Assay

A branch snaps in the darkness of the forest, three kunai launching in its direction instantaneously, sharpened steel meeting nothing but air and the remnant smoke of a substitution Jutsu as it carved into the trunk of the tree. Shadows, elongated by the dim light of the woods, engulfs Sakura’s still form. Crouched low to the ground, one hand holding a kunai and another poised for a hand seal, she listens. Her chakra floods her ears, magnifying the sounds of the forest as she keeps her knees locked, ready to spring to action when-

A rush of air to her left, then- an explosion. Her palms touch the muddy ground for a split second as she backflips to avoid the onslaught of kicks from her attacker. Pressing his advantage during the haze of the smoke from the explosion, the Shinobi hurls two shuriken towards her neck and one to her thigh as he reaches for his blade. Sakura deflects the ones sailing to her jugular as she dodges to the side, evading the other one. Her ears still ringing from the explosion, her fingers deftly make the hand seals for two earth clones as she takes to the trees to get to higher ground. Her opponent pursues as he cuts through the clones, but not before one places an exploding tag at his ankle.

“Shit-”

The detonation dislodges molecules of dust and several chunks of Earth, the blade-wielding ninja disappearing in a puff of smoke as Sakura whirls just in time to deflect the Chokuto slashing down at her, she sees the opening in his left flank and drops down to kick his legs out from under him as he tries to align his sword for another strike.

His legs give out and she springs back up again, delivering several hits to his abdomen and solar plexus in quick succession. Her final, sweeping axe kick to his chest makes him sail down to the forest floor.

He gasps out in pain as he rolls backwards onto one knee, blade still gripped in his hands as he lunges forwards and delivers a vicious vertical slice that cuts her from her upper thigh to just under her ribs, the pain steals the breath from her lungs and momentarily clouds her vision but before he manages to prepare another attack, Sakura grips his wrist with her bloodied fingers and pitches him forward, twisting around him as her kunai meets the delicate skin of his throat and her knee settles heavily against his lower back. Breathing heavily, she takes the point of her elbow and jabs it into the middle of his shoulders and she digs it in . His arm drops the blade and hits the ground repeatedly, gasping for air.

“Yield! yield! Sakura-Chan, I yield!”

The pink-haired girl huffs as she releases him, hands immediately occupied with putting pressure onto her own wounds as she tiredly rolls over and lays on the grass next to the Shinobi. Her hair splays around her head and grits her teeth to fight off the pain as the nin next to her groans and rolls over so his back is to the forest floor. She breathes in deeply, savouring the oxygen in her lungs and trying to use it as a way to detract from the pain as she exhales slowly, repeating the process twice more. She steels herself to talk through the cloud of agony her side was experiencing.

“Naruto, whoever the hell decided you needed a sword is a monster.”

The response she got back was booming laughter, although stilted with pain. Her blond teammate, who randomly took an interest in Kenjutsu somewhere these past four months, brought his well-loved blade to eye-level. He stared at the reflection of his blue eyes in the glint of the steel for a few moments before turning his eyes to her green ones. His sunny smile morphed quickly into worry as he looked her over, noting the amount of blood staining her top.

“Holy shit, Sakura-chan, I’m so sorry! Cho-Cho's reach is a bit farther than the tanto I had before, and I haven’t totally adjusted, I didn’t mean to-”

Sakura raises a hand to stop him, wincing as the movement tugged at her new injury. Naruto’s chokuto, lovingly named Cho-Cho by her blond teammate, made a parallel cut against her torso and while it wasn’t very deep, it basically flayed her side.

“Don’t worry about it Naruto, it’s just a part of sparring. It’ll be healed in no time,”

She shoots a smile at her teammate, placing her hands beneath her back as she slowly pulled herself into a sitting position, her body protesting at the movement.

“Plus, I can always get Princess Sasuke to heal me!”

“Hn. I don’t know why I bother healing you, idiots.”

