Chapter Text
Sakura’s job is not great.
It’s kind of gross, even though the instructors have told them a million of times that it’s necessary. They talked about genetic samples and replication of bloodline limits.
Mostly boring stuff, but she’s expected to listen, because that’s her job.
Unfortunately, she’s still not a real shinobi, because she hasn’t graduated from the Academy or gotten her Konoha band, but that’s fine. Neji didn’t go to the academy, either, but he still wears the headband; if she works hard enough, they’ll give her one too.
She’s under his command, which apparently means she’s under the Hyuuga’s command. The Hyuuga’s role is mostly on the frontlines, but Neji must be special for a kid from the branch family, because they only send him and Sakura out after the big battles are done, to pick off the wounded, and burn bodies.
Sakura kind of wishes she had someone to keep her from the big fights, too. Her job is with Neji, taking back kekkai genkai and retrieving important people’s bodies, but she has other assignments, too. She’s given a dull kunai and told to go through the battlefield, dodging slashes and jutsus from friend and foe, slashing at whatever isn’t wearing Konoha colors.
She’s learned by now to pick out the right bodies from a long distance away. The Hyuuga wear lighter clothing, have brown hair, and pale skin. Most of the time, Neji is the one who severs the eye, but he’s busy sometimes and there are too many for him to do alone, so she has to do that too.
She puked after one of the eyes burst in her hands, but then Neji just fixed a hard glare on her and told her not to soil his family’s bodies.
She doesn’t even feel nauseous, anymore.
It’s kind of annoying that they have to turn over every body, anyways. Hyuuga are easy to spot, but there are outliers, and sometimes when she pries open their eyelids to check, the bodies are already rotting.
Neji isn’t really mean, despite his harsh words and sharp stare. He watches her choke on her spit dozens of times on a battlefield that’s already been abandoned for a week, and gives her smelling salts to sniff when she’s feeling too sick. He steps in front of her when the main family raise their hands in anger, after she comes home bearing news of their precious son’s death.
She tells him it’s okay, that slaps don’t hurt from people who aren’t aiming to kill, but he just gets angrier at that.
Sakura needs to start keeping her mouth shut, like a good shinobi should, but sometimes things slip out. Like that time when she heard Ino’s dad saying bad words in his tent after reading a report she gave him. She repeated those same words the next time a senbon went into her skin, and she got smacked, with the senbon still piercing through her hand.
Once you become a shinobi, you are an adult, so Neji is allowed to say bad words, but Sakura isn’t. She only went to the Academy for two years, which apparently wasn’t enough even if she’s killed ten people by her own hand and probably a hundred more from slashed achilles tendons and exploding tags on the dusty ground.
She doesn’t have a jounin sensei either, or a third teammate, so there’s lots of things she needs if she’s going to graduate. Nobody calls her and Neji a team, so they have no number, but she wishes she had one, like how Ino always told her about the Ino-Shika-Cho trio.
Sakura doesn’t allow herself to think about Ino a lot anymore, but she can’t help wondering sometimes, if Ino still remembers her. Ino is still in the clan heir class in the Academy, with Iruka-sensei, taking useless kunoichi courses.
Neji was the one who told her about the clan heir’s class, how it wasn’t just a coincidence that so many important children were gathered altogether. It was so none of the kids would question it if one or two clanless students disappeared. So they wouldn’t learn in a classroom that only had a couple other kids.
She remembers his angry face when she told him that she was friends with Ino.
“The Yamanaka heir?” he’d scowled, hands a touch too rough when he plunged them into a dead man’s eyesockets. “You’re lucky they didn’t make you useless up there to make sure their precious little child was safe.”
Sakura had wanted to protest, that Ino’s family wasn’t like that. They grew flowers and Ino’s dad always tucked a blossom behind her ear when she came to visit.
Except she’s felt the Yamanaka technique scraping around in her mind for intel that she might have missed. Ino’s dad, despite his smile lines and kind expression, scolds her when she comes back with reports that don’t have the right results, even if it isn’t her fault. Sakura thinks that Inoichi hasn’t grown flowers in a long time, and the part of him that is Yamanaka Head is taking over.
Neji only nodded when she couldn’t find any defense for him, grim demeanor back on.
It’s okay.
It’s okay if Ino forgets her, if Shikamaru no longer greets her with a lazy stare. They are heirs. Even Sasuke-kun, with his baby face and innocent smiles, will become cold and hard like the head of the Uchiha. Sakura doesn’t need a shining hero like Ino to uplift her anymore.
She has Neji, a prodigy castoff of the Hyuuga, and that’s enough, for now. He may call her a pest and scoff at her attempts of replicating the Academy taijutsu, but he’s there for her when it counts. He knows the pains of flipping over every corpse in a field of death just to keep the enemy from stealing their precious doujutsu.
Eyeballs squish in her hands, still wet from tears, and she smiles at Neji.
They’re a team.
x
“No, idiot,” Neji frowns. “Your stance is too wide. Keep yourself relaxed, while still in position.”
“I’m trying,” Sakura whines. And she is, she really is! It’s just incredibly difficult to copy the Gentle Fist technique, given that only clan heirs are taught it from a young age.
