Sakura hated Inoichi.

The boy (because he really was a boy, for all that he saw himself as her elder) was only two and a half years younger than her, but he was honestly one of the most stuck-up pricks she'd ever met.

Anyway.

It wasn't particularly relevant now, so she tried to ignore her burning hatred for her future leader.

Right now, Sakura was helping Kohana in the Yamanaka greenhouses.

Academy students, technically, were exempt from Yamanaka clan chores—everyone currently in the shinobi path was—but technical exemption didn't work so well in real life, so everyone was expected to help out anyway, and the only real difference was that shinobi (and future shinobi) were allowed to actually chose where they'd want to spend their time.

Sakura always chose to do whatever Kohana did, so at the end of the day she spent a lot of time staring at plants.

Today many of the green thumbs, including Sakura's next youngest sister, were being put to work in the greenhouses harvesting soybeans for the Akimichi; their alliance, after all, was built on food.

Sakura picked at the dirt in her nails, staring at the huge baskets ready to be carted off. Out of all the skills she learned in the Academy, she didn't think she'd be using them to make a harvest as efficient as possible, but here she was.

"Guess what?" Kohana sang, coming to stand next to her.

"What?" Sakura asked. She scrambled up the nearest tree (the normal way, she had school tomorrow and there was no use tiring out), and Kohana was quick to follow.

"Guess!"

"Hm... you yelled at a customer, lost your job, and are now going to start a beet farm with the first Uchiha you see."

"What? No. Come on, guess something possible."

"I don't know! Every time you ask me to guess it ends up being something entirely different, how am I supposed to figure out what this time is about?"

Kohana huffed but apparently conceded defeat, settling herself into a crook of the tree's branches before continuing. "Well, I was working at the flower shop yesterday, and as you know it was the clan Matron's birthday that day, so who do I see walking into the shop that afternoon but the clan heir himself, Inoichi?"

Sakura rolled her eyes. "You cared a lot less about him a few years ago, you know."

"Yeah, well I can't remember that so it doesn't count, okay? Anyway, he comes into the shop and says he wants to get some flowers for his mother's birthday, so I helped him pick some out—free of charge of course—"

"Why of course? He's the clan heir. He can afford a few blooms."

"Well, it was more like a bouquet, and anyway I didn't do it because I thought he couldn't afford it. Will you let me continue?"

"I don't feel like I have much choice."

"Great! So... yes, so I built him this bouquet—it was absolutely gorgeous, you should have seen it, I based it off the ones we saw at neighbor Taka's wedding but with a few flowers switched around to better convey the meaning—and Inoichi, Inoichi said it was just about the best bouquet around—he said his mother would have to love it!"

Sakura smiled, though she didn't really want to. "It's nice that he complemented your work," she said, instead of 'I'm sure he only complemented your work because his mother had probably already been super passive-aggressive about him apparently not thinking to get her a gift until the afternoon of her own birthday, and he wanted to convince himself the flowers would solve everything.'

"You really don't like him," Kohana observed.

Their uncle—the man running this particular harvesting venture—called out that the break would be ending in five minutes.

"Nope," Sakura agreed. "I just think he's a bit stuck-up and selfish, really, but those aren't the qualities I particularly want in someone who is supposed to lead our clan."

Now it was Kohana's turn to roll her eyes. "He's five!"

"Did I act like that when I was five? Did you? I mean, we're seven and eight now, and you don't see either of us shoving people over just because they're in the way, or demanding respect from people our own age, or throwing an actual tantrum in a restaurant just because they changed the menu and no longer serve our favorite dessert?"

"...He just needs to grow up a little. Not everyone can be child geniuses like you."

"So you think you acted the way he is when you were four?"

"No, but Sakura, he's our future clan leader. They spoiled him a bit, yes, but... well, if nothing else, being a ninja should toughen him up."

Sakura grimaced. "I hope it does that before someone dies from his incompetency," she was, perhaps, being a bit rude, but then she'd also seen him skip school four out of five times last week (keeping other students in the Academy, apparently, being not entertaining enough) and, at least according to rumor, spending the entire day doing nothing but playing games and slacking off.

He'd been given a slap on the wrist.

People matured at different ages, Sakura knew, but what kind of clan leader would they end up with if no one told him to grow up at all?

.

Sakura hated taijutsu lessons. It wasn't that she was bad at them—she was around the middle of the girls in her class despite being the youngest—it was just...

Painful.

It didn't even matter whether she won or lost. Either way she was going to have to take at least some hits, and she'd never quite gotten past her inherent pain aversion, for all that she forced herself to act as if she had.

