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She makes it to K.O. Academy's entry exam because she's great on paper. In theory, she's hero material. Physically weak, sure, but smarter than every last kid in her district. Parents with weak quirks, even though she's born with none. She's taken courses on field medicine. Says she's planning on being a combat medic.
They say she'd be better off going to med school and taking that route. Sakura is stubborn. She's been in martial arts classes since she was old enough to throw a punch. She's got certifications and awards and medals enough to be a lethal weapon all on her own. Her fists are registered with the government as weapons. She's good. On other quirkless people, that is.
Up against a real villain, she's still just averagely fast, averagely strong. Her knuckles will break on quirk hardened skin. She doesn't have anything to supplement the force of her hits.
But she's too strong to be a regular cop and she's too well versed in battle trauma to be anywhere but in an emergency room. They let her take the exam because her test scores are too good and her practical application for combat medicine was damn near perfect, especially for someone quirkless.
But that doesn't mean she's going to make it. It doesn't mean that Sakura is going to magically develop her quirk, several years too late. It doesn’t mean that under heavy fire, with dozens of other hopefuls instead of just being in a room with five other combat med students, that she isn’t going to crack under the pressure.
Sakura aces the paper exam because she's perfect on paper. It's why they let her into the damn exams in the first place. They're hoping the practical will weed people like her out, those who are great at theory but can't fight their way out of a paper bag.
And right now, it shows.
Sakura has been running. Running from a fight. The bots in the practical exam are made of metal, not flesh. She can't hit them without hurting herself too badly. The only thing she can do is run.
She feels like a fool and a coward. She's wanted to be a hero for as long as she can remember. She's known she's supposed to be a hero. Helping people, saving people, these are the only things she can do with herself.
All she has is her kit, nothing else. They were all allowed tools to supplement their quirks, but Sakura doesn't have a quirk. She has an unnervingly accurate knowledge of the human body and how many hits a person can take before they are down and they stay down. That doesn't help with robots.
So she runs. She offers her help to the other hopefuls that she sees, but most of them ignore her. She's pretty sure they can smell her weakness. So she leaves them. There isn't much else she can do.
Until she comes on two boys, obviously from hero families. She'd be an idiot not to know an Uchiha when she sees one; if the Copycat eyes weren't enough, he's half on fire. And the blond boy on his hands and knees covered in a cowl of fierce red energy can only be the Habanero's son.
The Uchiha boy is protecting him, but the blond has been hurt severely. The Uchiha can't move him and cover both their backs at the same time. The blond needs help.
And all Sakura's ever wanted to do is help.
"Hey!" she bellows, pushing herself harder, faster, slipping in close. The red eyes of the Uchiha boy are fierce and furious on her, but the blond looks up only looking panicked. There's a gash in his stomach, and it doesn't look good.
"I'm a battle medic," she says. "Let me take a look at that."
"Who - ,"
"Sasuke," the blond says, "she isn't gonna hurt us."
His voice sounds wet, pained. Sakura narrows her eyes and runs through worst case scenarios.
"Lay him down on his back."
Sasuke follows the order with some hesitance and his fists clench whenever the blond makes a sound of discomfort.
The fierce red protective energy around the blond disappears as Sakura lays her hands on him. She tears at his shirt to get a good look at the wound, but it's already healing. It'll scar, sure, but it's nearly gone.
"You - ," she begins. "It's a healing quirk..."
The blond grimaces and puts a hand on his own stomach, eyes shut tight.
"But you've been using it too much," she surmises. "The overload... You're not scarring, but you'll get burns, severe ones. How are you - ?"
"She's pretty smart, huh, Sasuke?" the blond asks, peeling one eye open. "Normal people don't figure it out that fast, y'know."
She feels Sasuke's eyes on her all of a sudden, scanning her. Sakura sucks her teeth, tries not to feel like she's sitting under a microscope.
"No student offers field medicine to others during the practical," Sasuke says, the flames on his body dying now that he's sure Naruto is okay. "You're quirkless."
"Sasuke, be nice - ,"
"No," Sakura says. She'd been teased mercilessly for it as a little girl, bullied outright for it in middle school. Someone just noticing it wasn't going to kill her. It hadn't before. "He's right. I am. I'm trying to go to K.O. to train the battle part of battle medicine."
Sasuke sucks his teeth and shakes his head.
"You'll get yourself killed like that."
