Fic: "At Risk"

[fascinationex]

After they meet in Latency Period, Tsunade and Dan try to date. Set to a backdrop of the second shinobi world war, it goes about as well as expected.

Crosspost: AO3.

---

Tsunade was still hearing Dan's earnest voice in her sleep by the time she actually left for their date.

Not that it was a date-date, exactly. It was just an hour of time they'd managed to eke out of their schedules to meet at an old fashioned tea house.

It was casual. And it might just be friendly, after all. She'd been too busy saying ‘yes, I'd love that' to really clarify. He might not want to see her like that.

She tied her hair into two long tails and tried not to feel ridiculous rubbing colour onto her lips with her thumb. A full face of makeup would be way too intense for a midday tea house visit, and she didn't have half of the things she'd need for that besides—but she didn't want to give the impression that she didn't care enough to try.

She also thought that, maybe, she shouldn't just show up in her uniform for the same reason. But she really couldn't take the time to change. This date of theirs fell right between a "meeting" (by which she meant, an argument) about budgeting for medical training, a topic about which Danzo was being so damn stubborn she felt ready to strangle him, and a mission briefing. Tsunade could go to a briefing wearing a little makeup—she was, despite her front-line role, technically a kunoichi, and it wasn't a bad thing to keep her hand in—but she could not show up out of uniform.

So she darkened her eyelashes and rubbed colour carefully across the contours of her lips in the cramped bathroom of the Hokage's second administrative building. There was a crack in the top corner of the little mirror and the room smelled of industrial cleaner and, faintly, beneath that, of old urine.

She re-tied her hair. She slung her haori on properly.

Outside, another shinobi banged on the door so hard it shuddered in its frame. "How long are you going to take in there?" he demanded.

“It’s occupied,” Tsunade said flatly, and from then she just determined to ignore him.

She stared at her reflection critically for a few long moments. I look tired, she thought. A pipe dripped quietly.

Thump. The door shook again. "What are you doing in there?" the shinobi outside bellowed.

She ignored him.

Every ninja looked tired right now, but the dark circles beneath her own eyes didn't fill her with much joy. On a good day, Tsunade was beautiful. On this day... Well. Maybe a little illusion...

There. That was better, wasn't it? She looked exactly as she had two or three years ago, a little younger and still bright-eyed, when the war was still an ongoing, terrible presence in her life, but she'd been so much more confident in her ability to keep pushing through it.

Now, she felt like all she had left was forward momentum and a trail of dead friends. And apparently, it showed. On her face. Annoying.

The banging finally halted, and the sudden loud silence was a relief from the noise. It was immediately broken by the sound of some idiot trying to force the lock.

Tsunade whirled on one heel and yanked the door open without bothering to unlock it herself. It came clean off its hinges with a squeal of tormented metal and the crack of breaking wood. The slab of the door itself, too, splintered right along the grain at the place where she gripped the handle.

She met the startled brown eyes of the jounin standing outside the door.

The door handle, already loose in its fixture from her abuse, crumpled like styrofoam in her hand. She let it go. It, and the wooden door it was attached to, both hit the floor with a huge, echoing crash.

The silence that followed was deafening.

"Tsunade-hime," said the shinobi on the other side, looking distinctly wild-eyed. "I—I didn't..."

Tsunade smiled sweetly. "It’s all yours," she said, the very picture of politeness. She stepped over the pieces of the broken door, right past him, and headed down the corridor. He did not respond, and she did not look back to see what he did with the door.

She left the building without running into anybody who would bother her with annoying commentary about her makeup (by which she meant that Jiraiya wasn't in) and hit the street at a brisk walk.

It was overcast and drizzling outside, and all the light was grey. Tsunade felt like it hadn't stopped raining once since Nawaki had died. It was a fanciful thought—he'd been killed at the end of autumn, and now it was midwinter, and yes, there had been a lot of rain. It was not raining just to fit her mood.

And yet, every time she left a building and felt the cold, damp air hit her face, she was right back in that terrible moment: standing outside a charnel house in a Fire Country outpost, heaving for air that just wouldn't come. She could see, just as clear to her memory now as it had been to eyes then, her grandfather's necklace dangling from Orochimaru's bone-white fingers. His expression had been blank behind the little gleam of the crystal. Looking him in the eye then had been like staring through coloured glass.

