"Chaff in the Wind" [Naruto, Haruno Sakura, G]
Title: Chaff in the Wind
Author: weisquared
Fandom: Naruto
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Prompt: 23) You never conquer a mountain. You stand on the summit a few moments; then the wind blows your footprints away. --Arlene Blum (born 1945), biophysical chemist, mountaineer, author, and co-founder of the Green Science Policy Institute. In 1978, she led the first all-woman team up Annapurna I, a 26,200 ft mountain in the Himalayas, in what was the first successful American attempt. She also was deputy leader on the first all-women team climbing Mt. McKinley (20,320 feet) and was the first American woman to try to climb Mt. Everest (29,029 feet).
Summary: Konoha has its own version of Godwin’s Law, but unfortunately for Sakura, just because the other side loses doesn’t mean she wins.
“Good morning, Hokage-sama,” greeted Ino’s nephew. He looked a little bored but still sat behind a flower shop counter while his classmates “trained” (or ran around screaming. It was hard to tell the difference sometimes.) Sakura’s mouth smiled at him and asked for Ino, and her feet almost took her to the back room before he answered, all while her brain furiously commented that here was the difference between having a ninja background and a civilian’s. She’d never even realized how important an individual mentor was (didn’t realize there was such a thing) until she was thirteen, and even then it was jealousy and anger at being left that made her beg Tsunade.
How much of the difference between the outcomes of ninja children and civilian children had to do with the traditional explanations of genetics and family techniques, and how much had to do with cultural knowledge the ninja-born took for granted?
In the back room, Ino ignored her until she finished fiddling with her reaction and lowered the hood on the refluxing mess. Sakura didn’t bother getting her attention. It wasn’t worth being too careless around the concoctions of a mad psychopharmacologist/medicinal chemist. (And Ino would get angry if Sakura pulled rank). Sakura didn’t want to meet with the parent teacher association high on something that would make her blab her life story.
Gloves off and hands scrubbed, and in violation of all good sense, when she finished, Ino perched on her desk and sipped a diet drink while they made small talk. The hospital work and Ino’s latest clinical trial, Chouji’s students - it wasn’t politeness, because Sakura was rarely needlessly polite any more, but because sometimes, Sakura felt so disconnected. Eventually, though, Sakura brought up the upcoming vote on Academy reform.
Ino was blunt and told her, “You’re not going to get enough support to change anything until you scrap the Kumo treaty. They’re afraid Kumo is going to steal all our secrets and suck us dry, and they’re willing to stonewall as long as they can.” Sakura thought a job spent prying secrets out of captured ninja had destroyed Ino’s patience, but it didn’t make her wrong.
“There’s separation of powers for a reason. The clans have no say in foreign policy.” No, Sakura wasn’t bitter, not at all. She had only toiled over the treaty for almost two years, and finally, when it had looked as if Naruto’s dream of peace would come true, her own village started to stonewall everything.
Ino stayed silent, so Sakura quit preaching to the choir and asked who was in favor. Ino named some of the smaller families, and a number of individuals, but it wasn’t enough. There hadn’t been enough for the past two years, except for the creation of a minimum Academy graduation age. Even then, Sakura thought it had more to do with the specter of the Uchiha than an actual desire to improve the village. Maybe this was another of the drawbacks of having civilian parents. It took her the longest time to realize that while for her, the massacre was simply a tragedy for a close friend of her (albeit a terrible one), for the current generation of leaders, it was a bigger trauma than the Kyuubi attack or the Great Shinobi wars. And its ghost was still here, twenty years later, keeping the ones she considered her brothers away from the village and keeping the old families united in their opposition to any weakening of their power, even if it would cause a war.
As if Ino could sense her thoughts (and though she was reputed to by her underlings and victims, it was more likely because Yamanaka was one of those old families too), she said, “It was peacetime that made the Uchiha expendable.”
This was a common opinion, but hearing it from her oldest friend hurt. It was these sorts of discussions that made Sakura wonder if Naruto, for all his lack of administrative skills, would have been the better choice. “Even Hinata used to believe in Naruto and his ideals,” she said, remembering a time when it felt that they were all united together.
“You mean, Hinata used to have a crush on him,” Ino corrected.
