Chapter 2:

"There are hardships and there are delights."

After rain comes fair weather; March rain and April showers bring forth May flowers.

Mediocrity, as it turned out, was a lot easier said than done.

I sat at the back of the classroom, distractedly tapping my finger against my knee as Iruka went over some basic maths on the blackboard. It had been a week since I'd landed on my plan of total averageness, and only some of that plan was progressing well. Raising my grades from absolute failure had been simple enough, either by paying attention to classes I'd previously been blocking out or just actually trying the exercises we were being given.

(Mebuki had been utterly thrilled by the improvement, and it seemed like Kizashi was too, though it was hard to tell seeing as he'd been giving me a wide berth ever since the 'I don't want to be a shinobi' incident.)

But therein lay my new problem: my grades were now good. Too good.

I glanced down at the sheet of paper on my desk, basic addition and subtraction questions staring back at me. It was an inevitable problem really. I was an adult stuffed into the mind of a child. My comprehension and memory skills were quite literally years ahead of my six-year-old peers. Of course, I was trying to adjust, purposefully getting things wrong, but when faced with mind-numbingly easy problems like ten plus three, or six minus five, how was I supposed to know which one the average six-year-old should get tripped up on?

Then, there was the matter of my chakra control.

Like my mental acuity, it was no exaggeration to say I was in a different league to my classmates when it came to chakra control. Except, it had become obvious that mine was more than just an above-average talent.

I could feel my chakra. Constantly. Having existed before in a body without it, it was impossible not to notice the difference. It was like waking up with a new limb having been stitched onto you. A limb that, thanks to my hyperawareness of it, I seemed able to move with ease most people did not possess.

In a way, this meant it was harder to cover for my chakra control than my book smarts. Even if I hadn't got it exactly right yet, I did at least have some vague idea of how good a child should be at maths. I had zero fucking clue about the development stages of a kid's chakra control.

It wasn't like I could easily find out that information either. Without the internet to refer to, the only references I had were the books and scrolls in my father's study. And, whilst some contained information on chakra exercises and their difficulty levels, with the broad designations of 'pre-genin, genin, chūnin, jōnin', they were utterly unhelpful to my predicament.

There was, I had realised over the last week, only one real solution to this all.

I needed a control group to measure myself against.

I needed friends.

Of course, I'd made none since joining the Academy. Mostly, that had been due to being rather more preoccupied with trying to get the hell out of there and stopping myself from having full-on panic attacks. But, even after that plan had died, I wasn't exactly motivated to make friends with six-year-old children given they were….six-year-old children. Screw trying to get any semblance of intelligent conversation out of them, I was more likely to have mud flung in my face (which happened to be Kiba's new, and unfortunate, recess obsession).

Except, not having friends was becoming more than just an issue of having no one to compare myself to. The fact was, being a loner was starting to draw attention. Looking around the class now, I could see only two other students sitting alone: Hinata, who was painfully shy, and, Shino, who seemed to hold the same disinterest in companionship to me. Everyone else had settled into groups, even Naruto, though admittedly his insertion into groups was a little more forceful on his part than being due to true friendship.

In any case, my not having friends was becoming increasingly more notable, and I was starting to notice looks from Iruka and other chūnin instructors when I sat alone at lunch. So friendship was going to have to blossom, regardless of my personal feelings about it.

But friendship with who?

The rookie nine were all immediately off the table. Sure, a friendship with Ino would've been infinitely better than one with Naruto, but their future proximity to the orange boy alone made any entanglement with them potentially dangerous. However, it wasn't as simple as just making friends with anyone outside the rookie nine. Currently, there were around forty of us in the upper class: the class filled with clan kids, students with the highest entrance exam scores, and those with connections (AKA Naruto). It was obvious we were the class expected to reach graduation. And yet, despite being the ones with the most promise, I knew Naruto's graduating class had only had twenty-seven students. So, if I wanted to avoid ending up a loner again, I needed friends who would hopefully remain in that top twenty-seven.

I was still mulling over who to try approaching when our first kunoichi-specific class rolled around at the end of the day. Suzume, our instructor, took us to a large open field near the outskirts of Konoha before letting us loose with the task of creating a bouquet of wildflowers that, rather fittingly to my situation, represented friendship. It seemed to be a test to determine those who knew the art of ikebana, the arrangement of flowers, or hanakotoba, the meaning of flowers. Not that many did know, judging by the way more than a handful raced off to grab as many flowers as they could.