That's how ninja end up in the end, he'd said, watching it spin gently, and then watching her face to see if he'd gotten a reaction from her. There's nobody to save them on the battlefield, is there?

Orochimaru wasn't exactly known for his sensitivity to the feelings of others, but sometimes—sometimes she had to wonder if he had any feelings of his own at all.

She swallowed, shook her hair back over her shoulders, and reminded herself again that it was time to invest in an umbrella. The rain had never bothered her before, but now she wanted one. One of those big, old fashioned bamboo ones, not a lightweight plastic one that would be blown inside out at the first breath of a breeze…

Tsunade put the thought aside, forcefully, and started walking. She was going to do something good and fun. She wasn't going to spend all her time thinking about her dead brother. And it wasn't, despite what she sometimes felt late at night when she couldn't seem to sleep, a betrayal of his memory to want to enjoy things in a world where he was dead.

The streets weren't busy, but Tsunade still took to the rooftops. She had not factored in a lot of travel time while she'd been staring at her own exhausted face, and she really did not want to leave Dan waiting. She didn't want to leave him uncertain for a second. She had not stood him up. She was not going to stand him up.

Her long leaps and strides ate up the distance over the close-packed roofs. She dropped back down to the ground and ignored the feeling of the rain on her skin again, instead brushing her hair out of her face and tugging her collar straight.

She spotted Dan immediately because his pale hair seemed to glow beneath the grim light of the overcast sky. He was leaning against the outer wall of the tea house at which they'd agreed to meet, tall and broad-shouldered, handsome and composed. His hands were busy fiddling with the ribbon of a tiny bouquet of flowers.

Oh, thought Tsunade thinking about the flowers, it is a date like that. And despite herself, she felt her heart speed up in a way she could not possibly blame on the quick run she'd taken to get there.

Oh, you're a fool, she thought quietly to herself. And then she ignored the thought. She'd take what she could get, while she could get it, and she would regret nothing at all if she could possibly help it. So she liked the boy? Fine. So be it. She liked the boy.

"Dan!" she called brightly to him. Her hand shot up and she waved.

He looked up at the sound of his name, and upon seeing her there his whole face, so composed, seemed to light up from the inside. He smiled at her, and as with every expression she'd seen him make, it was earnest and genuine.

That's for me, Tsunade thought, giddily. She felt about twelve years old.

He pushed off the wall and met her beneath the slow drizzle, unconcerned about getting wet. She glanced to either side for any oncoming carts and crossed the narrow street to meet him halfway.

"Are those for me?" Tsunade asked, peering at the flowers. They were bright vermillion, with flowers that fell in little clusters where the short flower stalks burst out from a common point like strange, vibrant spokes.

"They are," Dan says,, passing the little bouquet over. "I know red spider lilies aren't, ah, so traditional. But they were so pretty—and I thought, the administrative offices are so dull. Just don't think about what they're meant to mean to much," he suggested.

Tsunade took them. She was not superstitious, and she could not even remember what red spider lilies were supposed to mean anyway. She knew chrysanthemums, she'd seen plenty of those all through the war, and had been glutted on them recently. White chrysanthemums, for grief and purity, ideal for the young dead. But hanakotoba was of absolutely no use on the front lines, and Tsunade hadn't so much as cracked a reference book on the topic since before she was a genin.

"They're lovely," she assured him, sincerely, because they were. She could probably even drop a bouquet this small in a cup on her desk. She would do that before she went to her mission briefing—and to hell with Jiraiya's inevitable teasing, and Orochimaru's cool amused looks. What did they know?

"I'm glad. And," he added, with a breath of laughter and a glance at her through his eyelashes, "kind of relieved. You don't want to know how long it took me to pick them out."

Tsunade laughed too, and for the same reasons: not because it was so funny, but in a combination of fluttery nervousness and pleasure and a bright irrepressible joy at the idea that he'd cared enough to agonise over the decision.

"No," she told him, "they're wonderful, you—you did very well."

Tsunade wasn't sure she had ever called a flower 'wonderful' before in her life, but these, right then, to her, absolutely were—and so was the shy but evident delight with which Dan received her praise.

They went inside, out of the rain, and for the first time in months Tsunade felt honestly cheerful.