Neji makes it look easy, but her knees and elbows ache from just an hour of practicing. She knows she’ll need it, when she’s grown up a little and can no longer slip between the adults, but right now, it’s just boring training that takes up her precious free time.
Neji crosses his arms. “You need to master this technique. You don’t have the Byakugan, so if there’s even a slight misstep in your form, you’ll die.”
Sakura thinks about saying she’d actually rather die than endure another minute of his training, but that’d just earn her more training and probably a slap to the wrist. Instead of retorting, she just sighs, loud and drawn out as long as possible.
Somewhere behind her in the makeshift training grounds, she hears a snicker. She thinks they might be making fun of her, for being stupid and weak, but then somebody whispers, “Adorable,” and she remembers that she and Neji are the youngest people in camp.
There were other kids too, other clanless children from different classes. They died because there was nobody who came before them, to teach them where to strike on adults, how to act dead when an enemy-nin got too close. Sakura doesn’t really have the time to pray for them, when she’s already so busy praying for Neji and herself, but she still feels bad.
Now it’s just her and Neji, a team of two heading out after the important shinobi are done fighting the important battles.
The thought of falling just like the children before, faces grey and blank, bolsters her motivation. She raises her hands again, palms angled just like she’s seen Neji do against stragglers dozens of times. Relaxes her shoulders and knees, dropping into a lower stance.
The katas aren’t too difficult to practice, although Neji keeps on stopping her midway to fix her mistakes. Sakura cycles through them, nodding along to Neji’s critiques.
The Gentle Fist technique relies on there being no blindspots in a certain distance from the user. Without the Byakugan, she won’t be able to see anything behind her, but she’ll have to make up for it with her own instincts. The hands always have to keep moving, to maintain the cycle of forms.
Sakura will probably have to emit chakra constantly from her limbs, in order to be able to sense opponents like the Byakugan does. Her chakra coils are slightly underdeveloped, and her pool is average.
It will take a lot of practice to master.
Her respect for Neji grows even further. Especially when the next time they are sent out, he flips over a still fresh body and marks the tenketsu on the man’s body, drawing tiny drops of blood with his senbon.
Maybe she should worry about desecrating the dead or something like that, but a cursory glance of his headband signifies him as not-Konoha nin, so it’s fine.
Neji tells her that tenketsu points will always vary from person to person, but the general areas will stay the same for most humans. It’ll require her to have advanced sensing skills in order to detect them individually, but that’s not really a problem.
Chakra control is the one she has going for her. In the ninety-fifth percentile, according to the sensor shinobi that Inoichi brought in once. It’s a shame that she was pulled out of the special class for clanless children so soon, but she’s picked up some things. Neji lets her practice on him sometimes, because she can’t do much damage anyways, and she lets him practice on her, on days that they don’t have to fight.
Neji starts letting her protect his back.
Sakura is still too weak to hold her own against adults, even wounded ones, but it’s easier when Neji is standing with her. He disables a man’s arm. She cuts through the muscle before he can recover. Her kunai is still too dull to be able to fully sever limbs, but it can still do damage.
It still grosses her out when he eventually soils himself, choking on his own blood. She hates the fact that everything slips out when people die. Souls go . . . somewhere. Blood spills out of bodies. Dead people can’t control their bowels, so piss and shit has to go, too.
Sakura wrinkles her nose, stepping around the mess to where Neji is standing.
“Neji, Neji,” she calls, shaking at her kunai to get the blood off. “Did you hear? We’re getting re-in-forcements, tomorrow.”
She says reinforcements slowly because she only just learned what it meant, and she doesn’t want to mess up the word. They’ve heard the word being thrown around a lot back in camp, but it’s never been anything substantial, until the most important person there announced that there would be a group of jounin coming to back them up.
The whole camp exploded with happiness, then, and she’d clapped too, because then she could go back home sooner.
There was lots of chatter after the announcement going around, but Sakura only caught snippets of it. She isn’t really close with anybody else in the squadron, because everybody was at least a decade older, and some shinobi were just plain mean.
Neji was gone during the celebration, tending to a slice on his upper arm. She’s not sure if she knew, but she forgot to tell him before lights out, so now seems like a good time as any to bring it up.
He snorts derisively. “I know,” he says. “But they’re not here because we’re all dropping like flies. They’re only here for the enemy. Not for us.”
She tilts her head. “But it’s not like they want us to die, right? There’s lots of strong people in camp.”
“The Hokage doesn’t care about anybody but clan shinobi,” he rolls his eyes. “Sakura, don’t get in their way, tomorrow. Important people don’t get punished if they accidentally kill someone like us.”
x
Today is an important day.
The most important day she’s had, since she first got assigned to Iwagakure’s borders.
Konoha’s Yellow Flash!
Sakura’s seen the posters taped up on the streets, before she left. A portrait of a smiling, blond haired man, encouraging shinobi. He’s one of the most important people in the village. Also probably the strongest.
He’s coming to camp.