The voice came from their right, two sets of footsteps trampling on leaves rang out as the remaining two Genin of Team 7 appeared from the thick undergrowth. Sai was nursing what looked to be a broken arm in a jerry-rigged splint, while Sasuke’s arm and face were adorned by several fresh bruises. Sakura gathered that their spar ended before her and Naruto’s.

The Uchiha strode over and crouched in front of the two Genin on the ground, obsidian eyes assessing them for damage, sharpening at the cut at her side.

At some point during their team gatherings, Sasuke had stopped actively engaging in spars and started hanging back and off to the side, hands glowing green as he practiced resuscitating fish with chakra. At first, Naruto had poked fun at him for not fighting and spending all his time with ‘smelly seafood’ before realizing that the Uchiha was so engrossed in his task that he didn’t register a single one of the blonds words. Each failed ‘patient’ resulted in the smell of freshly cooked fish wafting through the training grounds, and Sakura fondly remembered how for two months, her team basically subsisted off of Fresh Fried Fish a la Sasuke Uchiha.

She recalled Sasuke’s frustration at not understanding the mystical palm technique, each day seemingly bringing nothing but failure for two straight months. She had snickered a bit behind his back at first, the thought of the Great Uchiha Sasuke finally finding something he was bad at and experiencing the same frustration she, and a lot of other supposed ‘average’ Shinobi felt, was hilarious. Then the smug amusement slowly morphed into pity as she saw the frustration in his eyes grow deeper each day. When the good samaritan part of her caved in and she offered to help with his chakra control, he threw her a look of pure acid and stomped out of the training grounds, his bucket of fish in hand.

To be offered help from the girl who had improved in leaps and bounds over those same months when he had done nothing but failed, Sakura realized he must have felt insulted and, burying the small part of her that felt unbridled glee at making the oh so special Uchiha-Sama feel inadequate, ha! She tracked him down that day and spent an hour dodging the kunai he threw in an attempt to get her to go away as she tried to explain everything she knew about and learned in the two months since she began studying chakra theory and control.

When she plucked a kunai out of the air as it hurtled towards her and slashed through her left palm with it, the volley of projectiles stopped. Her right palm glowed a light teal as she placed it over her wound, coming away a minute later with bloody, but otherwise unblemished skin, a hand had grabbed her wrist. Looking up into red eyes, Sasuke’s whisper of ‘teach me’ had felt like a scream in the stillness of the Uchiha compound.

A week after, Sasuke was carefully placing his first-ever successful mystical palm technique patient in one of the gurgling streams that flowed through their training grounds, an offshoot of the Naka River. There was a triumph in his eyes as Team 7 celebrated at Ichiraku’s that night, and Sakura felt her heart flutter at how for the first time, her team of dysfunctional misfits who, on paper, shouldn’t have worked, felt like family.

Until Sai, in all his deadpan, grinning glory, kindly informed everyone that the fish that Sasuke was practicing with was Haddock fish and that they would most certainly be dead by now since they can’t live in freshwater. Sasuke punched him through a fruit stand.

From then on, ‘Haddock’ joined the ranks of ‘Leeches’ and became an inside joke in the team whenever someone fucked up.

Now, seven weeks later, the Uchiha crouched next to her, palms glowing a dark forest green and eyebrows furrowed as he blocked off capillaries to staunch the bleeding and stitched together her skin.His cool chakra gave her side a pleasant numbness.

“Naruto, you Idiot , your swing was three centimetres off from piercing her peritoneum.”

“Shut up, Teme! I already said sorry. And I have no idea what that even means!”

“It means , idiot, that I wouldn’t have been able to heal her since I haven’t been allowed to assist on lacerated peritoneal surgeries and wouldn’t be able to repair her internal abdomen if she herniated! ”

While the concept of using more than one sentence in a conversation was relatively new to Sasuke, Team 7 quickly realized that he spoke the most when he was talking about medicine and medical techniques. While the medical jargon sometimes made their head spin, they still found it amusing to bring up medical topics just to get the last Uchiha to talk.

“I didn’t even understand half of what you just said, nerd!”

