The night of her seventh birthday Sakura was kidnapped.

By her brother.

"Ren?" She whispered once he removed the gag he'd put on her.

"Hey Sakura."

"What's going on?"

"You're seven," he said. "It's time for you to start learning the methods of the Yamanaka."

"I thought techniques weren't taught until you reached genin?" She asked. She looked around—the room was fairly plain, with only two chairs and a table, and there were no windows.

"Techniques, sure, but that's not what we're talking about," Ren said. "We're talking about methods. Really, you should have learned about this years ago, but Kaa-san and Tou-san wanted to wait until the traditional age to start you."

"Ren, I have no idea what is going on."

"And that's the problem. At your age you should be much better at observing and drawing conclusions. Instead you prefer if people spell things out for you, and that cannot stand," he said. He stood. "Get comfortable, sis, you're not leaving for a good long while."

"School?" She murmured.

"Your teachers are aware you'll be missing the rest of Year Four. You'll start Year Five with everyone else—assuming you work fast enough."

Sakura grimaced. It was only May; if she was being kept here until the start of a new school year…

Ren, who had walked out of the room as Sakura began preparing herself for exactly how long she'd stay in the room, came back with a pot, a tea-making kit, and some leaves.

"First: poison resistance. This'll be the easiest part," he said. He set up the kettle and began preparing one of the plants to brew. "I figure we'll get through about four small doses before you get too sick to continue on. Then, depending on how you feel tomorrow, we'll see about another dose or two."

They waited, silently, for the tea to be ready. Ren poured, Sakura took the cup and drank.

And promptly spat it out. "What is this?"

"No use telling you now—you'll be too sick to bother to remember. We'll go over the poisons and your symptoms—as well as others'—when it's clear you can concentrate even while affected. Now, take another drink and swallow."

Sakura did so, forcing it down her throat quickly enough that its rancid taste didn't force her to spit again.

It took less than five minutes for her to begin sweating, dry heaving onto the floor and trembling all over. Ren was preparing a new plant for consumption. This one, at least, she thought she recognized, though her eyes refused to concentrate on anything in her state. "What… what's…."

"Don't worry," her brother said soothingly. "It's just the antidote. Well, no, that's a lie. What I gave you doesn't have an antidote. This is just a little something to make you puke so that it doesn't permanently damage your body."

It took well over two months to completely go through his set of plants, to finish puking, and fainting, and retching, and seizing, and experiencing every other side effect his collection had to offer.

By the second week, however, she was expected to work on other things while the plants poisoned her body.

Ren let her ease into it by going over the poisons themselves first—how to make them more or less potent, how to obtain their ingredients (because while some were straightforward, others were anything but), how to hide their taste, how to ignore some of their side effects by working your chakra against them, and how to treat them. While learning about the side effects before drinking, touching, or breathing the poison made it more difficult, Ren was right—compared to what came later, it was a breeze.

Unfortunately, that time all too quickly came to an end.

"Alright, I'm going to give you a slip of paper with a word," he'd said. "No matter what, you may not tell me that word."

He waited, watching as she memorized the word in front of her, before taking the slip of paper back and burning it with a quick jutsu. While Sakura's eyes were still on the flame, though, his fist jabbed straight at her nose. She flinched, screwing her eyes shut, but the expected blow didn't come and instead she opened her eyes to her brother ranting.

"No! Do you not see how dangerous your flinch was? You could have ducked, dodged, kept better watch of your surroundings... don't worry, though: by the time I'm done you—will—be—able—to—control—ALL—your—reactions."

With each pause a fist jabbed forwards, some hitting her, some not.

That was how her "interrogation practice" started.

There was a misconception among Sakura's classmates that torture was all about learning how to put up with physical abuse. And while the start of her torture certainly leaned that way, that definitely wasn't all of it.

"It's okay, it's okay," Ren had said on her third attempt, after she'd finally successfully managed to deal with what he threw at her as well as the poisons without saying the word. "It's over, it's over. You can tell me now."

Exhausted, and having only come to from unconsciousness, she hadn't even thought, just said it as easily as breathing: "snake." She hadn't made that mistake again. When Ren told her never to tell him the word, he meant it.

She was improving, though, over time—she never made the same mistake twice, and she usually anticipated Ren's tricks before he could do them.

That didn't make it any easier.

She'd just finished her poison resistance training—some of it would have to be repeated every year, and new ones would be added, but at least she had something to defend against most common ones. She'd also finished memorizing all of them, and she'd started paying attention during her torture sessions more: while she'd already learned about many methods in her regular Yamanaka lessons, it was one thing to know them in the abstract and quite another to experience them in person. Not only that, but often only one aspect of the torture would have been explained—the Academy, for instance, could have spent a day discussing an important victory, and how it had been in part possible because of information retrieved by T&I. Sakura would then go home and learn about how it was actually her great-great-whatever that had interrogated the information out of the suspect, and how they had gone about it. In that case, she would only learn how to use the technique, not defend against it. Now Ren made sure she knew both. By now she felt fairly confident on her ability to withstand and use what she had been taught, as well as how to tell if the information she was given was fake and whether a mind game was working.

Ren had, as a reward, given her the day off, so she sat curled in the corner, deeply in thought.

She didn't hate her older brother. She knew Arden would have, that much was clear, but she… didn't.

Arden grew up in a world where child soldiers were the subject of global outrage, where wars were uncommon and spies far more frequent in stories than real life. Arden grew up knowing, knowing, that everything and everyone she knew would be alright tomorrow.

Sakura did not grow up in that world. So, in her world it was okay that her brother beat his seven-year-old sister to the point that she didn't wake up for four days, because it was better if it were him than an enemy. Sakura grew up in a world where making yourself sick by ingesting, inhaling, or touching things you knew would hurt you made sense because that meant next time they'd hurt less.

