Chapter Text
Head tucked neatly below Cha's chin, Sakura sticks out her tongue at Mẹ, who smiles mischievously. Sakura frowns though, because she can't help but wonder, “Why do they look at us that way?”
Her father stiffens and turns his face away, towards the shrubbery, where no one can look him in the eye. “Because we're not from here.”
“Dear –“ Her mother begins in Firespeak, softly, but insistent. She nods towards the other parents talking in hushed noises, unquestionably about them.
“It's alright,” Sakura says bravely, stubbornly in Ricetongue, pushing her father's arm away. “Konoha is mean, so I'll just be meaner.”
Her parents exchange a worrying look, and Sakura rolls her eyes. She'll be a ninja. Ninja are mean.
The walls of their two-bedroom apartment are thin. Sakura doesn't mean to listen in, but her name is mentioned, and she finds herself curious.
“What do you mean, Sakura can't join!” Her mother exclaims in the jagged tongue of Fire country.
“She's not a citizen, so we can't trust her with sensitive information. However, she'll receive basic combat training to protect the Will of Fire if drafted.” The voice sounds polished, as polished as Sakura can imagine with this language that still tastes foreign in her mouth, like barbed insults and violent superiority.
“If you're going to make her fight anyway she has every right to an educatio –“
“She looks like she's from Kumo,” the Konohan soldier hisses.
“Don't you dare,” Mẹ seethes, accent shining through. “We have roots in Konoha, and there have been enough people tearing into our lives to prove that.”
“Fine. I was just trying to do you a favour, 丑八怪. She won't have an easy time getting through the screening. They're going to push her three times as hard as anyone else, and they're not going to stop when she cries.”
Sakura frowns at the word she doesn't understand. It sounds crude, but her mother won't hear any of it. “Out,” she grits, and slams the door shut between them.
“I don't need a man to tell me that,” she whispers, and Sakura almost doesn't catch it. Emotions are easier to understand in her native tongue, and mama sounds incredibly sad.
Sakura crosses the room on wobbly legs, slides the door open and hauls herself into her mother's arms.
“Con yêu mẹ,” she says.
The Academy building is large. It's not as large as the Hokage tower, but to Sakura, who's not used to the imposing architecture of this place, it's big and hollow. Even with the children running through the hallways, the laughter picking up with the steady trickle of steps and circades outside, with the trees loping around the windows and the leaves making shadows dance across the desk, Sakura feels terribly out of place.
She's the oldest in the class by almost a year, and the other children think she's dumb because she struggles through her written assignments, because she speaks slowly to carefully pronounce everything correctly.
Sakura has no friends and were she home, she'd turn to books to drown out the loneliness tearing at her. She tries to be strong and she still wages war against her textbooks and additional reading material, but her efforts have meagre results. Firespeak is very complicated.
She can't afford to slack off in any class though, so it comes as a relief when maths is introduced. And although she gets everything right in their first test, proof that she's smart, a victory hard-earned for a girl who's never had an issue with understanding before, a girl who's thrown into a world so foreign, she turns at night and wishes she was home.
“Can I sit with you?” Sakura asks them once, the other girls who are staying for kunoichi class, while the boys get to run outside.
They snort at that and one of them, a face like all the others, with pale skin and sharp cheekbones, features twisted into a sneer, offers, “I don't think there's any space left.”
Sakura glares at them, because she's not blind or dumb or lesser, but she doesn't raise her voice. Were she to start a brawl it would reflect poorly on her parents.
Her kunoichi teacher, a thin woman with scar tissue twisting her features and folds at the corner of her lips from smirking, pulls her aside after class and tells her, “If they're giving you any more of that shit, you better know your poisons.”
With wide eyes, Sakura looks at the brittle-boned kunoichi in a different light.
“Or how to throw a punch,” the latter adds. “Ideally both.”
Sakura shakes her head in disbelief. “They'd just –“
The woman laughs sharply. “Tell their parents? Little girl, this is the Shinobi Academy. You might get lectured, you might get on the fast-track to Genin if you're very impressive.” She leans forward, switches to impeccable Ricetongue, and smiles broadly, a terrifying thing. “They're never going to trust you. But this way they won't get the better of you either.“