This is not a healthy way of dealing with it, and if we can force her chakra sense to turn on without allowing her to force it off by blacking out then your daughter will be able to figure out how to cope with it, and turn it off in a less worrying way."

"Can't—can't you just turn it permanently off?" Kaa-san asked. "Make her never have to deal with the pain?"

"If I could, I would," The doctor said. "But that would be shutting off part of her chakra, which always comes with incredibly severe side effects. This really is the best way forward, the one which will see Sakura in the least pain overall. Not to mention, it would be best to do this now—children as young as she is usually lose most of their memories from this age, which would improve the chances that she doesn't remember this incident at all."

"She's a child genius," Sakura's father muttered. "I think she'll remember it."

They left the room.

Sakura stared at the ceiling. Her crib didn't have a mobile, but both of the ones bordering hers did, and she flicked her eyes back and forth, trying to decide if she liked the abstract one with simple painted metal shapes or the one with a half dozen wooden animals better.

Kaede began to snore. Sakura didn't think he was reading the textbook anymore.

She carefully sat up. She felt fine, though the tube connected to her right arm was slightly uncomfortable. She thought about pulling it out but decided not to.

Instead, she turned to her stuffed caterpillar, Dog (she'd found it funny, at least), and made it march across the crib edge. "I a hungry caterpillar and I eat…"

She looked at the rest of her toys before grabbing her stuffed monkey, Carrot. "I eat Carrot!" She mashed her two toys together and laughed. "Then Carrot try eat me!"

"They're… trying to eat each other?" Kaede asked. Oops. It looks like she woke him up. Oh well, at least this way they could play.

"You be Carrot," she said, thrusting the monkey at him. "I be Dog."

Kaede blinked at her. Sakura couldn't quite remember if he'd been introduced to her odd style of naming before, but she couldn't bring herself to care. It was time for Dog to get his meal. "I a hungry caterpillar!" Sakura shouted and attacked. Kaede huffed affectionately, but dutifully held the monkey as if he was fighting back.

The next time she woke up, Sakura wasn't hooked up to anything but she was in a different room and Kaa-san was holding her and crying. Sakura peered around the small room as the adults continued to speak.

"How long will this take?" Her father asked.

"We don't really know," the doctor said.

"Is… is this really where it's…" Her mother stuttered.

"We're in a training field that's known for low chakra content," the doctor explained. "It would be best not to overwhelm her."

The room was plain—six sides of white, with a door on one breaking up the monotony and an odd table in the middle, with boxes stored underneath. Against her will Sakura was lifted from her mother and placed on the table by the doctor, before he pulled something out from beneath the table—an odd blanket.

Sakura's mother gasped, but Sakura couldn't figure out what it was. She thought that Arden might know, but she also really didn't want to try to use the memories again, so she just stared at it curiously as the doctor wrapped it around her. That is, she stared at it curiously until he actually began to strap it into place. She squirmed, annoyed, as all possible movement for her arms and legs were restricted, and began to whine as a different odd series of straps held her head in place.

"Oh, I know, I know, honey," her mother cooed. "I know, I know."

"It'll all be over soon," her father added. The doctor made a skeptical noise which did little to comfort Sakura. Her father eyed him angrily. "We'll be with you the whole time."

"Alright," The doctor said. Sakura noticed for the first time that he was a Yamanaka, though the straight blond hair and odd Yamanaka eyes should have been a giveaway. "I'm going to partially open her first gate, so she can't fall unconscious, and then I'll unlock her natural sensory ability."

Sakura had not stopped crying.

"Let's begin."

The doctor touched her head with two fingers and closed his eyes in concentration. Sakura yelped as a prickling sensation began to invade her brain, and as much as she tried to shuffle away from it she could not—she couldn't move at all. Another sensation, this one more searing, took over, but it disappeared quickly as a sudden rush of—something—made every part of her body feel stuffed, as if it were about to explode. She scrunched her eyes shut and began to scream, barely feeling as the doctor took his fingers off and reapplied them to the base of her neck, absorbed as she was with needing to release the pent-up energy inside her, and having no way to do it.

