Chapter Text
The next realization she has comes gradually. Small ticks on a list of things that just don’t add up.
She has spent the last two weeks diligently. Determined to better herself with the tools she has already been given. Every morning she rose before the sun, ate breakfast, and trained for three hours. She walked up and down the black pine tree in their yard until her chakra levels ran low and the muscles of her core made her tremble. She practiced handling kunai and shuriken, whipping them out, spinning them in her hands, as well as target practice.
She’d always been good at consistently hitting the mark, but she was improving her accuracy and in fact…might even be hitting the target harder than before. Her katas and forms she repeats with the same single-minded focus usually reserved memorizing information before important exams. Even the Academy Three, she performs again and again until she has to sit down for fear of passing out – spots of black blooming in her vision and vertigo setting in.
This should be good. This should be positive. Sakura is proud of her progress, but she is so tired all the time. Her muscles tremble and ache, she gets headaches regularly which she never did before. She goes to bed at reasonable hours, sleeps like the dead – really, she hears nothing and is lost to the world and that simply does not bode well for a shinobi. Shinobi sleep lightly unless they are truly run down or severely injured. Neither Sasuke nor Naruto seem at all exhausted, Kakashi-sensei puts upon a lazy and exhausted façade, but she knew he wasn’t drained like she was.
That is the first acknowledgement that something is wrong. A little red flag of alarm. She wondered at how much Naruto eats when they sit down after training to eat their lunchboxes. Feels slightly in awe of just how much food he can consume. She thought it may be a fluke. Naruto defies any logic or reason and often does absolutely baffling things – he was a freak of nature. And yet…. Sasuke ate a lot as well. With a lot more class, in a calm, oddly delicate way and with impeccable manners, granted - but he still ate five times more than she did. Kakashi-sensei ate incredibly fast so gauging how much he ate was difficult, but he seemed to eat as much as or even more than Naruto.
At the monthly Rookie Nine gathering, she watched her former classmates as they ate at Yakiniku Q on the main street. Everyone put away more food than she ate within two whole days. Overlooking Chouji, who was an Akimichi and simply could not be compared to her, she watched Ino instead. Ino had talked diets with her back in the Academy. Ino had an amazing figure, but she still ate so much more than Sakura, it wasn’t even funny.
Sakura had begun to wonder if their concepts of what constituted ‘dieting’ had any similarities whatsoever. She sincerely doubted it.
Naruto had commented on her eating habits in the first days after they became a team and started eating lunch together. He asked her if she was sick and seemed concerned about her, but Sakura hadn’t realized what the issue was – as usual brushing him off. Which she felt guilty for in hindsight. Sasuke hadn’t said anything, but he too had seemed perplexed just the once when Naruto brought it up.
The day after the dinner at Yakiniku Q, Sakura sat on the red bridge alongside Sasuke and Naruto, waiting impatiently for sensei to arrive. She dithered for a few minutes, not wanting to look stupid in front of her teammates until Sasuke had enough. “Spit it out already.” He drawled with a roll of his eyes.
Sakura cringed at the tone, but did as she was asked. “How much do you guys eat in a day?”
Sasuke looked a bit baffled at the question, face going all Uchiha blank as he tried to compute her question and why in the world she was asking.
“Ah? Sakura-chan, why do you wanna kno’ that?”
Sakura made a face, glancing away and smoothing down the front of her black shirt. She’d stopped training in the red dress a good week ago. It got torn while sparring and she found it was much more convenient to train in cargo pants and a t-shirt than the dress. She couldn’t care less about how pretty she looked when she was fighting for her life to just to keep up with the boys when they were running laps.
“..I just realized you all eat a lot more than I do…” She murmured quietly. Feeling embarrassed for some reason. She ate one serving at every meal, as was polite, and was how she had been raised. Trying to go for seconds earned her a disapproving stare. Her mom always said it unladylike to eat too much and was concerned that the shinobi training would make her ‘bulky’.
“You do eat incredibly little, Sakura-chan.” Another voice interjected. She glanced up and Kakashi-sensei was sitting crouched on the handrail of the bridge. None of the kids even bothered to yell ‘late!’ at him. He put away his book and eyed her with some concern. “You eat like a civilian child instead of a shinobi one. Shinobi children eat a good ten times what their civilian peers do.”