Purposefully heading in the opposite way to Ino (judging by Hinata's absence, she'd been excused from this class), I began picking random flowers while surreptitiously observing my classmates.

Mako? No, she couldn't do that water exercise yesterday.

Honoka? No, she seems too close to Ino.

Takara? …she's playing in the mud, I'm not that desperate.

Yet.

As I knelt by some bluebells, still going over names in my head, my attention was suddenly grabbed by a few girls nearby. It looked like some sort of confrontation, one against three. "Hey, that was my flower!" The single girl complained, trying to snatch back what looked like a cosmos from the ringleader of the trio, a girl called Ami.

Ami huffed, holding the flower out of reach. "Excuse me, does this field belong to you? I don't think so," she shot back, her two friends giggling at her retort.

The other girl's face went red. "But I picked it! It's mine!" She tried to jump for it again, but Ami moved the flower away just in time, causing the girl to stumble and fall onto the ground.

"Look at you, you're so clumsy," Ami taunted, waving the flower in front of the girl who appeared to be fighting back tears. "Besides, I was gonna pick it before you anyway, so actually it was mine first, thief."

"Yeah, she was gonna!" One of Ami's friends chimed in.

"You're such a thief!" The other declared.

It was a completely ridiculous argument on Ami's part, and yet, the girl whose flower had been stolen seemed unable to find a comeback, lower lip wobbling. Even more ridiculously, Suzume, despite being in clear view of all this, wasn't intervening. Instead, the chūnin instructor appeared willfully oblivious, looking away to help cut some wisteria for another student as a clear act of bullying took place in front of her.

I was so bemused by this all, I noticed too late that Ami had caught me staring. The girl spun to face me, one hand still gripping onto her stolen goods whilst the other was placed on her hip. "What are you looking at, billboard brow?" She demanded, her two lackeys giggling again.

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes - please, it wasn't that funny - when a thought abruptly hit me.

Ami does well in classes, doesn't she?

I vaguely remembered her putting her hand up relatively often in class when Iruka asked questions. She wasn't a child prodigy by any stretch of the word, but she certainly wasn't failing. And then there was the clear mean streak she was displaying here; bad enough that I sincerely doubted any of the rookie nine would become friends with her, but considering Suzume wasn't stepping in to stop any of this, definitely not so bad that association with her would result in me being scrutinized by our chūnin instructors.

...I can make this work.

Looking up at Ami, I plastered a smile I'd practised in the mirror on my lips. "Sorry, I was just looking at your hair. It's really pretty."

My response clearly took Ami off guard. Her cheeks went red, glare faltering. "Oh, um, thanks?" She stumbled over her words, flustered. "I mean, I guess your pink hair is nice too."

Her two lackeys and the girl they were bullying all looked utterly bewildered by what was happening. Ignoring them, I stood up, walking over to Ami with a few bluebells in my hands. "You can have these, they match your pretty hair," I told her, watching as her cheeks turned even redder.

And, just like that, I became friends with canon Sakura's childhood tormentor.

I saw almost immediate results from my friendship with Ami.

As a member of her clique, I went from sitting alone at the back of the classroom to sitting near the front with her, Kasumi and Fuki (her two lackeys), no longer an outcast. Further, now with a control group to adjust myself to, my grades finally began to look more and more average. I found the sweet spot was to usually do worse than Ami but better than Kasumi and Fuki - that was, aside from in chakra control where Kasumi, who was from an offshoot branch of the Akimichi clan, did the best of the trio.

Despite Kasumi's unexpected connection to Chōji, however, my new friendships ensured most of the rookie nine would want nothing to do with me.

Ami was a bully, simple as.

Of course, I quickly realised it came from a place of insecurity: her parents were divorced, leaving her feeling ignored and emotionally neglected. It was why I'd so easily managed to become her friend - all it had taken was a few earnest-sounding compliments and attention-starved Ami had latched on, desperate for more.

None of this excused the way she acted though. Sure, the insults she used were childish, stupid even - sunglasses freak for Shino, bug eyes for Hinata - but, at six years old, they could leave disproportionately deep scars. More than once, I watched her reduce a classmate to tears, Fuki and Kasumi sniggering as she did so.

And, more than once, I watched our chūnin instructors let her do it without batting an eye.

