Sakura is four years old. Her father in is the other room. He is trembling at something unseen, taking raspy breaths as he fruitlessly tries to calm himself. Sakura stays in the kitchen and eats her cereal, careful not to crunch it too loudly.
Her father eventually recovers enough to stop shaking and go upstairs to rest.
Her mother came in the kitchen, looking quite pale too. Sakura was in the middle of eating cereal, but instead of chewing it, she let it disintegrate in her mouth and swallow it so it wouldn't startle her mother.
Later, she would ask her mom about it. Her father used to be a ninja, a genin. One of his teammates died, and it made her father feel bad, even now. The other teammate went to get training from a strong ninja, because she was the most promising. Her father retired because it hurt him so badly. The other ninja were mad at him for that. They thought he should serve despite how he felt, and they ignored him and even spat curses at him.
It was that day Sakura realized there was more to being a ninja than cool jutsus and being a hero.
"How can I help?" Sakura whispered to her mother.
Mebuki looks at her husband, who is snoring on the couch, cat resting on his chest and rising up and down.
"Hugs and kisses, and telling someone you care for them helps." Mebuki whispers.
Sakura nods, taking that information and tucking it close to her heart.
Sakura is five. She just saw a woman flip a man who touched her butt onto his head. With one hand. The woman is a ninja. She is wearing a trenchcoat and fishnet leggings tucked into steel-toed boots.
"I want to be you!"
The purple haired woman looks at her for a long time.
"I'm sure you will be, Haruno."
She walks away.
Sakura is happy for a long time afterwards, before she realized she never gave the woman her name.
Sakura is seven. She tells her parents she wants to be a ninja.
They ask her if she is sure.
Sakura thinks about the purpled haired woman, who demanded respect, Ino, who gave her the red ribbon in the park, and Sasuke who wanted to be a ninja and become stronger too.
She nods.
Her father gently pulls her to the side.
"Being a ninja is hard. It's tough. If you really want to be one, your mother and I will support you. But I want you to know that you have a choice. You can choose not to be a ninja and there is nothing wrong with that, we will still love you. Now, do you really want to?"
Sakura nods again.
They sign her up.
Later, she asks what her father meant by choice. He smiles sadly at her.
"My parents were immigrants. In order to live here, immigrant couples need to sign up their firstborns for the military. No exceptions. I didn't have a choice when I became a genin."
His eyes looked far away, sad and cloudy, and Sakura thought that maybe he was seeing something too much for her to understand just yet.
Sakura and her father are terrified out of their minds. They haven't seen Mebuki since this morning when she left for work. She is hours late coming home. They visit the place where she was last, and they see blood on a protruding piece of scrap metal. Ever since the Police were all killed, Konoha is a scary place, especially at night. A civilian woman is not safe.
They ask around, and they hear about a woman with a back injury heading to the hospital.
They find Mebuki sitting in one of the chairs. She's crying. Her hand is trembling so hard, that when she tries to fill out paperwork she smudges the ink and has to start over.
When she sees them, she shouts in relief, and cries harder.
Kizashi hugs his wife, and Sakura runs to get some water for her mother to drink. When she comes back, her father's normally cheerful disposition is replaced with one of anger.
He's asking the medics why his wife has been sitting in a pool of her own blood for hours on end.
They reply that it is because she is a civilian, and needs to fill out certain paperwork. And that she is a non-priority.
His shouts fill the halls, and Sakura feels her heart roar in rage along with his. They eventually treat Mebuki, but only after Kizashi can prove that he used to be a ninja and that Sakura is a ninja-to-be.
Sakura learns something that day.
She will be a ninja, because people respect ninja.
Sakura is eight, and they are calling her names. It doesn't bother her much, she was used to it long before Ino jumped to her defense. Kids are mean. Calling her forehead, and pinkie doesn't mean anything to her.
It's when they start calling her the civilian that gets to her.
Sakura isn't dumb. She knows that she is one of the only kids in the entire academy that comes from both civilian parents. Everyone else is either from a clan-big or minor- or a second or third generation kids born from a parents who made it chunin or higher.
When they call her civilian, they are saying she is weak. That she is lesser, and shouldn't be here.
She tells Ino this.
Ino is a clan heir who doesn't get it. She tells Sakura she is overreacting. She says Sasuke doesn't like girls like Sakura who create a big fuss over nothing.
They aren't friends anymore.
Sakura has something to prove now. When the academy teacher smiles at her patronizingly when she lags being in the sprints, she grits her teeth and runs harder, breaths whistling harshly between her teeth.