It was not entirely that Dan was handsome and successful and extremely partial to Tsunade herself that made her so weak to his charms—or at least, not those things alone. She could hardly look at him without again feeling the relief of him standing up and saying, to all the council: Tsunade is right.

That moment had been, for Tsunade, the sort of split-second question that all ninja were familiar with asking. Usually it had to be asked on the field of battle, on no notice: is this person on my side? And Tsunade, for better or for worse, had decided right then that Dan was. Then, later, she caught up with him outside the building and he looked at her earnestly with his heart in his face and said: I was so relieved that somebody else said something.

Something sharp and wilful had shifted inside her. From that second on Tsunade had known that she was on Dan's side, too.

This was a kind of silly thought to linger on, sitting across from him in the tea house. He'd let her have the seat with its back to the wall without argument or even comment, and now she had the luxury of keeping her attention on his pretty face as well as all the exits. The truth was that a ninja tended to carry the battlefield with her, especially these days. They were all set to hair triggers. The feeling that they were on the same side, in a way more significant than merely being of the same village, was more valuable to Tsunade than any amount of chemistry, or –

"Dan! Kato Dan!" Tsunade jerked her head up at the sound of someone's voice calling to them. Dan himself twitched so violently that he upset his tiny plate of skewered rice dumplings and nearly knocked them off the table between them. Tsunade caught the plate one-handed, by reflex, and then smiled stiffly at the woman approaching their table.

She'd seen her coming in, paid casual attention to her as she did to everybody coming through one of the entrances. The woman was ageing but pretty, and Tsunade had pegged her as a ninja immediately—she wasn't exactly trying to hide it—but it would have been tricky to say if she was an active one or not. Her age was some indeterminate figure over forty-five, hard to pin down beneath her makeup, and her figure was slight and her neat clothes hid whatever muscle conditioning she might have had.

She was close enough to active duty that she remembered to call out before sneaking up on someone, at least. Dan, when he turned his head to see her, seemed more resigned than tense or wary to Tsunade. That was probably a good sign.

"Aunt Etsuko," he said in a voice that almost wasn't even strained. "It's so good to see you're well."

"Is it," said Etsuko, eyeing Dan mistrustfully. "Last I heard of you, young man, you were stuck out on the front lines. Have a care for an old lady caught out of the loop next time, won't you?"

Whatever her age, Tsunade didn't think she was quite old enough to be playing the 'old lady' card just yet. From Dan's expression—a little exasperated, a little embarrassed, but mostly fond—he agreed.

Tsunade propped her chin on her fist, leaning rudely on the table, content to watch them interact. He seemed like he really was pleased to know she was well, however annoying her interruption at this time was. He was so sincere and open, it was hard for Tsunade to even be irritated that she'd lost his attention.

Etsuko leaned in and smoothed his pale hair and kissed his temple, and he submitted to her affection good-naturedly, apparently utterly unashamed of it, even in public.

"I'm sorry, Auntie, I'll try to find time to drop by more often. But, I was actually just having lunch –” He gestured to Tsunade.

Etsuko glanced over at Tsunade at this cue, took in her neat uniform—she'd just checked it in the mirror for fifteen damn minutes before coming here, so it was about as neat in uniform as Tsunade had ever been—and nodded. "A working lunch, I suppose. Senjuu Tsunade-hime… right? Of course. Everyone knows who you are." Her eyes narrowed, but her mouth curved into a pleased little smile. "You're the one spearheading the effort to take medics to the front lines, aren't you?"

Oh, yes, clearly Aunt Etsuko was an old lady stuck out of the loop, bereft of information about current events.

"Actually, it's not really a working lunch," Dan began, with a little furrow between his eyebrows, just as Tsunade said, "Yes, that's me," in a tone of voice that was in the very grey zone between ‘challenging' and ‘openly hostile'.

Etsuko utterly ignored Dan's interjection, but she did smooth his hair down again complacently, even as he sighed. "Oh, Dan's such a fan of that idea, you should hear him when he gets started on it–"

"Um," said Dan.

Tsunade raised an eyebrow at him. She'd known this in theory, but his public statements on the topic had been sharp, direct, and very collected.

Etsuko continued as though the byplay was meaningless to her.