So Sakura didn't hate her brother. She didn't particularly like him at the moment either, but she felt rather entitled to that.

Ren opened the door, carrying a bowl of simple unflavored rice and some ginger tea.

"Lunch!" He said, grinning. Sakura made a face at him, but sat up anyway.

"How much longer?" She asked.

He grinned. "Sooner than you think. You're putting up with everything pretty well, honestly, even if your natural constitution isn't that great."

"What's left?"

"A bit more interrogation practice, unfortunately," he said. "But after that we're going to focus entirely on perception—getting you better at recognizing facial expressions quicker, what they mean in context, interpreting word choice, et cetera."

"Okay," Sakura sighed.

True to his word, Ren let her out one week before the next semester—Sakura's fifth year—was to begin.

The Training Ground Forty group was thrilled to see her.

"You were gone so long!" Sachiko whined. "The rest of Chinmoku said not to worry, it was just something the Yamanaka did at seven, but still!"

"Welcome back," Aiko smiled.

"Was your training successful?" Bokuso asked.

"Yep!" She said.

"I am glad. Aburame complete their own fulltime training at five."

"This is normal?" Yasuo asked.

"Most clans do it," Shin said. "Nara don't, not officially, but generally winter break is used for that purpose every year. Akimichi do too, in the break between passing the genin exam and beginning training. Aiko, when do the Utatane?"

"Seven, like Yamanaka," Aiko said. "So I did mine last year, but we're supposed to say we're sick—remember November?"

The group nodded. She'd disappeared for a little over two weeks, then came back claiming the flu, despite absolutely no residual symptoms to account for her long absence.

"Yeah, so that's the main one. We also have additional training beginning the evening of the first Friday of every month."

"What's the difference between that training and the regular training you all do?" Yasuo asked.

"This is more… intensive," Juro grunted.

"We are trained," Bokuso explained, "generally speaking, in how to excel in the skills our clans are known for—such as ecological research in mine—though it is also when things that require recovery time are done. My clan injects venom, for instance, to develop a resistance."

"And mine focuses on poison," Sakura said.

Sachiko and Yasuo made a face. "Do we have to do that?" She asked.

"Why weren't we given a chance to do that?" He asked.

Aiko waved away their concerns. "You will! It's usually done when you're a chuunin, anyway. It's just that the clans generally want to do it themselves, because, you know, family."

Sakura had grown bored of the conversation. "What did you all do while I was gone?" She asked.

Juro grinned, then started telling her about having been given a volunteer position at the hospital—he wasn't doing anything medical, mostly just being everyone's gopher, but at least he was there. Then Shin went, telling her about how one of his second cousin's uncles had offered to help him get one of his short stories published under a pseudonym—but only after he'd managed to get his genjutsu up to a point where he could play out a scene from his stories.

Aiko had decided to go with her family tradition and aim for either the Hokage or Justice Department, and had begun trying to make inroads for that, while Sachiko had successfully completely gotten rid of her stutter even while under the influence of weak genjutsu (her stutter had always been worse while she was afraid, but ample practice had put a stop to that.) Bokuso was acting as a gopher to his grandmother who was inventing food to rapidly grow hive populations, and Yasuo was experimenting with any weaponry he could get his hands on, trying to figure out what worked best for him—currently he was most drawn to anything close combat.

All of them had continued working on their "Reform List."

"Oh!" Aiko said as they wrapped up their explanations. "And I'm joining your class—they reshuffled the classes again so that there's now two classes of about fifty, and I'm in yours but now Sachiko and Bokuso aren't."

Sakura frowned. "Why did they reshuffle all the classes?" She asked.

"Dunno," Juro said. "It's not like they explained it."

"Perhaps," said Bokuso, "They are trying to start pairing us up with whomever they expect to be in our genin team, or at least putting us in the same class. I am, for instance, aiming for T&I and have been transferred into a class with Ichiro Utatane and Nio Yamanaka, both of which are similarly inclined and yet do not have any genin partners already."

"I agree," Aiko said. "I don't know about Sachiko, because she's an orphan, but I already know I'll be paired with one of the Uchiha and the Sarutobi with the weird cowlick. All three of us are aiming for administration and politics, so it makes sense."

"Shin, Juro, and I aren't aiming for the same places," Sakura said.

"Sure, but you're also Ino-Shika-Cho. Everyone knows you work well together," Yasuo said. "I bet for other teams they use chuunin goals as a uniting similarity."

"And anyway," Aiko added, "Juro wants to go into medical, and they never put more than one medical on the team."

Sakura smiled. "You know, we actually have a pretty good mix of chuunin goals among us, and they never stopped us from getting along. I mean, Yasuo's going to be a frontline fighter, I want to be a researcher, Shin's interested in Sabotage or T&I and Juro's already working at medical, you're looking to start as an Academy instructor or courtroom clerk, and Bokuso's T&I. Sachiko—"

"Cryptology."

"—which means the only main career we're missing is tracking, I think."

"Damn we're awesome," Yasuo grinned.

"Well, we are," Aiko said primly. "Everyone choses frontline, so that just makes you ordinary."

"Hey!" He snapped. "Like every Utatane doesn't chose Academy instructor!"

Sachiko rolled her eyes. "None of us chose our goals because someone else expected us to," she said. "That's what matters."

Bokuso held a two-inch beetle that had appeared from nowhere up to his eye. "And anyway, we're still pretty young. We've got forever to decide."

The beetle leapt up and flew away and Bokuso immediately began chasing after it, knocking the group out of the circle they were sitting in as he did so. "Come back!" He shouted. "I wasn't finished studying you!"

"You really think we'll have a while to decide?" Sakura asked Shin.

"Sure," he said. "Why not?"