When Mizuki-sensei says the ninja world is no place for the meek of heart and suggests she should look for other career options, she studies so hard she gets the top scores and beats Sasuke Uchiha in the writing portion.
She doesn't hear anything else from him after that.
Sakura graduates as number one kunoichi, above all the clan girls and boys except Sasuke Uchiha.
She is happy with it.
Sakura is twelve, and there is sweat in her eyes, cramps in her legs and a kunai in her hand, but Sakura doesn't stop moving.
The enemy nin is hurtling senbon at her, and Sakura's sharp eyes notice their glistening tips-coated with poison. She pumps chakra to her feet in a continuous stream, sticking to the side of the bride and almost falling when she raises her foot to move. She can't keep this up forever.
As soon as she tries to step onto the bridge she slips on the ice. The bridge is coated in it.
"You know you can't keep this up." The masked nin said gently.
Hiding behind one of the stone pillars, Sakura has an idea. She had seen Haruhi sensei glide over the counter top back at Tanzuna's house with socked feet.
She adjusts the chakra in her feet and bolts out and onto the ice.
She cringes for a second, before smiling when she glides across the ice like a swan in a pond. She ducks and dodges and weaves around senbon, blocking them from Tazuna. Her hair flips behind her, and she can feel the nin's eyes follow it.
She is in good spirits until she sees Zabuza raising his sword, preparing to cleave Sasuke in half.
"NO!"
But before she can get to him, the nin raises a huge ice wall between them.
Sakura frantically skates around, looking for a way around it, but Haku blocks her each and every time. She is desperate, and about to start crying, when she hears a voice whisper to her from behind one of the heavy machines.
"Use these." The voice whispers. Sakura can faintly make out a shadow of a person in the mist. She can't tell who is it, but Sakura runs to the machines anyway.
She climbs into the driver's seat, blinking at all the knobs, buttons and dials.
Creaks are heard where senbon impale the side of the machine.
Sakura turns the key, grabs the wheel, and presses the accelerator. A startled yell is heard as she collides with the ice wall, shattering it to bits with the full force of the giant machine. She jumps out, and just in time shoves Sasuke out of the way.
The next thing she remembers is waking up to Naruto's crying face.
She spends a long time thinking about what Haruhi-sensei said.
She works in the hospital now. It took three weeks in order for her to get approved, even longer for Haku, and it only sped up when Kakashi-sensei personally stepped in. Sakura notices immediately how they treated him with respect because of his status as a clan ninja. And while Haku was also from a clan, she was a foreigner.
Despite being the number one Kunoichi, it took weeks longer than it should have for her to become active at the hospital.
When Ino showed up with them, asking where she needed to register, the receptionist, stood up straight (unlike with Sakura, looked at Ino with respect (unlike with Sakura), and told her everything she needed to know. Unlike with Sakura. Ino had everything taken care of in two days. In what took Sakura and Haku three weeks, Ino got taken care of in two days, with more privileges than them to boot.
She loved Ino like a sister, and was glad they reconciled after the period incident, but that day, she came home shaking with rage.
Her parents could only look at her with painful empathy and resigned understanding.
She trains. She still likes Sasuke, but the bridge and her near death puts everything into a new life. It would be great to date Sasuke, but this is life or death. The academy always made it sound so grand and spectacular, being a ninja, but now Sakura knows the truth.
The academy did not prepare her for this.
Maybe nothing could have.
She studies. She trains. She learns, and communicates. Friends aren't just friends, but allies, people who could mean life or death for her.
She learns poisons with Ino, medical training with Haku, ninjutsu with Sasuke, Taijutsu with Rock Lee, weapons training with Tenten, Genjutsu with Kurneri, and so much more.
Her parents are proud. Sakura pretends not to notice the worry in their gazes whenever she walks past a clan ninja.
Their reactions are a dose of reality.
She may be improving, but she will always be a civilian born.
Sakura wants to be angry at her parents for that, but she can't find it within herself to be anything other than grateful.
Don't tell anyone, but TenTen was her favorite. She was the only other new genin who wasn't from a clan. Tenten was born to civilian parents who died in the nine-tails attack, leaving Tenten on her own. With no last name.
But Tenten didn't let that stop her.
She worked for everything she had. She got an apprenticeship under the local blacksmith, and forged many of her own weapons.
Being a year older than Sakura, she has a lot more experience.
Her advice, especially regarding being a civilian born, is crucial. Sakura will have to work for every ounce of respect she gets. And no matter how hard she works, they will always be ninja's who won't respect her. Who will disregard her.
"That's fine, I don't need them to like me!" Sakura exclamins pumping her fist.
"CHA!" Inner shouted her agreement.
