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When Tsunade-sama returned to the village, Tenzo expected life to change.
Generally, the lives of Konoha's elite hunter-nin were surprisingly routine. They worked hard to make it that way. They drilled, they trained, they cycled village duties. Sometimes they were called upon to complete an A-rank mission, perform a quiet assassination, or hunt down a comrade.
But Tsunade... Tenzo knew the Hokage had access to documentation on Orochimaru's experiments. Possibly, she might want to… inspect his work.
Tenzo was the only success in his long and grizzly history of failures.
Orochimaru had been Tsunade-sama's team mate, her medical interests were renowned across the continent, and Tenzo was using her grandfather's stolen cells. So he had been braced for that.
Tsunade had checked his medical files over during her brutal reorganisation of the village hospital.
"No cell degradation," she'd said, peering at his results. Her blonde hair gleamed like a halo around her face beneath the fluorescent lights and her voice seemed soft against the backdrop of admins and nurses running around, talking and clattering and generally being worked off their sensible non-slip slippers.
When she'd entered, Shizune-san had offered to take his blood for her.
The rumours of her heamatophobia must have been true. But Tsunade had waved her sharp, quiet assistant away. She had taken the sample herself with her eyes hard and narrowed and her jaw clenched.
Tsunade had steady hands. Memory rose in an unpleasant flash: hers were steadier than Orochimaru's. Unblinking, he redirected that thought. Practice helped.
"I would have expected to see a higher rate of decay..." she flipped her page, looking at the numbers on the other side.
Tenzo waited patiently, one leg swinging silently beneath the collapsible hospital cot upon which he sat.
“You're fit for duty," she said, finally. "You can go."
So go he did, feeling oddly like he'd dodged a knife flung from the shadows.
He should have known that this unexpected good fortune was hiding some deeper, weirder change.
The first obvious hint came with an urgent mission summons at 6:02 AM. This wasn't a bad time—3:02AM was a bad time. 6:02AM was a terrible time.
A hawk tapped Tenzo's window and he woke from a sound sleep. Its message was simple: Urgent. Solo mission. High priority. It carried the stamp of the Hokage's office.
His breath fogged in the air outside. It was still dark, but dawn was threatening.
He arrived in under five minutes, but Tsunade wasn’t there.
"Oh, good," said Shizune-san, wringing her hands. Her dark hair, usually smooth, was ruffled. He had not picked Tsunade-sama's assistant as someone prone to anxious fretting about missions. "Come on."
The sun was rising outside, slow and pale. The village was quiet.
He was led, perplexingly, on a winding path through the village and to a bath house. Outside, he felt a chakra signature flicker. He didn’t turn toward the roof top, but he knew a familiar shape in a hound mask would be in the shadows there.
The light inside was bright. He blinked.
“It needs to be fixed before we open!”
Tenzo recognised the voice of Haruko, the proprietress of Konoha’s best-loved bathhouse, only because he had heard her complaining to Sarutobi of Jiraiya many times.
“Tsunade-sama, we will demand reparations from the Hokage’s office as we would with anyone else!”
Tenzo followed Shizune around a corner to see Tsunade slouched in a seat in what must have been Haruko’s office, talking with the ancient lady, whose slight frame was forced stiffly upright in affront.
The Hokage looked as though she’d had a very long night. The illusion that maintained her youth and beauty was impressive, to even allow her to have dark circles and tired eyes.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, interrupting Haruko.
Haruko turned her dark and suspicious eyes on Tenzo, but no recognition flickered through them. That was a quirk of ANBU work: any civilians Tenzo knew rarely knew him. He was used to it.
He bowed. “Hokage-sama.”
“I’m glad you’re not late.” A dull flicker of chakra from outside said that Hound, on duty guarding the Hokage, could hear her dig at his manners. Tenzo didn’t react. “Fix Haruko’s wall, will you?”
Tenzo paused. This was his urgent mission? At six in the morning? Fixing a wall?
At his hesitation, Tsunade-sama’s eyes narrowed dangerously.
“Yes, Hokage-sama.”
He followed a dubious-looking Haruko to the outside of the building, where…
Tenzo eyed the wall. It was a big hole.
He paused. “Did Tsunade-sama—”
“Yes,” said Haruko, stiffly. A second later she relented with a huge sigh. “Jiraiya-sama, really. The Hokage was…” She trailed off.
Bathing, Tenzo figured. He winced.
“Can you fix this or not?”
“Yes." The bathhouse wall was wooden, after all. He gathered chakra to his hands.
Two days later, it was a restaurant.
“I’m sorry,” said Shizune. She did not sound sorry, but clearly she knew it was polite to pretend.
Tsunade certainly wasn’t going to apologise. She hadn’t even seemed mildly embarrassed about the bathhouse.
He’d heard she’d destroyed the famous Tanzaku Castle in a fit of temper, and at the time he’d dismissed it as rumour.
“It’s fine,” he said. He turned his blank stare on Shizune.
A moment passed.
“…Aa.” She shifted uncomfortably.
It was barely noon. Tenzo knocked a splintered chair with his toes. There was glass on the floor, too, and that, he couldn’t fix. “Is the furniture, ah, also…?”
Another pause. Then: “If you don’t mind.”
Did he mind? He didn’t respond. He crouched down and touched the floor—the boards were also splintered, he noticed.
The restaurant repaired itself slowly around them.
The next morning, it was 4:30AM, truly dark outside, and a bar.
Tenzo looked at the sagging roof. That was structural. He’d need to be careful.
“Ah… I see. And you say she—”
“Right through,” said the bartender, sounding torn between awe and horror. “Can you—”
“Yes,” Tenzo sighed, resigned to his fate.