"And now we're sitting ducks," Sakura returns. "We need to relocate."
"She's right," the blond says, pulling himself to sitting. Sakura puts a hand on his chest to stop him.
"You need something for those burns. Your quirk heals damage taken in a fight, but the more damage you take, the slower your quirk heals the damage. You overheat and you can't heal the burns with your quirk."
She tugs on her medic apron, tries to think of what would work here. The burns on him are clearly far beyond her ken, but the blond is already moving like he's ready to stand up and fight again.
"No time," he insists, a cocky smile on his face. "The next number one hero doesn't have time - ,"
"To heal?" Sakura snaps. "You'll be the one dead before you even touch number twelve."
"She's right, Naruto."
They both turn to Sasuke, equally surprised. But Sasuke isn't looking at them. He's looking at the massive bot, gaining fast.
"What's your name?" Sasuke asks, flicking his bright red eyes to her.
"Haruno Sakura."
"Haruno-kun," Sasuke begins, "get Naruto to safety. I'll handle this."
Sakura purses her lips but she knows better than to fight him. It was safer to get Naruto to a place where he could recover. Besides, if she was going to be a battle medic, she was going to have to get used to taking orders.
"You bastard, you can't - ," Naruto starts, but Sakura's already got her arms under his armpits and she's lifting him away. Naruto squawks, surprised at being lifted so easily. He may have an intense healing quirk, but he's only the size of a fifteen year old boy. Sakura lifts things heavier than him for warmups.
She drags him to a dilapidated building that provides just enough cover, listens to him shout all the way. She sets him as gently on the ground as she can manage, and she starts reassessing the burns.
They only look like they're surface level, but if it's the result of him taking more hits than he can manage, there's a chance they've burrowed deep into the muscle. They only appear as though they're on the surface, but if the regeneration of his cells is being impeded even at the muscular level, or even deeper, there's a chance his bones themselves are scarred, or even the marrow -
This kid is giving himself cancer and Sakura is feeling kind of whiplashed about it.
"Sakura-chan," he says, nudging at her. "Calm down. If I get hurt too bad, my mean old auntie will just take care of it. She can heal anything - ,"
"That isn't an excuse," she snaps. "And besides, we're running out of time. We just need to wait it out."
Naruto's face pinches together.
"While Sasuke's out there dealing with the worst of it?"
"You should've thought of that before you got yourself so hurt."
"Ugh, you sound like my aunt."
"Your aunt is smart."
There's a scream. One that makes the both of them stand. Sakura's stomach clenches. She sees a body go flying, all black hair and navy clothes. She knows it's Sasuke.
She doesn't know what possesses her to run. There's nothing she can do to help this kid from a family full of pro heroes, quirkless and useless as she is. She knows she has to stay and look after Naruto. But Sakura can't stop herself.
All she can hear in the back of her mind is Ino. Ino with her perfect quirk, her Mind Control, slipping inside and telling Sakura she's nothing, that she'll never be a hero, that she's better off a pretty nurse clearing old men's bedpans.
And then she doesn't hear anything. She's running, throwing herself in a new direction. There's no way she can beat the bot that's bearing down on Sasuke.
All she can do is throw herself in front of him. Push out her arms and shove him away from the giant metal hand that's aiming to kill. She can see his Copycat eyes widen in shock when she does it, and Sakura can feel tears rolling down her cheeks as she does it.
The timer goes off. The arm stops, its dark green fingers nearly wrapped around her. Sasuke is far away, as far as Sakura could shove him with her meager strength, but it's far enough.
He isn't in any danger. Neither is Naruto. She did her job. Sakura's a hero.
"You really think quirkless people can be heroes, don't you?"
There's a gaunt looking woman standing in the doorway. Miss Medicine (also known as Katō Shizune) has been patching up all of the injured hopefuls, Sakura included.
She turns over her shoulder and so does Shizune, who lets out a brief unhappy sigh.
"What are you doing up?"
"Be quiet, Shizune," the gaunt woman says. "I'm talking."
Miss Medicine rolls her eyes and gets to her feet.
"You're well," she says, "just a little rattled from that stunt you pulled towards the end. You managed getting through the practical without hurting yourself too badly, which isn't something most hopefuls can say."
