Sakura didn't know what to think about how her first duty after her recovery ended didn't involve either sensing or research.

She supposed she found it a bit funny, in the end, that rather than it being her sensing as Konoha wanted, or research as she wanted, she was instead spending her time reporting to a committee about a bridge collapse she'd been only moderately impacted by on her way home.

"I honor Konoha and the Daimyo with my full and honest report of my experiences." Sakura finished, looking up at the co-council of shinobi and samurai that ran this particular courtroom.

"We thank you for your testimony. You may leave."

This day—her first day back—had begun with waiting for three hours until they were ready to call her into the courtroom, and then another hour for the case before hers (a roof collapsed in an administrative building a team of genin had been paid to build, though they ended up blaming the architect for that one because he'd been the one to obtain the poor materials), and then through the testimony of a chuunin clerk before, at last, she could testify.

She was the last to testify in that case, after which she knew they'd spend about half an hour looking at written testimony before deciding guilt.

She couldn't imagine that her report was particularly helpful in that decision, but unlike everyone with more relevant witness statements, she was there, so…

Testimony.

And then, at last, she reentered the (rebuilt) Research Department building.

She was immediately sent to the Head.

The Head was an Aburame who was at least half a century older than the village itself.

He was also…

Well, he was missing an arm.

And two fingers on the other hand.

And he'd suffered major burns across at least two-thirds of his body at some point in his life.

And he had no less than three massive scars on his (otherwise unburnt) face.

And he only had one foot.

And he was constantly sick with something—he'd been poisoned several times over the years, and his immune system had never quite recovered.

And she'd heard from multiple people that the sole reason his body had managed to keep going at all was that his bugs were literally physically supporting him—personally, she knew for a fact that he no longer wrote at all, instead relying on his insects to manage it which, given that no other Aburame seemed to do that, was no doubt a far too practiced skill.

She was honestly shocked he was still alive—his mind may have been sharp, but with that much done to his body Sakura had been sure that the stress of the war would do him in, as callous as that sounded.

"Head Aburame." She said, stepping into the room and bowing.

"Yamanaka Sakura. Please take a seat." He nodded at one in front of his desk. "We have much to talk about."

She did so with some apprehension.

Prior to leaving for the war, she'd had very little reason to interact with the man, and even fewer to see his office—what few times she was sent to deliver/retrieve something from him, he was in his clan's compound.

Usually, actually, he interacted with almost no one but the other Deputy Heads (which had not helped the rumors.) A folder was always dropped off to him in the morning, but usually, one of the Deputies would just pick it up on their way to updating him in person.

What Sakura knew of the man, then, primarily came down to rumor and guesswork based on his appearance.

She did know, though—and of this she was as certain as he could be—that the man was brilliant.

And severe.

"Hai, Head." She sat.

The Head got straight to the point. "I have your doctor's assurances that you are medically fit to be working, so I won't bother reassuring you or myself. There is, however, the question of where to sort you. You are a chuunin now, field promoted, and that means you must select a specialty."

Sakura nodded. The promotion… well, she'd had it confirmed when she reentered the village, but it still didn't feel completely real. If she'd been in Konoha, if there hadn't been a war, then there would have been a small ceremony, congratulations, maybe even a party. Instead…

Instead, she'd found out several weeks later, and only because they'd had to meet with the Daimyo.

But she had been promoted.

She was, due to work that had nothing to do with Research, now higher in rank.

"Typically," the Aburame continued, "we would base such a specialty on whatever your major project was. There are two problems with this: first, you have yet to satisfactorily complete a single one." Sakura held back a flinch. "Second, your projects are… ranging."

Sakura nodded.

"Your typewriter proposal would best fit in Communication and Detection Research, and so would your radio proposal. Your battery proposal, on the other hand, would be classed as weapons and materials research, while your proposals on improved bandages would be slotted as Human Research and Engineering. Further, the notes you sent back include drafts of proposals related to all three already noted disciplines as well as the Efficiency Sciences and Survivability and Lethality Analysis. While some leeway can be given for proposals which arguably bridge multiple disciplines, you very clearly do not have a central interest to frame your proposals through."

"I apologize, Head."

"It is… inefficient, but not necessarily bad for Konoha as a whole; while several of your ideas—typewriter included—need some work, many others, including the radio and battery, have great merit. But, again, we come to the problem of supervision."

The Aburame looked down at what must have been her file as a page seemingly flipped on its own. Sakura made no reply.

"For the interim, your battery and radio proposals are considered most vital to Konoha. You will, therefore, be temporarily placed under the Deputy Head Uchiha in Weapons and Materials Research because his offices and labs are centrally located, but allowed to move and work with Deputy Head Nara Hiroshi in Communication and Detection Research as needed. I will then have you cycle through each department until you are sufficiently vetted in each, at which point we will discuss again your future in our department." Several papers floated towards her, forming a stack just as they came within grasping difference.

She took them.

"The first ten pages are for Uchiha, the next for Nara. Please deliver them and begin your work."

"Yes, Head." Sakura stood and bowed again. "Thank you for your time."

Aburame grunted.

.

Sakura, in all honesty, would have preferred to begin working directly under Deputy Head Nara.

She supposed that was why she was assigned to Weapons instead.

The Nara, after all, was rather well known for not supervising, for letting everybody do whatever they wanted. This was a point of contention between Nara Hiroshi and the other heads—there were (repeated) times when they'd ask him about the status of a project, and he…

Wouldn't know.

At all.

Not even the slightest clue.

(He had a really nasty habit of turning to the nearest genin assistant and asking them, too, as if they'd have any idea.)

Sakura could kind of see how that would be annoying, but she still believed (for her personally, at least) that working under the Uchiha was worse.