"–I've heard you're a medic, too, dear, is that true?" she went on, apparently oblivious to Dan's flushed cheeks and evident discomfort. She seemed ready to pull up a chair and join them at any moment, actually.

At least her benign response meant that Tsunade wasn't going to have the Shimura Danzo argument twice today, she thought, and relaxed a little. "I am a medic, yes."

It wasn't her major area of interest, really, but she was one of the best surgeons in the village—not even just in the corps—due to the sheer advantage of her chakra control. There wasn't even a member of the Uchiha or Hyuuga clans who could match her precision. And while it wasn't her major area of interest, she'd been brushing up on a lot of medical knowledge, lately. If her program did get off the ground, someone was going to need to train field medics. It seemed more and more likely that it would need to be her, and that had to be a concession she was properly prepared to make when Danzo demanded she produce a complete curriculum on absolutely no notice, as she knew he inevitably would.

"Amazing! I can't imagine being so accomplished at your age," Etsuko said.

Tsunade touched her own cheek uncertainly before she recalled the illusion she'd laid. It was something she'd been maintaining without really thinking about it. Now she laughed nervously, and

Dan gave her face one sharp and unsettlingly intent look. Tsunade glanced away.

"I wonder," Etsuko went on, "if you would humour me in answering something...?"

"Uh," said Tsunade, blindsided. But she did want Dan to stop eyeing her face—her slightly too-young face—so critically. He'd figure it out eventually. He was clever. So she said, "Sure," and smiled politely.

"My cat, you see," said Etsuko, "she scratches all the time. She doesn't have parasites, I've checked for that, but her skin keeps flaking, and sometimes she cleans herself so aggressively that she loses hair–"

Tsunade waited patiently for the question to arrive, wondering where all this strange and unnecessary context would end.

She kept waiting and wondering right up until Dan braced his elbows on the table and put his face in his hands and just sort of… sank into it and stayed there.

From where she could see them between thick strands of hair, his ears were flushed.

"Excuse me," Tsunade interrupted, "are you trying to have me... diagnose your cat?"

Etsuko paused. "Yes? I suppose so. I mean, she's usually such a strong, healthy girl..."

Dan made an unflattering, despairing little noise in the back of his throat, still with his face hidden behind his hands.

Tsunade's polite little smile ticked at one side as her face twitched, just a little.

"I... see," she said, in a tone that she hoped fully indicated that she absolutely did not see, "I'm afraid I'm not really a veterinarian. Not much call for veterinary medicine on the front lines, sorry."

"Well... but surely itchy is itchy?" Etsuko protested mildly.

"You'd be surprised. That's why you asked a medic, isn't it? Because you don't know?" Tsunade was not always great at finding the happy medium between 'firm' and 'aggressive'. Her entire face felt strained, but she tried to make her smile as sincere as possible.

Etsuko did not take this rebuff as her cue to leave, but she did look briefly startled by Tsunade's directness. "Oh, all right. I'm just so worried about her..."

This, then, was by no means the end of the conversation about Aunt Etsuko's cat. Dan was clearly too polite to tell her to get lost, and Tsunade was much too cognisant of how readily and honestly Dan had accepted this woman's affection to risk offending her more than she already had.

She pointedly picked up her flowers and sniffed them, although they had no smell, and Aunt Etsuko interjected blithely, "Oh, did you lose someone recently, dear? I had heard that, poor thing. I am very sorry for your loss," with every appearance of oblivious sincerity, and bulldozed on about her cat.

Dan hunched further over his odango. "That's so nice, Auntie," he said, loudly, finally, "and maybe I can come around later and you can tell me about it then–"

"Oh, but you both must have work to talk about, I'm sorry for keeping you," Etsuko said then, and, apparently realising that she'd been talking at them for about half an hour, finally took a step away from the table. "I'll hold you to it, you know," she said to Dan, which Tsunade interpreted more as a threat than a warning from a nice old lady, and she kissed his head again and finally disappeared out of the shop.

"So," said Dan into the silence, "that's Aunt Etsuko."

"It certainly is," said Tsunade drily.

He twitched. "I'm sorry."

His miserable, flushed face was also cute. She spun the bright red flower around in her fingers.

"It's okay," she said, and she was surprised to find it really was. "I'm sorry to say I really do have to get to a briefing in about ten minutes, though."

"That cat," muttered Dan sourly. "She also has the care of my niece, but you wouldn't know it by listening to her."