Sakura manages a smile as Miss Medicine walks away to tend to another student. But the gaunt blonde woman in the doorway doesn't budge. Her hazel eyes are sunken in and her hair falls in two stringy ponytails. Her loose clothes are much too big for her by half, and there's a dark purple diamond tattooed on her forehead.
"You didn't answer my question."
Sakura blinks then looks down at her hands in her lap. Her eyes track to her medic kit. It was true, she hadn't sustained much damage during the fight. If the timer hadn't gone off, she would've gotten crushed by the bot's hand. Sasuke wouldn't have been able to do anything to help her. Naruto wouldn't have either. And Sakura wouldn't have been able to do anything for herself.
"I don't know."
The blonde woman snorts, but it leads to an unhealthy sounding cough. Sakura's eyes narrow and she's on her feet immediately, stalking over to the woman.
"You're hunched over, obaa-san, open your chest."
"Obaa-san?" the woman asks, incredulous.
She reaches out and slams her fist onto the top of Sakura's forehead. She isn't expecting the strike to smart as much as it does and she yelps in pain. But as she does, Sakura can see blood trailing down the edges of the woman's mouth.
"You need medical attention," Sakura says, eyes wide and frightened.
"You don't know if quirkless people can be heroes, but you threw yourself into a fight you couldn't win so you could save two kids you didn't know."
Sakura rolls her lips between her teeth. She tries to figure out how she can answer in a way that'll satisfy this strange, sick woman, but she can't come up with anything.
"I want to be a supplementary type -,"
"A battle medic," the woman finishes. "Naruto told me. Battle medics get killed more often than full fledged heroes do. You're weak in hand to hand combat with anyone other than someone with basic human physiology. You don't have a natural healing quirk, which puts you at even more of a risk."
"With all due respect, ma'am," Sakura says softly. "There's blood on your shirt."
The woman ignores her.
"Do you really think you can be a hero, or even a supplementary type as weak as you are?"
"No."
That stops her, pushes her into silence. The blonde woman gives a lift of her eyebrow, as if she's expecting Sakura to continue.
"I can't be anything unless I'm stronger. I could barely help Naruto-san and Sasuke-san in the exam."
"Do you think you deserve to go to K.O.?"
Sakura's mouth goes dry. She doesn't know how to answer that question. She's been asked if she's crazy for wanting it, if she's really sure, or if it's just a phase or what she's trying to prove.
But she isn't sure she deserves anything. That her potential spot at the academy is anything other than the fruits of her labor and of years of wishful thinking. She has wanted this for as long as she can remember.
But if Sakura goes out into the field as a battle medic, as weak as she is, even with a K.O. education, will she be saving lives or putting mroe of them in danger?
"I - ,"
She got to the written exam on her own merits. They passed her to the practical because she passed the written. She doesn't know if she passed the practical exam, and she isn't sure if she'd deserve her result either way.
Because she saved two people. She got people to safety. And that was enough for her.
"I don't," Sakura says, eyes on the ground. "But I'm going to earn it."
She looks up, her stomach dropping as she does it as this strange woman with blood in her mouth stares her down like she's nothing more than dirt under her expensive black heels.
"I'm going to do everything I can to earn my spot at K.O.," she says, hands balling up into fists. "I'm going to prove that quirkless people can be useful outside of hospitals and the police force. That we can be in the field, that we can help people, that we can protect those that need protecting."
She looks up, green eyes blazing, feeling like she's going to throw up or worse. But it's the truth.
"Just like I did today."
The blonde woman stares at her for a long moment before a smirk breaks out over her face. Then she laughs, laughs right at Sakura like countless people have before. Sakura clenches her jaw, bites her tongue. Keeps herself from saying something else she'll regret.
"You're funny," the blonde says. "You remind me of a couple idiots I know. Being stupid and reckless is a pre-req for being halfway decent at this job anyway."
A puff of smoke fills the air. The gaunt woman grows. Color comes into her face. Her back stands straight. Her lips go pink and rosy and her hair takes on a healthy shine. The dark purple diamond on her forehead turns into a bright, pale lavender.
And suddenly Sakura is standing in front of Ultimate herself.
She wipes the blood off her chin, smiling. Sakura is rooted to the spot. Ultimate laughs again, but it isn't mean or meant to hurt her. It's like she finds Sakura amusing. Like she's told a joke instead of just being one.
"So how about it, brat," Ultimate says, holding out her hand. "What do you say I make a hero out of you?"