Pain sucked, and for all that she could objectively see the point in being able to defend herself in hand-to-hand combat, when the taijutsu lessons were actually going on all she could think was how she wanted to be doing just about anything else.

A more bearable class, at least for Sakura, was "Konoha Lessons."

Spanning everything from history to law to government to (surprisingly) housekeeping lessons, the class was generally the first one they had in the building every morning.

"Today," Sensei Utatane began the second everyone had taken their seats (she was never one to waste time), "we will focus on the role of the Diplomacy Department: international relations. To begin with, how many of you know what the relations are like between Konoha and, say, Kumo?"

Hands shot up.

"Saito."

"Um, not good," the boy said. "After us they're considered the most powerful, right? And then they were our main enemies in the first shinobi war, and they killed a bunch of our military and civilians, including the second Hokage."

"Correct. To continue, Kumo, due to the diversity of its region, is uniquely suited to the isolationist-leaning policies it has chosen to adopt..."

Sakura began diligently scribbling down her own unique shorthand (a combination of the typical kanji and English letters, created both in response to Teru using his ninken to cheat off of her and to demonstrate her effort to create her own code to those curious), but as she did so she couldn't help but glance to her right.

The year four classroom had gradually rising platforms for the desks just like the earlier years, but unlike them each desk was not a separate entity—instead three students fit at every table, and nine students fit in every row. In addition to this change the platforms had gone from uniformly rectangular to slightly curved, allowing the outermost desks to point slightly inward towards the center of the chalkboard.

Sakura was sure the reasons for this were many and various and not at all arbitrary, but the result was that at her seat she had a perfect view of nearly the entire classroom, including the Hyuga twins, who looked...

They were ten, she knew. About the middle of the class with age—the Hyuga usually aimed there, while the Uchiha went younger and the Ino-Shika-Cho kids went only after all three of them were judged ready, which made ages very variable.

They were quite good, too—top of the class in just about everything. Hiashi lagged a bit in battle analysis, and Hizashi was similarly tripped up by battle strategy, and both were absolutely miserable at infiltration, but Sakura had no doubt they would be excellent members of frontline teams, just as intended.

That said, recently there had been tension between the two.

They'd always been competitive, but now it had gotten to the point where they couldn't even write notes about Kumo's free five-year universal education system without subtly turning their backs on the other.

Sakura's eyes darted further up, to where Shin was writing next to her. He'd been watching her look, and now blinked lazily as she silently asked him for answers: he had none to give.

The other twins in the class, 'the Inuzuka brats,' as Sensei Utatane put it, were doing fine as always. Of course, they had always been a little more aggressive to each other than Hiashi and Hizashi, but then they were Inuzuka.

That afternoon, what remained of them met up at the Training Ground (Sachiko had been disappeared ages ago, and Aiko hadn't lasted much longer before she was removed from the Academy to begin her apprenticeship; with Yasuo testing out at the end of the training exercise, that only left chinmoku and Bokuso.)

"What's up with the Hyuuga?" She asked the second they settled in.

"They're Hyuuga," Juro said. "Who knows?"

"I believe," Bokuso interrupted. "That there is currently no small amount of turmoil in the clan. Many of our ninja are work together, and it has been reported that the Hyuuga, and in particular the branch Hyuuga, have begun to act increasingly agitated over the past few months."

"Do you know why?" Shin asked.

"That is not knowledge that my clan possesses."

Shin paused, then refrained. "Can you guess why?"

"They likely chafe at the leadership of the main house," Bokuso stated matter-of-factly. "As we have previously discussed, the control of the branch house by the main house, and the subjection that control has led to, is analogous enough to slavery that only the treaties signed at their initial joining keeps charges from being filed."

"So you think they're going to revolt?" Sakura asked, mind whirring as she tried to judge their likelihood to succeed.

"Improbable," Bokuso said. "Their rebellion will likely be limited to underperforming their duties as significantly as they believe they are able to get away with."

"Why?" Juro asked, but nearly before he'd finished the question his mouth snapped closed.

There were rumors, rumors which had never managed to be substantiated or disproven, about what exactly the seal on branch Hyuuga was capable of.

If even a quarter of it were true, then of course they wouldn't revolt. There was a difference between fighting against seemingly insurmountable odds, after all, and punching the ground to try to get to the other side of the earth.

Still, it was something to add to their ever-growing list of 'to-be-fixed' and set aside for later.

.

They were in the middle of a field cooking lesson when the banging started.