Tsunade laughed, startled into it.

"Ten minutes, hmm. Oh, here." He passed over a skewer of rice dumplings, already smeared with sweet soy sauce, which she took, and which turned out to be a trick to lull her into a false sense of security, because he continued with: "Is that really an illusion? Why?"

Tsunade sputtered. She'd been so sure she'd gotten away with it. "I have no idea what you--"

She looked at his face. His smile was only getting wider.

"Oh, all right," she muttered, giving in quickly. It was so easy to give in, with Dan; she doubted he'd tease her and trusted he wouldn’t use it against her. "I looked in the mirror before I came here and…” She hesitated for a second, and then went for it: “I thought I looked exactly how I felt."

His eyes stared sightlessly over her shoulder for a second, fixed on something in the distance. She doubted he was looking at the wall. "I know exactly what you mean," he admitted quietly.

Dan put his hand over Tsunade's for a moment just before she got up to leave, just holding it in the air over her skin there. He waited until she went still before he let it fall atop hers, and the shock of his touch went right through her.

Dan's fingers were dry and a little cooler than hers, chakra-burnt at the pads, scarred on the insides from playing with kunai. She turned her own hand under his, sliding their skin together, and flipped their hands so hers was on top. She twined her fingers between his, flexing her palm against his, feeling the wiry practised strength of his hand in hers.

His eyelids fluttered and she heard his breath change, just a little.

"I am really sorry that this didn't quite go how I meant it to. Maybe we could," he licked his lips, "do something a little less informal, next time?"

"Less informal," Tsunade repeated uncertainly.

"Less... like something Aunt Etsuko might mistake for a working lunch" he admitted.

"I see," said Tsunade.

"I think... I should have said it like this to begin with." Dan blew out a breath, sending a strand of hair fluttering. "Please," he said, lowering his head in a sort of seated bow, sounding much more formal than he had, "Tsunade. Come on a date with me."

"I'd be delighted," Tsunade said, without even having to think about it. And then she did think about it, and she added, "...and I will let you know, regarding my schedule, after this afternoon's mission briefing."

He made a face. "Yes. I... actually, I have a secondary debrief interview in twelve minutes," he admitted, glancing over his shoulder at the clock on the wall, although his fingers tightened on hers as though he was afraid to let go.

She didn't resist the extra pressure.

She could feel the strong bones and worn skin of his hands and she knew she could tighten her own fingers and crush his hand effortlessly. Her recent studies in medicine now left her contemplating the resulting injuries, from the distal phalanges down to the carpals...

She looked down at their hands, which he had so trustingly left together, pressed skin to skin, laying on the table between them. She would never do it, but there was something fascinating about knowing that they both knew she could, and seeing that he would let her hold his hand anyway.

"And I have a post-mortem after that," he added, sounding pained, apparently oblivious to her lingering thoughts.

She scrunched up her face. Post-mortem meetings were never a good time. They usually meant that something had gone badly wrong enough that the debrief wasn't enough, and the administration wanted to bring everybody who'd survived together to 'not point fingers, but' about the whole mission.

"I could send a message by slug," she added. It was faster than it sounded.

"I think that’s more reliable than actually catching you before your mission,” said Dan ruefully.

That sounded about right. Carefully, Tsunade squeezed his hand in hers, ever so gently. She finally stood up.

"I’ll be in contact," she promised him, meeting his eyes over their hands.

Dan's whole face softened when he smiled. It was a nice smile, warm and sincere. He let her hand go the moment she tried to gently wriggle her fingers free. "I look forward to it," he responded, as though he really did look forward to it, like hearing from her was something he anticipated with real, unfeigned pleasure.

Her fingers finally slid, reluctantly, away from his. Her skin felt tight with the memory of the contact. She flexed her fingers, but it didn't go away. She balled it into a fist and ignored it.

They split the bill and parted ways with awful, silly, lingering looks.

Tsunade returned to her closet-sized office—shared, technically, with her whole team and used by whoever was in the village and had a need for centralised desk space, access to records and their own secure filing cabinet—where she dumped the red spider lilies out into her half-full water glass and left them n the desk there.

Dan was right, she thought as she hurried toward her assigned room for the mission briefing. They brightened the place up. And it needed it. It was… nice.