Sakura thought that it was something more fundamental. Somewhere along the line, her friends had turned cynical, and she had missed whatever turning point made them think that warmongering was preferable. When she was younger, she had thought that her generation would be different - and yet it was Hinata who was turning into her Danzo. “What do you actually think about the treaty?” she asked, because if Ino had turned too…
Ino hesitated, but finally said “I think that it has a good shot of creating a lasting peace. And I think that scares Hinata more than them kidnapping little girls to cut out their eyes.“
--
Sakura’s favorite thinking spot was atop her monument, directly above the most ventral point of the corpus callosum. She liked being able to see out over the village and the part of her hair made a natural path.
By the time Ino had commented on the symbolism, Sakura wasn’t sure whether she had been more disturbed that Ino saw her as primarily a mediator or that she’d come to her thinking spot so many times in the past few months that moving felt wrong.
Even now, a year later, although Sakura had tried to push her own vision of change through, she still found herself repeating the same holding pattern of her predecessors. The Sandaime exhausted his power battling the Uchihas for control, and she herself was stuck trying to manage the increasingly aggressive Hyuga. Tsunade was her hero, but even Sakura knew she didn’t do anything besides mark time for someone else. The Sandaime did that too, and so many years were wasted. (And in the end, Sakura wasn’t even the one they had hoped for.)
At the PTA meeting, all she could think of was the children - the enthusiastic, excited children who she unreasonably found herself hoping would redeem her generation. She wanted to help them - the “geniuses” pushed to grow up too soon by demanding parents, the orphans left behind, the civilian children fumbling their way through, the girls who steadily dropped out with each successive year - and she couldn’t.
She turned around to walk the groove that joined back to the well worn path down the Hokage monument formed by generations of ninjas, her predecessors included, and decided that she was sick of the reminder. Sakura jumped down the face of the monument instead.
Because she had the control and chakra and strength to do it without damaging the ground below.
--
No one stopped her when she walked through the Hyuga manor. Rank hath its privileges (though more relevantly, they had once been friends. Were still friends, Sakura corrected herself.)
Hinata was reading in her office, toddler on her shoulder. She put her sleeping son down on the couch along the wall, with his face turned into the room so Sakura could catch the mark on his forehead, matching the double seal on Hinata’s brow. Hinata didn’t wear bangs anymore, and she had never worn her hitai-ate there. The overlaid seal had turned it into a mark of pride, and in this context, a not-particularly-subtle-by-Hinata’s-standards rebuke telling Sakura that Hinata has accomplished her goals and changed her clan and her children would see the difference in their lives.
But Sakura would get nowhere thinking of that, so instead she focused on Hinata’s glasses. Hyuga eyes were adapted for distance, not close reading, said the far-too-unused portion of Sakura’s brain. Sakura was still a medic, even if she wasn’t using her training anymore and that was the job she had appointed to herself, to heal the village.
Even the Hyuga couldn’t see everything clearly. They spun around the see the world when needed, but never eliminated that blind spot. Maybe their genes were wiser than they knew.
So, instead of asking about Naruto and how Hinata had to turn to outside help for her special seal project, Sakura asked Hinata about the Kaiten. Sakura thought she understood why it spun, and it was not because even the Hyuga cannot expel chakra in a uniform sphere standing still. It was because the angular momentum prevented an external torque from pushing them aside.
Sakura said as much, and Hinata widened her eyes in surprise, and given how Hinata used to act like a startled rabbit when she was younger, Sakura thought that it was odd how unfamiliar that look was on her now.
Hinata grasped the olive branch and agreed. “It’s easier for a top to spin than balance immobile on a narrow edge.”
“Peace is like that,” Sakura responded, because she was tired of having most of her conversations be unspoken. “Can I tell you what I want? Health reform, prosperous trade, equal opportunities… and perhaps then our village will be strong enough to survive the peace?”
Vulnerability and giving in was never Sakura’s preferred style. (She hit hard, cracked bone, broke skin.) But she had fought with Hinata long enough to know that a gentle touch was deceptively effective. Sakura waited, strangely calm, and finally Hinata agreed.
It meant that she’d sacrificed Naruto’s dream for her own priorities, at least for now, but Naruto and Sasuke had made their choices long ago, and it was time for her to as well.
She’d lost Ino once and gained her back. She wasn’t turning her back forever on her old teammates. But she and Hinata were friends once, and politics and positions aside, she wanted to find that again.