Sasuke huffs as he turns back to Sakura, the bulk of his healing appearing to be done as he starts stitching together the last layers of skin.

“You three would be dead if I weren’t a medic!”

“While I am unsure if Asshole’s statement is correct, teams with medical ninja do statistically have a lower probability of fatality.”

Sai lets out a chuckle as he sits down next to Naruto and joins the conversation, careful not to jostle his arm. Naruto turns to him and squints, looking over his arm. Noticing his teammates questioning look, Sai gave a light shrug.

“Asshole punched me through a tree.”

“Yeah, I figured, with him picking up Baa-Chans unhealthy punching habits. What gives with the splint, though? Why couldn’t he just have healed you?”

Sasuke grunts out a reply, still focused on healing her side.

“I stimulated the healing process but it's better to allow skeletal injuries to heal by themselves so that the regeneration of blood cells that comes from the bone marrow being healed can calibrate to the body, otherwise it weakens the lymphatic system.”

Naruto sighs, folding his hands under his head as he lazily stares at Sasuke’s glowing hands. Sakura chuckles as she looks him over.

“I guess Naruto’s just going to pretend he understood that,”

“Hey!”

“That statistic about teams with medic nins is pretty interesting, though. Why not just have a medic on each team?”

“Medic-nins only make up about seven percent of the Konoha Shinobi population, so they have to be allocated very carefully. I believe the teams themselves have to be considered carefully as well. Team 7 has a pretty well-rounded skill set of close-range, long-distance and mid-distance fighters, So someone like Asshole, even with his deplorable bedside manner, can focus on long-distance techniques with his Genjutsu and heal after the confrontation is over.”

“It’s not just that,” Sasuke cuts in, shooting a glare at Sai.

“Medical Ninjutsu requires extensive knowledge of anatomy and several years worth of training, along with chakra control in the 85th percentile and above,”

Sasuke hesitates, looking up at Sakura from where he was finishing up his healing. Black meets green as Sasuke speaks.

“You could be a medic-nin, Sakura.”

Naruto bursts out laughing, immediately wincing as he was reminded where the pink-haired girl kicked him in the chest. Coughing, he tried to swat off the Uchiha when he reached over with a glowing green palm to heal his bone bruises. The black-haired boy simply rolled his eyes and when the blond relented, continued his work.

“Sakura-chan as a medic? Seriously?”

Sai and Sakura joined in on the laughter, minds unable to conjure up the pink-haired girl as a medic. Sasuke’s smirk was small but present.

“I’m fairly sure Ugly would trap her patients in a water cage if they so much as bled the wrong way.”

“Or bury them with an Earth Jutsu for not taking their medicine!”

Sakura wiped mirthful tears from her eyes, shoulders shaking with laughter.

“Yeah, no, definitely not for me!”

While Sakura did have an aptitude for Medical Ninjutsu, and indeed managed to both execute and teach Sasuke the Mystical Palm Technique, it was mostly a result of her extensive research into Chakra Theory and its applications coupled with her natural talent for chakra control. While Iryo-Ninjutsu was definitely an option for her, she couldn’t see herself as a medic. Not while her body longed for the rush of elemental chakra coursing through her coils, not while she felt like she had barely brushed the surface of how far Chakra could be utilized and honed for combat.

Four months ago, Sakura had begun training with single-minded ferocity, throwing herself at physical conditioning and spending hours on end scrutinizing texts about Chakra, it’s origins and uses, how it formed and what happened to it after death, each question answered unearthed a hundred more and she absorbed the information like a sponge. Sakura spent what felt like every waking moment training, and while it was true that her strength now was almost incomparable to four months ago, she knew, from an objective standpoint, it was also because what she was four months ago wasn’t very much. It’s not hard to improve rapidly when you start off with nothing.

Objectivity aside, she was damned proud of what she had become.

She had to spend months catching up to her teammates, fighting tooth and nail each step of the way. Now, she had to spend years to surpass them. And Sakura, the little pink-haired girl who nobody had really believed in, who just wanted a chance, was ready.

After all, she was just getting started.