Diving back into Arden's memories felt surreal.

These were, absolutely, the same memories she'd internalized in the past, had made a part of herself, and then expelled entirely just the year before.

The memories, the information, even the vague inflections of Arden's emotions had shaped Sakura into who she was.

And then…

She hadn't been able to sleep. She remembered that, remembered lying in her bed after reviewing another of Arden's memories (a sleepover, this time) and trying, and trying, and trying.

She remembered Sensor Sensei Inuzuka standing over her, asking her questions, remembered the dawn light peeking out from behind her.

She remembered a bit of the medical tent, though she had no recollection of how she'd gotten there.

She remembered waking up in the tent to find herself ordered on bed rest.

Remembered the hours spent doing nothing but thinking.

Remembered blaming the memories.

Remembered repressing them.

Or, more so, shoving them into the ocean of Arden once more, completely removed from her consciousness in a desperate attempt to be better, feel better.

It was the war, Sakura knew, as much as Arden's memories—if not more—that had placed her in that cot.

She had been so young, was fourteen (was fifteen now, barely any older.)

She'd been ten the first time she killed.

A third of her life ago, an action she'd considered for so long to be the worst act she'd ever have to do.

War had been worse.

She hadn't even had to kill anyone, had really only gotten into that one fight, but the constant—

Well, the constant hadn't been something she was able to cope with.

The stress.

The pressure.

The importance of not failing.

The Yamanaka meetings, meant to act as short respites but instead treated as more work, as more double and triple checking for hidden messages.

And all the deaths.

And all the suspected deaths.

And all the wrongly reported deaths.

And all the deaths.

Turning to Arden might not have been the best idea, but it wasn't the reason she'd ended up in that tent.

That was the war.

The still ongoing war.

There was a reason she hadn't acknowledged it lying in that cot, however. A reason she'd been similarly reticent even after.

The fact was, Sakura didn't live in Arden's world. In her world, what happened to her then would happen to her again, and not being able to cope only acted as a negative. In her world, child soldiers were as much an accepted part of life as sleep.

And so, when Sakura's unconscious—formed through not only her genetics and life experiences but also Arden's—couldn't take it anymore, and yet had to, had to for the safety of everyone she interacted with on a daily basis, it had ended up rebelling against sleep instead.

And Arden's memories really were the reason she'd ended up bedridden so quickly, but they weren't the 'bad' of the situation.

That was being placed in a war to begin with.

That was dealing with the stress of her position, of trying her damnedest to not be the reason for anyone else's death.

And now, having acknowledged that, she was diving back into Arden's memories and information, relearning facts and figures and opinions and experiences that she'd forced herself to forget.

.

Arden, it turned out, was not an expert in economics. She knew some, but hadn't really studied the proofs particularly well, and for those theories that had already been more or less debunked—mercantilism, the Gold standard, and so on—her education (as far as Sakura could figure, and she'd spent hours in a meditative state searching for any crumbs she could find) had been very scant indeed.

Still, it put Sakura leaps beyond where she'd been before.

She started a new(er) journal.

And then she went to the Administrative building.

"Yamanaka Sakura, Chuunin Researcher."

"What do you need?"

"Access to Commerce and Finance Department records."

The Tokubetsu Jounin grunted, then gestured. "Chuunin... Souto Ren, I think, is working the Commerce area of the restricted records basement. Finance is in the confidential records basement, so you'll have to submit an official request and be monitored." He handed her the request sheet—when he'd gotten it, and from where, Sakura couldn't even begin to guess. She supposed it must be boring to be so highly trained and act as a receptionist.

"Thank you."

Souto Ren was a known entity to Sakura, and not necessarily one she'd been happy knowing.

He'd been a crony of Shimura's, for one, but more than that—

Well, she was more than a little surprised to find out that he'd made it to Chuunin at all, and especially surprised to find that he was apparently working in record keeping: he'd excelled in the physical aspects of their class, it was true, but little else.

She was less surprised when she saw him.

At eighteen, give or take, he was relatively short but incredibly solidly built—he was clearly still keeping up an intensive fitness regimen despite occupying a more or less sedentary position. He was also very much not sedentary—in fact, he looked to be on the verge of a panic attack and dashing back and forth between his desk and the filing cabinets to either side that blocked quick entrance into the stacks of documents behind them.

"Souto Ren?"

He froze.

"Um, Yamanaka Sakura requesting access to Commerce records."

"Yes, yes, yes, yes, of course, yes. Hi." He stared at her. She stared back at him. "Oh! Right. Um, you wouldn't happen to know what I'm supposed to do next?"

"Are you okay?"

Souto Ren sighed, then flopped onto the chair that had already been knocked back some distance from what was ostensibly his desk. "No. I got 'promoted' last week. To this! I just—"

"I did think that you had been planning to be combat-oriented."