---

The briefing was full of familiar faces, which was a mixed blessing.

“Nice lipstick,” Jiraiya said, about three seconds after she’d arrived to find him tipped back on the back legs of his chair, balancing his canteen on his nose like a performing circus animal.

“Thank you,” she responded, determined not to treat the casual statement as goading. She sat in the seat next to him.

Her resolution lasted until he added, “No smudges, though,” even though he hadn’t been looking that closely. “Did he not like you once you started talking?”

She kicked one of the chair legs out from under him and it went with a very audible snap, sending Jiraiya, his chair and the canteen all tumbling to the floor together in a pile of swearing and fluffy white hair.

“That’s why he didn’t kiss you, you mean hag,” he promised her from his pile on the floor.

“Uh-huh,” said Tsunade, trying for unconcerned and mostly sounding hostile. “Where’s Orochimaru?”

“I don’t know? Late? Whining about missing his research window? Who cares.”

Tsunade did care, because whatever was keeping him was wasting her time, but she wasn’t sure why she’d even bothered to ask Jiraiya about it. The likelihood of a sensible response had not exactly been high.

In the end their mission briefing ran long. Orochimaru showed up late and left early, and by the time Tsunade left the room she had no idea how long the mission itself would take anyway.

“Are you mad because you won’t have time to see whoever refused to kiss you today?” Jiraiya needled.

For reasons that certainly remained mysterious to her, he was following Tsunade back to her place to pack.

“I’m already packed,” he’d said, patting the pocket of his flack jacket smugly. There would be a scroll of sealing inside, she assumed. Tsunade was also capable of making such scrolls, but Jiraiya was the more creative and had a lot more practice with it. If he’d figured out how the masters in Whirlpool preserved their food supplies from decay in such scrolls, he’d be in high demand…

Her own great uncle had known the trick of it, taught (allegedly) by his sister by marriage, who had been of Whirlpool herself.

“Ne… Tsunade...” Jiraiya was looking up at the sky, overcast and grey again. “It’s that guy, right?” He went on, even as Tsunade put on a short burst of speed over a tricky series of rooftop jumps just to make it harder for him to keep up and keep talking. Unfortunately, Tsunade’s legs were shorter and unless sh wanted to put a lot of chakra into the effort, Jiraiya had little difficulty keeping up with her. He landed right next to her with a soft tap of his shoes on the slate tiles of someone’s roof. “Kato Dan, right?”

She sniffed. “Leave it alone, Jiraiya,” she told him, taking the next jump soundlessly. It was worth putting in the extra effort to be quiet when she was getting closer to the roofs of her own neighbours. Nobody wanted to cause trouble where they had to live.

The fence outside the old Senjuu compound was at best sort of decorative, wooden and finely grown into a sort of bafflingly complex lattice with no man-made joins at all. If she leaned in, she knew she would feel the lingering touch of her grandfather’s chakra in the wood. No doubt it had once been a lot more dangerous than just decorative, but the knack of the wood release had been lost with Hashirama himself. Even her great uncle, who’d had precisely the strange mixed combination of water and earth type chakras needed, had been unable to crack this specific skill of yang chakra application that had come so naturally to Hashirama.

Now, Tsunade brushed her fingertips over the wood as she passed it and thought: I’m home, grandfather.

It did not answer her. The chakra was old, and the fence was just a fence. But she did it anyway.

“If you’re mad about the briefing running so long, blame Orochimaru, not me,” Jiraiya complained, kicking his shoes off in the doorway even though he certainly could have waited outside. Tsunade would not have minded. “He’s the one who came late. Sarutobi-sensei didn’t even tell him off.”

Because he was tired, Tsunade had thought. Orochimaru had arrived late with some vague disgruntled excuse about being caught up in his research—she certainly believed that much—and Saturobi had not bothered to say anything about it, both because it was uncharacteristic of Orochimaru and because Sarutobi had a huge number of briefings on his schedule, as well as an enormous pile of strategic analysis and a tower of death and MIA certificates to approve. He was tired. He had been Hokage for a long time and this was his second war—and Jiraiya was here having whinge about favouritism.

Even though Orochimaru certainly was the reason they had so little time to pack and get on the road, Tsunade was feeling a bit of favouritism herself right now. Mostly because he was not here making a nuisance of himself.

