Sachiko's friend, and now Sachiko herself, lived in the area just off the main road next to the hospital. It was one of the most populous areas of the city; the area to one side of the Akimichi compound was the most populous, where the poorest of Konoha's residents lived, and while the area to the north of the main gate was technically the least populated it was also where most of the warehouses were. The blocks around the hospital, on the other hand, contained housing for nearly every independent genin and quite a few chuunin besides. Most of the buildings had commercial buildings—restaurants and the like—on the first floor, with family homes above in the older buildings and full apartment structures on top of the newer ones.
Sachiko's friend had found subsidized housing on top of a dango shop, and her apartment—fifth floor, second door on the right, mind the step—was a two bedroom, one bath situation with herself, Sachiko, and two other infiltrators living there on a 'whenever in town' basis.
No one but Sachiko was there when Sakura knocked.
"Settling in?"
"Yeah," Sachiko said. "They're giving me my own room, which is nice, but I think that's just because I keep on getting up in the middle of the night to puke."
Sakura smirked. "Oh?"
"My morning sickness apparently isn't calibrated correctly. How about you?"
"Oh, you know, the usual. My research hours just got switched around, so now I'm working Wednesday through Saturday, but honestly that works better with my Tuesday and Sunday team training and I still get a day—today— off. I did group training this morning, obviously, but besides that."
Sachiko groaned, flinging herself backward onto her bed. "I've barely been home and it already feels like I've been waiting years for the war to start."
"Well, the rest of us have actually been waiting those years, and I promise it is far worse to actually go through."
"Years?"
"Since my time in the capital, more or less, so yeah… two years, almost."
Sachiko's head slammed back into her pillow. "Do you think the war's going to last just as long?"
Sakura shrugged. "Who knows?"
Not ten hours later, after lunch at the Akimichi compound and barely being able to dodge out of the way of Juro's increasingly accurate technique, Sakura found herself in her clan head's house being asked the same question by his son.
"I want to fight, you know? But I'll only become a genin this summer! That's way too long—if the war is too short, then I'll barely begin training before it's over."
"As a general rule, no one knows how long a war will last until it's over. The Great War lasted only a year, give or take a few months of 'we're totally not at war' battles, but Suna's been at off-and-on war with Iwa since then, and the Mizu and the Umi were at war for nearly a decade before the Land of Water wiped out the Land of the Sea all but completely."
Inoichi rolled his eyes. "Do you think they really salted the lands? Because that's what my sensei says, but I don't know why you'd waste valuable soil like that."
Sakura shrugged. "Who knows? It's not exactly like Fire's itching to take direct control of any islands, so I doubt we've ever bothered to check. They might've, though, just to prevent anyone else from using it."
Inoichi groaned again, dismissing the tangent and shoving at the rolls of paper in front of him. "What if this the only war in my lifetime, and I've missed it by just months?!"
Sakura smiled. "That's a nice thought, but it's only been about twenty years since the Great War ended. After this one will likely come another, and another."
"Weren't the sealed beasts supposed to change that?"
"Sure. But no one actually thought it was a long term solution. A tailed beast that hasn't been sealed into someone isn't useful, after all, and a jinchuuriki is barely better than an S-class jounin without a tailed beast."
"Then what was the point of giving so many of our enemies biju?"
"Well, it did successfully keep another Great War from happening for two decades, at least."
"You say that like it's a good thing."
"It is."
Inoichi frowned. "I hope the next war lasts years. I hope I'm able to become a chuunin during it, then a jounin. I'll be able to really show off then."
"Be careful what you wish for."
"That's what my mother says."
"You should listen to her, then."
"She also says I'm so self-centered I'm going to die alone if I don't change my ways."
Sakura kept quiet.
.
Beyond merely the threat of war, the year did not seem to be shaping up particularly well. There was a drought, for one, which was so bad it was looking like the stores meant for the actual war would have to be broken into just to sustain the population, and the Daimyo—on top of literally telling Konoha not to go to war—had also increased many of his non-food-related tariffs to even Fire's vassal states, meaning everything was suddenly much more expensive.