Tenten levels her with a look the immediately quiets her.
"What if this ninja is your teammate, and refuse to work with you? And what if this ninja is your superior officer? What if this ninja is the person you have to report to, and they won't listen or believe a word your saying? What if they decided to hand out punishments for a perceived insult? What of they say you are treasonous? That's punishable by death. What if They go out of their way to relocate you to dangerous missions and areas? This is much more than whether or not they like you, Sakura!"
Sakura nodded, stunned.
They quietly went back to sharpening their kunai.
Looking back at all that, Sakura just felt tired.
She was sitting in one of the cots, legs crossed and looking at everyone else in the room. Most of them were asleep.
She saw Karin laying on her side, and Sakura's eyes narrowed as she thought about the enigma of a girl. She had bite scars all up and down her arms and presumably the rest of her body too. She also had a bloodline limit that Sakura had never seen or read of before.
She remembers back when she was frantically studying with Haku, and they were given access to books they normally wouldn't have. There was an upcoming test about healing factors, and how certain clan had them. They needed to study how it affected the healing process and what they should do if they encountered it.
Sakura remembered seeing a red haired woman in the books. Her name was blotted out, but Sakura was pretty sure it started with a "U". Could it be that the Uzumaki were once a clan, with bloodline limits? Karin had said something about how the rest of their clan had died between the second and third shinobi war. Sakura knew that people with bloodline limits were often hunted, like Haku and Sasuke.
And If Karin had one of the Uzumaki bloodlines, the chains, could it be possible she had a healing factor too? The bite marks on her arms could be because people were using it to heal!
During the battle with Gaara, Karin was slashed down her leg with debri, but looking at it now, it was all gone! No medics or anything helped her.
Sakura slid from her cot, and walked over to Karin. Her silenced her footsteps with chakra, stopping over the sleeping girl.
She raised her hand to shake Karin awake from the shoulder, but paused when Karrin stirred and rolled over. She blearily opened her eyes, blinking up at Sakura before stiffening.
"What?"
Sakura stared at her in silence.
"What?"
"...Guilt." Sakura said simply.
Karin sent her a creeped out look. Her hand clenches in the fabric of her shirt.
"That look when we escaped on the summon. It was guilt. You saw how badly injured Ino, was. And you knew you could heal her with your bloodline limit." Sakura hissed.
Emotions she had been suppressing for the past few days boiled over, and suddenly she had to restrain herself from jumping over and punching Karin in her mouth.
A part of Sakura was horrified at herself, but as she remembered Ino's mangled face and her own desperation as she fruitslessy tried to ease Ino's suffering, she couldn't find it within herself to care. Karin could have prevented that, but all she could do was muster up a stupid simpering look as they ran for their lives.
"Karin's a coward!"
Sakura couldn't agree more.
Karin dashed out of the room, and Sakura gritted her teeth and gave chase. No use in waking up the others.
She skidded out the door and around the corner, coming to a dead halt when she found Karin there waiting for her. Her arms were crossed around her chest, and she was biting her lip.
"You can't tell anyone." She spoke, voice stiff with stress.
Sakura clenched her fist, the leather of her gloves squeaking.
"I won't tell anyone if you heal Ino. Right now."
Karin took a deep breath, and then another. Her eyes darted around the hall as if they were trying to find a way to escape. She absentmindedly traced some of her scars with her fingertips.
She opened her mouth to say something, but instead nothing came out.
"What?" Sakura demanded, hand going for her kunai.
Karin got into a defensive position eyes locked onto something Sakura couldn't see.
"There is something wrong! Something is happening!"
"Are we under-"
A huge crashing noise drowned her out, and the two of them were thrown to their sides violently. The coughed as clouds of dust filled the air and choked them. Their ears rang harshly as they desperately tried to gain their footing.
Sakura stood only to sway and almost fall over, when a hand caught her arm.
"K-Kakashi-sensei!"
He looked frazzled. His hair was singed from fire and his vest was spotted with blood. His sharingan was out, and that more than anything told her that this was serious. Karin forgotten, she turned towards her sensei.
"Whats going on?"
He didn't answer her, instead posing his own question.
"Where is Haruhi, Where is Sasuke?"
"I-I don't know. Haruhi went after Sasuke, and Kabuto-san said he'd get them back."
Kakashi froze. He didn't say anything, but the horror in his eyes told her all that she needed to know.
And now Kakashi knows Haruhi and Sasuke are missing.
Things have truly gone sideways, but that pretending like they weren't in the first place.
Question of the chapter: What do you think of Sakura's and Tenten's bond? What do you think of the classism and prejudice in ninja society?