Then–

When Sakura tried to access Arden's memories, it felt as if she was holding a piece of paper with a hole she wanted the water to exit through against a faucet of information. It was a lot, it was too much, but the water was already compressed—limited in the amount it could shove in her brain even before her attempts to stymie the flow. This? This felt more like holding that same paper against an ocean.

Her screaming became shrill, and did not stop until her voice was gone, and even then she still tried to make noise, tried to convey how much this hurt, tried to get it to end because it was too much too much too much too much too much too much why why why why why why why too much why too much why too much stop stop stop stop too much stop why stop too much why why stop please please stop too much why—

The sensation ended.

"We'll continue tomorrow," a man's voice said, and then she was unconscious.

It took a while, after she was born, for Sakura to get a sense of time. When she finally had it, a significant portion of her energy was spent protecting that knowledge, and using it whenever possible. The ability to tell time—to tell how long something takes, when something will be, what the daily schedule is like—was one that Sakura found infinitely useful, and therefore carried close to her chest as one of her crowning achievements (because getting that far had in no way been easy, especially given the difficulty of even counting up to twenty-four.)

That achievement was gone.

Sakura had no idea how much time passed between that first miserable day and the next time she regained consciousness. All she knew was the pain interspersed in between. She didn't remember being fed, or changed, or bathed. She didn't remember where she was, or who she was with, or why she was there. The pain, the all-consuming pain, took up her entire attention and left time for nothing else—not even time itself.

As this went on, though, the pain slowly began to lessen. Slowly the overwhelming amount of sensation at every side began to dissipate as she formed walls against its torrential power, and many of the signals constantly being sent to her brain began to go away. The longer she spent in pain, the more conditioned she became to the sensations, until at last it was only the three things that actually moved and changed around her that still caused her head to feel as if it was being carved in half, and even that was slowly dissipating, slowly being blocked by her new mental wall.

There was a man's voice, humming, she noticed one time. The next time she was coherent she felt a hand rubbing her brow, cleaning the sweat from it. As she slowly returned to awareness she also began to scream less, her blood-curdling (if entirely silent, muted by overuse) cries eventually becoming full body heaves, then whimpering, then simple tears.

"Oh, Sakura," her mother said the first time she stopped crying. The man—the evil, evil man—had stopped the sensations for a little while, and the end of the misery allowed her to finally take in her parents' faces.

They weren't doing well.

Her mother's long blond hair looked as if it didn't know what a brush was, and her eyes were so bloodshot they were nearly red. Her clothes, too, were the same as Sakura remembered her wearing last time, but she was pretty sure that wasn't just because it was the same day. Beside her mother stood her father, whose clean-shaven face now sported stubble and whose generally cropped brown hair now danced along the tips of his ears. His hand was on her foot, she noticed, and her mother's was cupping her head—shaved bald, apparently. She wondered when that happened.

"Mama. Chichi," Sakura got out.

"Sakura," her father moaned.

"It is time to start again," the evil man in the corner said, and her mother began to cry.

However long it took for her to become used to the constant sensory overload, it did happen, and to her surprise Sakura found herself (with her sensing thankfully off, her walls firmly up) being led out of the building shortly after the first time she made it through a session without any tears at all.

"We'll need regular appointments," the doctor was saying, "but I'll suggest one of my colleagues for that. I fear her memories of me won't be very pleasant. I'd also suggest letting her take it easy for the next three or so months—say until her third birthday. Let her recover and try not to strain her in any way at first, then slowly begin working up to what you had her doing before this happened. You have to remember that she didn't open her chakra sense because it was too much—the two were likely completely unconnected."

Mama and chichi made the appropriate noises, but it was clear they were barely listening. Sakura hoped the evil man was writing down whatever it was if it was important. She didn't want him to have a single excuse to see her ever again.

By the time they made it home it was well past dark, and most of her siblings were fast asleep. After a short bath, she was carefully put in her own bed and tucked in.

"Sleep well, little Sakura," her mother said. Her father kissed her forehead, and they lingered at the door before abruptly disappearing. Sakura sighed and closed her eyes. Perhaps now she could get a good night's rest.