She rustled and banged about without commenting back to Jiraiya on the topic. If Jiraiya ran late, it was usually because he was harassing a pretty girl, not because he was busy with actual work.

Tsunade’s short term kit was by the door, of course, but there were a few things she’d want for a longer term mission if she could possibly get them: more underwear, more puttees, additions to her med kit, an extra roll of water purification tablets, so on. She shoved it all into her kit without paying much attention to Jiraiya, who had, as usual, gravitated to the closest hanging scroll of Mit-sama’s calligraphy to stare at it. Tsunade didn’t think he was actually learning anything, but he always looked. One of his least obnoxious habits.

Before they left, Tsunade scribbled out a note for Dan in her own, much less lovely, handwriting. Jiraiya peered over her shoulder at it while she bit into the meat of her thumb and summoned someone to take it to him for her.

“Ha!” he crowed victoriously. “I knew it!”

Tsunade ground her teeth and blew out a loud, frustrated sigh through her nose. She rubbed one glowing green fingertip over her thumb and closed the tiny bite.

“Are we going now?” she asked pointedly, and Jiraiya obediently jammed his shoes back on but he did not stop talking.

“I guess even he doesn’t have the bad taste to kiss a mean hag like –” She covered his mouth, and most of his face, with her hand. “–mmph.”

“Jiraiya,” she said in a deathly serious voice. “Leave it.”

“Wooow,” he said, drawing the word out.

Tsunade shouldered her bag and they headed out. It was still raining lightly and miserably and she could not help but think of Nawaki, of running, of heat in her lungs and terror in her belly and the moment she’d seen her grandfather’s stupid necklace dangling from Orochimaru’s fingers. She blinked hard.

Jiraiya’s forbearance lasted a grand total of five minutes under the threat of Tsunade’s rage, which was just long enough for them to get to the village gates from the Senjuu compound.

“You know, if you shove him around and hit him, that’s probably why –”

“He’s not nearly as annoying as you are,” Tsunade growled, fingers twitching.

“But I’m right, aren’t I?” he asked as they stood waiting for Orochimaru. He wasn’t late… yet.

“About what, Jiraiya?” she sighed, tipping her head back against the big fence. The clouds above made the sky grey and miserable, which was pretty much how she felt looking at them. Sometimes Jiraiya’s most annoying qualities reminded her of her own, sometimes very bratty, younger brother. It had used to feel endearing during long absences from home. Not it just reminded her that Nawaki would never be a stupid little brat to her ever again, and her mood fractured and her shoulders hunched.

“He didn’t kiss you, did he?”

Why was this so important to Jiraiya? “No,” she said, thinking more about how to stop feeling so miserable and grieved and aching before it affected her mission performance than she was about Jiraiya’s fixation on romance. “I didn’t ask him to.”

“You’re a girl, Tsunade,” Jiraiya complained, shooting her a disapproving look. It was almost comical to be disapproved-of by Jiraiya. “You don’t ask boys to kiss you. It’s not cute at all! I mean,” he added thoughtfully, “maybe a girl like you does –”

Tsunade breathed out, but it was no use, so she opted for her next most effective coping mechanism for stupid teammates. She uprooted a tree and clobbered him with it, streaming twigs and leaves and clods of damp dirt through the air around them. It felt good to hear him yelp in sudden fright.

This was how Orochimaru found them when he arrived. He still wasn’t late, but he was cutting it close.

He melted out of the inconsistent shadows like a ghost and picked his way over the new cracks in the hard-packed dirt path without even commenting.

“You are so not cute,” Jiraiya was whining loudly from the ground. Tsunade’s fists shook, but that was all right. At least if she felt miserable and embarrassed and angry, she could do something with that. Those could be useful. Nothing was less useful than helpless overwhelmed grief.

She stomped away form him, holding onto her fury with her teeth, and ignored Orochimaru’s calculating stare, full of a sharp amusement and a knowledge he hadn’t earned.

“Let’s go!” she snapped, marching forward. The sooner she got out of Konoha, the better. She had fewer haunting memories on the road, and no ghosts waiting to rise up from her memories to claim her.

“Why is she like this,” Jiryaia lamented behind them.

“I wonder,” said Orochimaru, soft and speculative, as though he was having an entirely different conversation.