As it turned out, Suzume was in the majority for letting bullying happen on her watch. Most of the adults seemed to take the stance that if you couldn't handle a few mean jabs, then you weren't going to make it as a shinobi anyway. Toughen up, I heard an instructor tell one of Ami's sniffling victims, it's just words.

Iruka was a rarity in that he would call out Ami's behaviour. But, with dozens of other students to handle, including the increasingly misbehaving Naruto, most of her bullying went unnoticed and unchallenged.

I didn't challenge her either by virtue of her bullying simply benefitting me. While I didn't join in with the taunts or giggling, my association with her, as I'd suspected, dissuaded most of the rookie nine from seeking any kind of interaction with me. Ino even seemed to actively dislike me (unsurprising really, considering how much she hated Ami). So, despite knowing she was being cruel, I never stopped Ami. Like the chūnin instructors, all I did was look away.

There was, however, one big disadvantage to our friendship

Sasuke.

Like many of the girls in our class, Ami had an all-consuming, massive crush on him. Fuki and Kasumi did too, but it was because Ami liked him that we had to try and sit near him in class or cheer him on when the boys played ninja in the playground.

Honestly, I couldn't really blame Ami that much. Sasuke wasn't just popular with the girls. Sasuke was popular full stop. As much as the girls crushed on him, the boys almost seemed more obsessed with him, desperate to be his friend. He was undeniably the best in our class, athletic and academic, constantly receiving praise from our teachers for getting the top scores over and over again. Worse still, the compliments never seemed to go to his head. If anything, he'd get bashful about it all, which just served to make him all the more popular. He had a massive friendship group and was always surrounded by friends, chatting and laughing.

I hated it.

Because I couldn't stop what was going to happen to the Uchiha.

What could I do, really? Walk up to Fugaku and tell him that his plans of a coup would get his entire clan killed? Tell Itachi that if things continued the way they were, he was going to commit familicide? Sarutobi that his best friend was a genocidal monster?

In every case, I was asking people to believe the frankly absurd words of a child. And, beyond that, in every case I was almost certainly walking into death at the hands of Danzō. I had no doubt that Danzō was watching our class carefully because of Naruto. So the second I made any move too unusual, he'd know, and that would be that. No need to try and be average anymore, I'd been fucking dead. Or worse, he'd use a Yamanaka to rifle through my mind and then it wouldn't just be the Uchiha gone, everyone would be screwed.

I couldn't try and pretend though that it was for the greater good of everyone I was staying my hand. I was no hero. It was all just self-preservation, nothing more.

The Uchiha were going to die and popular, happy, nice Sasuke would have to watch it happen.

Sometimes, the sight of him would make me almost physically ill with repressed guilt.

All I could do was look away.

Sorry for how long this chapter took! The PhD was certainly PhD-ing and honestly after long days of coding nothing is less appealing than sitting in front of a computer and writing more TTATT

Here we are though, chapter 2 at last! Sorry it is a bit short and so much of Sakura telling the camera what's going on rather than showing, I kinda wanna zoom through these Academy chapters a bit quicker than I did in the og fic and a bunch of conversations between kids does not seem that fun lol. Might come back and edit this chapter later to pad it out a bit, but she's done for now :)

But yeah, been thinking a lot recently about Sasuke before the Uchiha massacre happened. As far as I can tell, there's not many canon flashbacks about Sasuke before the massacre and they don't conflict with the way I've characterised him here - I sorta envision him as this very sweet kid who is just genuinely nice though with still an inferiority complex to Itachi. I have this picture in my head of him telling his friends to be quiet while Iruka is talking and I'm just….my poor baby :(

Growing up is just looking at all the kids in Naruto and begging Kishimoto to leave them alone TTATT

ALSO! For the guest that said Sakura's parents aren't shinobi: I had no idea Kishimoto said they were civilian and clanless BUT since it was said in an interview, not the manga (as far as I can tell), I shall elect to treat it as non-canon. If it turns out I'm wrong and it was in the manga….Kishimoto himself will have to stop me, he has no power here wahaha.

Reviewer Question: Favourite filler arc from Naruto?

It's been a long time since I watched any filler arcs so my memory isn't the best of them, but I remember really enjoying the twelve guardians arc! And the land of tea arc is such strong nostalgia I can't help but have a soft spot lol