"Apparently I 'have no natural talent for battle strategy' and 'only function passably as part of a larger group.' Which had been fine when the goal was to hold the line, but with the new General everything's turned to aggression, and apparently my use ran out."

"Still, it's a pretty big career shift."

Souto shifted. "Yeah… I may not have taken being reassigned to guard patrol with grace, so they kind of reassigned me again. To punish me."

Sakura did not laugh. That would have been rude. And cruel. And she was working with Inoichi enough to not laugh.

(She did, however, juxtapose his current visage with the one he wore when he was tormenting her classmates. It wasn't exactly justice—his behavior as a child was not the reason he ended up here—but it did feel more like karma than Sakura cared to admit.)

"Did you really think fighting back would work?"

"Well, I wasn't thinking."

"Nara Taro was in a similar position." Sakura said. "He ended up getting assigned to Research and it took a bit he's doing really well now. Even if record keeping is absolutely not the job you want maybe if you do a good enough job they'll assign you somewhere else."

"Yeah, yeah, that all makes sense, but—and I'm not sure if you've noticed, but you're Yamanaka so you probably have—I'm not exactly good at this! I have no idea what I'm doing!"

"You're new."

"I'm lost."

Sakura did not laugh. "Don't you have a boss?"

That set Souto off. He did have a boss, as it turned out, except his boss was also a recent transfer that had been sent to records as punishment, and so he was as in the dark as Souto himself.

And so, Souto explained, they were trying to go off of the instructions that had been written down by each of their predecessors… but their predecessors had assumed they would have much more knowledge about how the records system worked than what they actually did.

By the time half an hour had passed—and Sakura was becoming increasingly aware of the vanishing time because she was kind of on a deadline—Souto had turned to how frustrating he found the wording (and Sakura had to admit she was similarly flummoxed, but also Souto seemed to have completely forgotten she'd come here for a reason and wouldn't stop his diatribe long enough for her to interrupt. Sakura was half sure he was doing it on purpose, just so that he didn't have to work.)

She was saved by another entrant.

"Hyuuga Kiyo, here to request records on trade between the Land of Fire and the Land of Canyons from 20 Konoha to the modern day."

Souto stared at her. "Do you know what I'm supposed to say to that? Or how I'm supposed to find those records?"

Sakura… decided to slip out while she could. The records could wait.

Sakura left for lunch and decided the afternoon was better spent helping her sisters than in the Administrative Building's basement.

Toddlers were little balls of mayhem, as a rule, but at least they kept life interesting, if only because keeping them away from fire, knives, heights, or really anything else that would hurt them was a constant struggle.

This struggle was exacerbated when Sayuri discovered something new about her summons: to the shock of everybody, Condors had two interests: combat (of course) and children.

They found them fascinating.

So for the afternoon, dozens of toddlers roamed the backyard as the three condors Sayuri had the best relationship with mingled amongst them, shockingly gentle even when the toddlers weren't.

"That one—Kishi—tried to claw my eyes out yesterday." Sayuri said conversationally. "Didn't succeed, but still."

Sakura glanced around, but none of the toddlers seemed to have heard. "Really, Sayuri?"

"Well, yeah. They're apparently worried they won't taste good—what with the weird coloring—so it's not like Kishi would have used his beak."

"I can't believe they're trying to kill you even with the summoning contract."

"Technically the summoning contract isn't being signed until the end of the month. They'll stop then. Probably. Mostly."

"So is it going to be the new Yamanaka contract?"

Sayuri snorted. "Hokage says it's too valuable, so no. People who do really well in the field will get the option to try to impress the condors, and then they can sign with or without my permission. I've got five, maybe six months until I'm no longer the main summoner."

"So why'd you do it then? Put in all the time and effort?"

"Well, I'll still be a summoner, won't I?"

"How… how does that add up?"

"I dunno, it just does. It's cool. Look, Sakura, not everything's about optimization—you know that, or else you would have chosen a different career track. That's part of the greatness of Konoha; unlike other villages, you actually get some choice."

"I'm being made to work on economics right now."

"You don't want to?"

"I—it's hard."

"Oh! You think something's hard?"

Sakura glared at Sayuri, who rolled her eyes. "Something research related."

"I used to regularly blow up this backyard due to failed experiments, you know."

"Yeah, but you never thought of that as a reason to not try."

"Trust me, I've given up on—or at least postponed—many of my theories."

"But Konoha likes your economics one?"

"They think it'll be useful. If it's right, and they're able to use the theories to support Fire's economy, they think it'll be almost as useful as my long-distance communications idea over time, and that one got me Tokubetsu Jounin level access even though I'm still officially a Chuunin."

"Geez. You need to step up your taijutsu practice, get your promotion."