Ten times? Sakura blanked at that. Why had no one informed her? Why had no one ever said anything. In hindsight it was obvious. Shinobi children trained all day, they expended so much energy just to have a functional chakra system and trained more than professional athletes did. Of course, they would need to eat more than kids who just went to school, played for a bit, and then hung out at home reading manga and lazing about on their bedroom floor like her cousins did.
“You probably don’t eat more than 1500 calories a day, whereas Sasuke eats at least 10,000. Naruto is an outlier and eats about 15,000 which is approximately what an adult male shinobi eats in a day.”
Both Naruto and Sasuke looked flummoxed at that. 1500 kcal was a snack for them and to hear that that was all Sakura ate in a day was shocking and awful. She had essentially been starving every day for years. Every day since she began the Academy, she hadn’t been getting enough to eat.
Sakura was so shaken by this knowledge, she was just standing there, watching her hands while Naruto yelled furiously. Why had no one taken her aside? Why had she just been allowed to suffer for years? Of course, she was weak and skinny when her body had nothing with which to build muscle. Naruto worded those questions a lot more rudely than that, and calling her weak did sting, but he meant well. He was concerned for her.
The training session was postponed. Instead, Naruto bullied Kakashi-sensei into bringing Sakura to the hospital for a check-up. Even Sasuke said nothing and just followed along, seemingly for once agreeing with the blond knucklehead.
The mednin had been incensed. She had called it neglect, bordering on abuse for it to have gone on that long. Sakura’s bone structure was impacted, her growth hindered – she should have been a good five centimetres taller than she was. She had several micronutrient deficiencies. Her musculature was next to non-existent. Her chronic fatigue was because she had been – so to say – running on empty for years on end.
At the end of the visit, the mednin’s mismatched eyes had met Sakura’s and she’d spoken very seriously, if with more care than one could usually expect.
“You need to eat 10,000 kcal a day from now. That’s your goal, but preferably more. You would need to eat 8000 just for maintenance, but you’ve been eating like a toddler. I’ll be prescribing you a whole list of supplements that you will take twice daily.”
Sakura had nodded obediently, still unable to speak – feeling embarrassed and very, very small. Once again, the little girl, wanting to hide and cry.
A hand landed on top of her head, messing up the ponytail she’d put it in but obviously trying to provide comfort. “Stop thinking like a civilian. Their rules do not apply to you. Even their own rules are, frankly, ridiculous.” Sakura glanced up at Kakashi-sensei, awkward man that he was, trying to be helpful.
The mednin frowned at him, not having forgiven him for not taking action earlier. She put on her reading glasses and squinted at Sakura’s chart again, before meeting her gaze again and saying quite sternly: “The idea that you earn a meal through exercise is a dangerous misunderstanding. Exercise, even for shinobi, only accounts for about 20% of your caloric consumption. The vast majority of calories burned are used to keep you alive, to keep your body running. It powers your brain, your metabolism and organ function. Your brain expends at least 20% just by itself. 1500 kcal is only just enough to keep your organs running.”
With that, they’d left the hospital with a small bag full of supplements. Naruto gave the usual enthusiastic goodbye, a hn from Sasuke as was usual, but Kakashi-sensei stayed. He walked her home in awkward silence. Before he left, he patted the top of her head again – not unlike how he petted Pakkun she assumed – and apologized for not realizing how bad it had been. Her health and well-being were his responsibility now and he’d failed her by not being more attentive.
The next morning, she woke early once again, but cooked her own breakfast and took three servings, eating until she felt full and round as a ball. It didn’t matter that the soup was salty or the eggs a bit overdone. It felt like freedom.
Her mother wouldn’t allow Sakura to eat as she much as she needed, but if Sakura started cooking for herself and buying her own groceries, then there wouldn’t be anything her mother could do.
When she arrived at the training grounds, Sasuke dropped three scrolls on her head without a word and just began training as he usually did. The scrolls covered caloric intake needs, one even had formulas for converting just how many calories were spent doing certain jutsu and the last one had information more specific to kunoichi metabolism and caloric needs. Sakura’s cheeks ached all day from how much she smiled. Naruto kept an eye on how much she ate and Kakashi-sensei kept handing her protein bars after she’d performed well – as if he was giving treats to his dogs.