…That wasn't to say it was bad.

It wasn't, in all honesty.

Deputy Head Uchiha was smart, capable, and was known to go to bat for any of his underlings.

He was just also known to, to put it kindly, take a bit too much interest in what they were doing.

To put it less kindly, and to use a direct quote from one such underling, he was a micromanaging ass.

Still, Sakura really wanted to get to work, even if it did mean (as it turned out it very much did) that she'd spend the rest of the day—and, as it turned out, the rest of the week—explaining each of her projects in detail.

At least he seemed to (grudgingly) consider her competent by the end of it.

.

It didn't take long for Sakura to fall into a routine, and one that was far less grueling than the pace she had become used to.

Specifically, her eight-hour shifts were no longer so exhausting that she was incapable of doing much outside of them.

Sakura took full advantage.

The first thing she decided to do, when she finally started making a list of all she wanted to accomplish, was meet up with as many of her friends as possible.

She started with Aiko.

They had dango.

They tried talking about something nice, something happy.

That well ran short quickly.

So they turned to everyone's most used standby.

"I'm just," Aiko said, rubbing her temples, "so ready for this war to be over. I know we must defend our homeland, but the longer this goes on… well, ideally we'll be able to recover at some point."

"It's that bad?"

Aiko straightened, picking at her stick as she considered how to answer. "Okay, so you know how the Land of Fire doesn't restrict many goods or services? Like, everything is technically marketable?"

Sakura nodded; in Fire, there was a lot of variety in tax based on the good, some regulations about how to go about the sale, and a strict information requirement (paying someone to kill, for instance, was allowed but taxed at the 50% level if not hiring a ninja and requiring both the buyer and seller to submit forms recording the sale, and the seller had to be honest about his or her level of skill and likelihood of success. The act of killing, hilariously enough, wasn't allowed at all unless one did work for the government or was outside the borders of Hi no Kuni, which made the fact that paying someone to kill was legal all the more ironic. This had been covered in the fourth year of the Academy.)

"Yeah, so what we do instead… it requires a lot of monitoring."

Sakura raised an eyebrow.

"Even when we're not at war—merchants will try to pass off a high tax item as a low tax alternative, will 'forget' to submit records of sales, particularly exports, will… 'mislead,' I guess, would be the correct euphemism consumers about their goods—that last bit is especially common with medicines, by the way, so you're better off just buying from the hospital's supply even though it's more expensive—basically, even when not at war a lot of manpower has to go to making sure everyone is paying their taxes and complying with regulations and being honest.

At war, it's worse.

We just don't have the manpower to watch everyone, and so tax revenues are shooting down, and people are getting subpar goods or just outright scammed and…

Well, and then there's the currency."

Sakura already knew about that problem.

The problem had a name: Wind.

Or, more specifically, Wind's gold supply.

Most Daimyos, historically speaking, had dealt with the cost of war by simply making more currency. The technique, as far as debt relief measures went, had its (many) failings, but it still ensured that the country wasn't indebted to any other by the end of the war.

Fire, however, had decided to ally with Wind.

And Wind had most of the world's gold supply.

Which meant that the traditional way that deflation was achieved—making paper currency worth relatively less gold than it had been at time of print—wouldn't work, because it would piss Wind off.

Which meant that they didn't have enough currency.

Which was never a good thing.

(War was expensive, after all, and debt was hard to erase if the currency was set.)

(The effects could be seen around Konoha already. If the government wasn't feeding a good portion of its population as shinobi—Sakura's route home hadn't taken her to that many Fire settlements, and she was guiltily happy for it.)

"I'm trying not to think about that, to be honest." Sakura said.

Aiko shrugged. "Not thinking about it isn't going to make everything suddenly better. What we really need to do is win."

"That's not happening any time soon." Sakura said. "Iwa's doing the same thing as us: trying to stretch length of the war until it's unbearable for the other side."

"And who's going to win that, do you think?"

"Well," Sakura said. She drew out the word, not particularly wanting to finish the sentence. "From what I know, everything points to Iwa being able to outlast us. But, of course, they think the same. The idea is to prove that we can actually handle a long war, so that future generations don't even consider trying for one at all."

"That's—" Aiko groaned, picking at her dango stick so as to not snap it in half.

"Let's talk about something else." Sakura suggested. "Something not war related, ideally."

"Oh," Aiko said, "Guess what."

"Come on, not a single clue?"

"That'd take all the fun out of it!"

"And what fun is it, just asking someone to guess? You could be talking about anything."

"And there you go, taking all the fun out of it even without a clue." Aiko was grinning, though, so Sakura grinned back. "Anyway, I've got news about the other Ino-Shika-Cho in our clas—zatsuon."

"Really? I haven't heard about any of them in ages."

"Good reason for that." Aiko said.

"…How bad?"

Aiko grinned.

It wasn't, it turned out, as bad as Sakura had feared.

The main thing was that the team had been completely dismantled within a month of the war beginning.

Inohina she hadn't really been worried about at all—she might like spilling secrets a bit too much, but she was also mainline Yamanaka. She'd landed on her feet perfectly well, apparently, and was now a full-time tracker and interrogator with a pair of Inuzuka.

Arata did not, as it turned out, end up dropping out of the shinobi forces. Sakura was surprised about that—he'd never been particularly interested in anything a ninja could do. According to Aiko, however, he'd settled in quite nicely with the gate guards, ensuring that every bit of merchandise that entered and left the city was properly accounted for.

The real problem was Taro.

Taro, Sakura knew, was smart.

Taro, Taro knew, was smart.

Taro, therefore, had always been a bit of an ass.

He'd also hated working with his teammates, to the point of getting suspended not just the once Sakura remembered, but twice.

And now…

Now he was going into Research.