Sachiko was pregnant, Kaa-san was working night shifts again, a fever was making its way across the country, and, on the first of April, Konoha burned.
Sakura woke to alarm bells chiming in the peculiar pattern that every ninja had drilled into them from their first year at the Academy: fire… fire… fire… fire…
As with the last time the bells rang, in mere seconds, Sakura was running down the street, wet scarf tied around her face as she followed the direction of the crowd toward the east.
The fire had already spread to a disturbing degree. It was clearly centered around the warehouses, and the silos especially looked all but totally gone already. The fire seemed to have spread south, first, across the barrier of the Main Road and into Aburame territory and the neighboring buildings. The Aburame themselves were fleeing away from the fire—their typically earth techniques might have been helpful, but their insects were far too susceptible and difficult to replace for them to risk any of them. Instead, it was the rest of Konoha who took up arms against the blaze.
Already civilians were forming into lines as directed by the fire brigade, bringing water from the Nara River to the north (likely why the fire seemed the most stemmed in that direction) as well as the wells interspersed around town. Ahead of them stood what water users Konoha had available, directing the content of the bucket into the worst of the fires while earth users stood around them, tamping out sputtering flames before they could rear back to fight again.
Sakura, fire-natured like most of the rest of Konoha, was pushed to the front, where she (and a Hatake clan member to her right, and a ninja she didn't know to her left, and so on) pushed against the flame, holding it in place despite its desperate struggle for fuel, for survival. The Uchiha—who lived south of the Aburame—had already arrived in force, but even their combined efforts didn't seem to be enough.
The warehouses, in preparation for war, had been full. The newer apartment buildings were ramshackle, made of wood without even the thinnest layer of clay to try to prevent a fire from spreading, and—damningly—a rain-less thunderstorm continued to light up overhead, occasionally throwing blasts of lightning far too close for comfort.
The heat was unbearable.
She hadn't thought it would be that bad—she'd dealt with campfires before, after all, and even malformed exploding tags—but this was something else.
She knew she was far back enough to avoid any damage, at least from the fire itself, but her skin still felt like it was burning away, the tips of her fingers especially straining as she ended every series of hand signs by gesturing straight out at the inferno ahead. It was unfortunate that the main fire-based fire-stopping technique was so weak; it was all she and her neighbors could do to keep it contained, and that was while working together, spread so close that if they wanted to, they could touch. Most of the others that were effective had the opposite problem—so chakra-intensive that few could make use, and those who could were usually needed elsewhere.
Occasionally, between the gaps left between her and her neighbors, panicked residents would flee from the flames. Some—a woman, clutching her arm to her side, a teenager with a cat cradled in his arms, a family of six—came alone. Others—an elderly woman, two toddlers, an unconscious man, another man clawing desperately at his face and the burn which made half of it unrecognizable—came in the arms of volunteer firefighters and ninja alike who, upon leaving their charges with the already formed medic tents behind Sakura, would rush right back to grab the next person.
Dawn came.
Dawn went.
Two hours later, the fire was finally put out.
Sakura, having stepped back from the fire line hours ago (she didn't have the chakra to keep up endlessly, and it was better used for sensing anyway), kept on searching the charred remains of over an eighth of the city for any survivors.
The research lab had neighbored Aburame lands.
It was gone.
The stores—meant for war, and to deal with the drought-begotten food shortage—those were gone too.
The Aburame, at least, lived partially underground, so it would take less time than it would their non-clan neighbors to rebuild their homes.
It also didn't seem like an enemy attack—they were most vulnerable when the fire was still raging, and no one had taken advantage of that.
Sakura kept working, searching with her hands while she waited the requisite minute before searching again with her chakra sense. If she wanted to, she could search using pulses of chakra instead; she could do that every ten seconds, now, and last for hours—but doing so was really only helpful when searching for those with developed charka networks. Those without (or pretending to be without)—civilians, infiltrators, animals, children, exhausted ninja—were difficult to find when using her chakra sense to coat the neighboring area, but they would be all but impossible to find by pulsing, so the longer, slower route was altogether better.