"Only in field promotions right now. Of course, this'll probably get me one. If I can actually figure out what I meant when I wrote it."

"You forgot?"

"I—I kind of blocked out a lot, um, when I was bedridden."

"Oh."

In front of them, Yamanaka Sai tried and failed for at least the eighth time to steal a condor's feather. He was fascinated by them, and shouted "soft!" and "give!" in between wails when the condors darted out of his reach.

"Um, well, I'm sure you'll figure it out. You're smart."

As far as Sakura could tell—although, to be fair, it certainly hadn't been the aim of her day-long meditation—PTSD (the closest equivalent Arden seemed to have) was not something often discussed in her world either.

Of course, that wasn't considered a positive—at least to Arden.

Here?

It was considered compassionate.

Having a breakdown or really in any way (temporarily) being unable to do your job was something that you would get treatment for, but it was also considered something best not mentioned, best forgotten as quickly as possible lest your comrade's judgments of you be tainted.

Sakura…

Well, she didn't really want the average Konoha citizen to know that she had a breakdown, but she had a sneaking suspicion that, in reality, how openly a subject could be talked about had relatively little correlation to how many people knew about it.

Still.

When in Rome.

"Yeah. I am making headway, but of course now I need paperwork."

"Is that what you were doing this morning?"

"Trying to. The guy who is overseeing the records I need… well, let's just say that Konoha's 'choices' weren't offered to him."

Sayuri grunted. "How do you know?"

"He was chatty."

"Hm."

Case in point.

And then their attention was entirely derailed because Sai had finally managed to grab a feather and was now attempting to stick it down his throat as quickly as humanly possible.

"Yamanaka Sai! Spit that out! Hana—no, don't copy him!"

.

Souto wasn't doing much better the next day, but there were new notes jumbled one on top of the other on every surface and scribbles down his arm and he looked like he hadn't slept but it only took him twenty minutes to figure out where the documents she needed were.

So, progress.

Unfortunately, that progress resulted in her spending the rest of the day stuffed into a cramped room with a fuinjutsu lamp, desk, chair, and no windows trying to turn the lists of information and her own journal notes into something intelligible.

The next day she was called in front of the Hokage.

"What?"

Deputy Head Nara grinned. "What, you've never been called in front of the Hokage before?"

"Well, I have, but not alone."

"First time for everything."

The Deputy Head of Efficiency Sciences was not known for her sympathy.

There were chairs in front of the Hokage's office, lined up five to a side down the hallway.

One man—a Jounin, from his looks—looked to be fast asleep in the one nearest to the door.

Sakura sat as far away from him as possible.

It only took an hour for her to be called in.

"Yamanaka Sakura, daughter of Yamanaka Kaoru and Yamanaka Kenta, began attending the Academy at age two, graduated on time, was part of a Spring Session diplomatic envoy, trained as a sensor and a Researcher, worked as a genin in the latter until the war where you were assigned to the Second Second's sensing team, successfully foiled an assassination attempt, worked with your former genin team to provide information and receive promises from the Daimyo, tutor to clan heir Yamanaka, godmother to Morino Ibiki, created the concepts for long distance communications systems, a hormone test, a band aid, a 'typewriter', a cipher approved of by Orochimaru, and now apparently an entire economic theory."

Sakura wanted to say many things to that.

She wanted to say that she hadn't done any of her inventions alone, that she certainly hadn't completed the economic theory, that Orochimaru only thought her code was a good basis, that for anything diplomatic, she was just a necessary body—

But the Hokage already knew all that.

"Hai."

The Hokage smiled. "You're not very good at focusing your energy, are you?"

Sakura… didn't know how to take that.

Thankfully, the question seemed to be rhetorical.

"While it is true that specialization is a vital part of any massive shinobi structure such as our own, your… breadth provides interesting opportunities, and so I must commend you. Your promotion will be finalized by this weekend."

Sakura—

"Additionally, I have had a read over your economic theory, and had one of my ANBU borrow and decode your updated journal this morning—"

Sakura—

"—and they and your supervisor agree that your theories have merit. On that note, so do I."

Sakura—

"Nonetheless, many of your theories are quite… radical. So I thought I would attempt to make the most out of your breadth of talent and your theory; in November you will be sent to the Land of Mushrooms to attempt to help them deal with the damages of the war using your theories while also bolstering our relationship with them, and as much as possible making their economy dependent on ours. That gives you… oh, about two months to prepare."

"U-Understood, Hokage."

"Sakura?"

"Yes?"

"Your work really is extraordinary. You are an invaluable asset to Konoha and that will be true regardless of how these theories pan out. I do of course want you to try your best, but I'd prefer you to put in less effort in the short term to keep your work viable for the long term. Please do not overstress yourself."

"I will try, Hokage."

The Hokage smiled. He really was a very personable figure. "Dismissed."