Sakura can’t wait. She’s bouncing on her toes even though she should be conserving her energy, unable to keep her excitement. Several older shinobi are staring at her, some with contempt, some with humour, but she doesn’t pay them any mind. Namikaze Minato is the strongest shinobi in Konoha, and he is coming to help them with fighting efforts.
Today, she isn’t assigned on the cleanup team with Neji, because nobody thinks there will be any casualties from the stronger shinobi, with the Yellow Flash on their side. She will be out on the battlefield, Neji at her back and the Yellow Flash fighting beside her, and the thought makes her happiness swell up so big she can hardly breathe.
When Namikaze Minato marches into camp with a group of dangerous looking shinobi behind him, she cheers along with everybody else.
“Konoha’s Yellow Flash!”
“They’re here!”
A whole bunch of shinobi rush up to the group, asking about how the war is going in the other borders. Namikaze only rubs his head and tells them that it’s classified just for now, but it doesn’t dampen the atmosphere.
He smiles at them, bright and cheerful, and Sakura thinks he must be the sun.
She desperately wants to go up to him too, ask him if he’s going to kill all the enemy-nin, but Neji’s words come back to her. Important people don’t care about clanless, weak shinobi, and she is both. Still, she’s content watching him talk to the rest of the camp like they are all friends, and assure them that the war will soon end.
Sakura stands up straighter from her place by Neji, craning her neck to see better over the crowd, when Namikaze’s eyes drift to her direction, all on their own.
For a moment, her heart leaps, that maybe he’s coming to giver her one of his blinding grins. Then she sees a strand of hair in her vision, and sighs.
Her hair is pink. Bubblegum pink, according to Ino. Ino thought it was pretty, like her name, but Neji only tells her that it’s a beacon on the battlefield, and that he’ll cut it for her soon.
Her face colors as Namikaze starts toward her, giving his graces to the rest of the already dispersing shinobi. He must be coming to scold her for allowing it to grow this long. Hair is easy to grab, and only strong shinobi are allowed to wear it long, like Neji.
Except, instead of scowling like one of her Academy instructors, his mouth only tightens, and he crouches in front of her. He’s tall enough to be eye-level with her, even when he’s in a squat and she’s standing up.
“What’s your name?”
His voice is nice. Light and kind, like nobody else’s, here.
“Eh- I’m Haruno Sakura!” then she bows deeply, and shows him her wristband, signifying her as a low-ground fighter. Nobody really mentions her main job, to collect eyes and bodies.
“Hello, Sakura-chan,” he smiles. “I can see that you have a very important job, right?”
“Right! Yes, sir!” Nobody calls her Sakura-chan, anymore. It’s nice to hear it from somebody, even if it’s not her dad, or Ino.
“Can I ask when you were assigned here? How old are you?”
That question makes her think a bit, because days tend to blur together, between conflicts. Luckily, Neji nudges her shin and answers respectfully, “Three months, sir.”
Sakura says, “I’m six and three-quarters, and Neji is eight. He’s already genin, though.”
“You’re really- wow,” Namikaze chuckles awkwardly. “You guys are both really brave, y’know? Some shinobi who are way older than you have already deserted.”
She nods seriously. “It’s bad. Bad shinobi deserve to die.”
Namikaze coughs. She immediately wants to take her words back. It obviously made him uncomfortable, and she doesn’t want that. He’s one of the nicest people she’s met in a while.
“I wouldn’t say, er, they deserve to die, Sakura-chan,” he tries. “They’re just- a little tired of the war dragging on so long.”
She says, “Okay,” just to get the look off his face. It goes against everything she’s been taught so far, but it’s Namikaze Minato saying, it so it must be true.
Namikaze makes a poor attempt at fixing his face back into a cheerful expression.
“Say, how’d you both like a present?” he rummages in his pouch. “I’ve got a lot already, and it looks like you guys are short on weapons, so how about it?”
Sakura restrains herself from squealing. The dull, dull kunai that she’s been trying to sharpen is at her feet; he must have spotted its ragged edges.
He takes out a strange looking kunai, with three prongs instead of one. The handle is wrapped in marked cloth.
“Here you go,” he says, handing one to her and one to Neji. “It’s a kunai designed by myself. It should work a lot better than the ones you have.”
Sakura does shout then, taking the kunai and jumping into the air.
“Thank you!” she says breathlessly. “It’s the best present I’ve ever gotten!”
Neji bows, clutching the weapon to his chest. “Thank you, Namikaze-san.”
She tests the sharpest end against her pinky, which she knows she won’t use for a while. Blood wells up immediately, unlike her old kunai, which took a fair bit of pressure.
“It’s so sharp!” she giggles. Namikaze’s satisfied expression sours a little bit, but he must be happy that she’s happy too, because he nods, and pats her head.
“Keep working hard, okay?” he smiles reassuringly.
“Okay!”
Namikaze Minato is great.
He’s the best shinobi she’s ever met, aside from Neji.
Sakura’s beliefs are just reaffirmed later during the day, when she watches the Yellow Flash plow through dozens of Iwa shinobi without breaking a sweat, slitting throats and incapacitating limbs.
She manages to slice through a thumb on an enemy-nin’s tanto, with her special new kunai.