Sensei Utatane didn't look concerned, so clearly it was expected, but that didn't really quell the curiosity of her students.

"Keep an eye on portion control!" She reminded them, blissfully ignoring their faces popping up like prairie dogs towards the source of the noise. "Remember that you may not necessarily know how long a mission will last!"

Sakura glanced down, ensuring her cuts were alright, then back up.

The banging hadn't stopped. It was December now, the rainy season finally over, and Sakura had plans this week. In exchange for helping Ren take care of his kids when both they and his wife had caught the flu, she'd been promised tickets to Round 1 of Jounin promotions (the only round she was allowed to watch, anyway.)

Those promotions were happening tomorrow, and if this impeded her from watching them, she was going to be very upset.

She eyed the rest of chinmoku, but they were as confused as she, before targeting Bokuso. After a second she got a slight nod. That was enough.

The banging did not cease as they completed their cooking lesson, as they filed outside for taijutsu, as they filed back inside for ninjutsu lessons... in fact, the banging was still ongoing when they were dismissed for the day, and walked out of the front door to avoid their younger counterparts leaping out of their windows.

"Well?" Sakura asked nearly the second they stepped foot on their favored training grounds.

"It seems the Academy is expanding," Bokuso said. "They appear to be preparing to add a basement level."

Before he could expand (or Sakura could ask more questions), a shadow covered the entrance.

"Aiko!" The members of Training Ground 40 shouted. They hadn't seen the tall and gangly girl since she'd started her apprenticeship in the Justice Department, forgoing her initial plan of serving in a genin team to go straight to work instead.

"Hey guys!" She grinned, flopping next to Shin as everyone adjusted to her surprise appearance. "What's up?"

She looked good, Sakura decided. As confident as always, but less harried than she had been when she was still attending the Academy.

"Academy's adding a basement, apparently," Juro said. He offered her a sandwich, which she accepted, before repeating the act with everyone else.

"Oh, I know about that," Aiko said. "I was kind of hoping for something more interesting."

"Do you know why it's expanding then?"

"...Do you know how big the incoming class is?" Four heads shook. "300 new students started last summer. 304 are supposed to start this winter, and the number's still growing. We've had a population boom since the village was founded, you know, even with the wars, and it's still going on. Basically they just need more space."

300.

That was...

That was an entire additional starting class from when Sakura began, and that didn't include the new rural Academy that she'd heard had finished being built last month, or all the kids that were starting later than their first year, besides.

That was a lot of ninja.

"Come on, don't you have anything else?" Aiko asked, apparently in no mood to play information broker.

"I'm going to watch the jounin matches tomorrow," Sakura volunteered.

That made the other girl lean forward.

"Really? Anyone good up?"

"Ren's not trying till next year," Sakura said. "22's apparently his lucky number, so he thinks it might help. Sayuri says it's just because he's not ready. Out of those actually trying, the only big name is Jiraiya."

"Jiraiya the Hokage's student?" Shin said, sitting up in surprise. "I thought they'd done theirs two years ago, at sixteen."

"Tsunade and Orochimaru did, not Jiraiya," Sakura explained. "He wanted a match just as hard as theirs."

Normally, that wouldn't be an issue, but both of the jounin-level former students of the Hokage had double specialized: iryoninjutsu and frontline for the Senju, and research and frontline for the snake summoner.

In contrast, Jiraiya had exactly one specialty: fuinjutsu. While he was apparently already one of the best in the village at it, it also meant that traditionally he wouldn't be pitted against a frontline jounin to earn his promotion. Because he'd demanded the harder battle, he'd apparently also been made to postpone two years to develop the necessary frontline skills to take on the task.

"Ah," Shin said, leaning back into Aiko. "Well, it should be interesting, at least. Might even give you a few ideas on how to use fuinjutsu yourself."

Sakura snorted. "I'm alright with working off of what is already known, thank you very much," she said. "I personally have no interest in trying not to blow myself up on a daily basis."

Not that it would matter soon, anyway.

They were in the first -loor classrooms, now—mere weeks away from leaving the Academy entirely.

Sakura pressed her chin to her knees and ignored her body's shiver.

She was prepared, and she'd do fine.

(It had been months since the last time she'd checked in on Arden's memories. She'd rationalized her avoidance in every way she could—she was busy, the memories were of a different world anyway, she was growing and needing her sleep.

As graduation approached, however, Sakura found her mind drawn to the memories over and over again.

She'd go back to reviewing them, she decided. Probably. Next week.)