She still only found two survivors: an unconscious boy, about her age, and a woman who had found herself pinned in place under a collapsed apartment next to her dead husband.
The afternoon was spent on clean-up duty, and Sakura—having actually worked in the building—was one of the few who could work at what used to be Research's Headquarters and wasn't needed anywhere else.
She'd begun working diligently at first, clearing out a bit of land to place sorted piles in and working her way methodically across what used to be her place of work, but eventually she'd found herself staring up at the blue sky, wondering when the clouds had disappeared.
"Fall seven times. Get up eight."
"Hey Bokuso."
"Did you know that this is the seventh time Aburame lands have burned?"
"I did not."
"After the first time, precautions were taken. Land was cleared around the compound; the underground system was expanded; fire-resistant beetles were formed."
"Wise moves."
"Yes. This is the first time Aburame lands have burned since moving into Konoha."
Sakura turned to look at Bokuso. He stood, staring out over what used to be his lands, his home. He seemed physically fine, but there were no visible insects on him at all. "An unusually long hiatus, or an unusually short one?"
He gave a half-shrug. "About average."
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"Anything else, if you please."
Sakura sat back. She stared at the hole that led to the Research basement. Inside one of the research chuunin was doing much the same as her, but he wouldn't care enough to listen in and even if he did she had nothing to say that would make him wary.
"Have the Inuzuka found their new leader?"
"No. It's down to two: Tsume of the guard branch and Shiri of the tracking branch. Both are quite young: the older contestants focused on injuring each other, leaving the younger contestants in far better shape."
"Do you know either of them?"
"No. Kegawa supports Shiri: they are of the same branch."
"Sachiko is pregnant—did you know that?"
"Yes: we met last week, between my shifts in T&I. She accepted my offer of Aburame nausea tea: I delivered it to her yesterday."
"Aiko's been busy."
"Yes: we have not been able to talk in over a month. Yasuo and I had met for ramen, and she saw us and said hello."
"I saw her… at around the same time, actually. She gave me the rest of her dango when she realized she'd been on her lunch break for too long."
"It is unfortunate that our schedules do not allow us to meet up more frequently."
"That's what growing up is, isn't it? You go from seeing your friends every day at school to just your teammates and then not even that. I've gone full weeks now not seeing Juro and Shin; the last time I did that I was two."
"Eventually the war must end. We will have more free time then."
Sakura nodded. In front of them the chuunin threw a giant metal… thing out of the hole. It had likely used to be a machine of some kind, but the fire had warped it past all recognition.
"Do you know where you will be working?"
"The Research labs adjacent to the hospital, most likely. They're the largest that are still up, and they're one of the few branches that doesn't usually work in the field or almost entirely in paperwork anyway."
Bokuso nodded. Then, at last, he frowned. "I liked my home."
Sakura hummed.
"I liked—we had so many insects there; not just what we bred, but also insects that enjoyed our gardens, our decay beds."
"I'd see swarms of butterflies sometimes, or bees, when I went outside for my lunch break. It was always fascinating seeing them flit about."
"I will miss our old shrine. We'd built one, out of pine, and then set termites at it until we liked the design."
"It was unique?"
"The last member who could control termites died six years before the clan moved to Konohagakure. It feels… like a failure, to have lost our last major remnant of their work: something exceptional is forever gone from this world, and it is difficult to imagine life without it."
"Fall seven times. Get up eight."
"And if you break a bone in every fall?"
"Then rely on your friends to pick you up and care for you until you can care for yourself."
"Easier said than done, I believe."
"Most things are."
"How many, do you think, are dead?"
The blue of the sky was beginning to fade, the vibrancy slowly being dragged away for different colors to take center stage as the sun began its final plummet.
"Not as much as will die."
"This war will be bad."
"A huge portion of our supplies are gone, we're in the middle of a drought, we're already emotionally exhausted from the apprehension of waiting, Iwa's had even longer to prepare but their wait has been willing… when this war starts, it will be hell."