Work Text:
The desk was too big, the room was too small and cluttered, and the ceremonial robes were too restrictive. Tsunade Senju had officially been hokage for all of 2 hours and she was fairly certain she was looking her first assassin in the eyes. He’d arrived shortly after her coronation with a sealed scroll from Danzou Shimaru.
He was an anbu. From his voice, she figured him in his twenties, but he carried himself like a true veteran-- shoulders back, footsteps silent, every movement purposeful and graceful. She’d been surprised when instead of a blade, he’d pulled a scroll out of his cloak and offered it to her.
15 minutes later, Tsunade was still sure this was a trap or at the very least a distraction. She regarded the anbu across the desk from her with cold, calculating eyes.
Tsunade scanned the scroll again.
Princess Tsunade,
I hope you can forgive my absence at your coronation. There are matters critical to the village’s safety that I must attend to, though it pained me dearly to to miss your triumphant homecoming. I hope that this gift is an acceptable compensation and token of my loyalty. I thought long and hard about what to give the last daughter of Konoha’s most noble clan. Among my most skilled soldiers I found the one thing money cannot buy and alcohol cannot replace. Ask him to demonstrate his skills.
~Konohagkure’s Danzou Shimaru.
The letter made it clear Danzou didn’t stand behind her, not that he hadn’t already made that clear in person. The head of the anbu’s elite division thought her a spoiled child who’d grown into a drunken fool and abandoned her village.
He isn’t totally wrong, a small part of Tsunade thought. She had been a spoiled child. It had taken a war and the destruction of everyone she called her family to cure her of that. Afterwards, every street in Kohoa seemed full of ghosts. Could she really be blamed for leaving? For doing whatever necessary to numb the pain?
Tsunade never wanted the hat. She’d taken it to keep it out of the hands of a warmonger. Danzou seemed less upset than she’d expected at the last Council meeting. Probably because he’s either going to have me killed or he’s decided I’ll make a good puppet. And that thought turned her back to the anbu who was still standing in front of her, silent and calm behind a mask.
“Do you know what’s in here?” Tsunade asked. She gestured at the anbu with the scroll.
The man shook his head.
Tsunade narrowed her eyes. He had dark brown hair and a deep voice. She tried to remember what exactly had her grandfather’s voice sounded like. Had his hair had that same golden sheen in the sunlight?
Tsunade held the scroll out to the anbu.
He didn’t move.
“Read it,” Tsunade ordered. “I want to know what you think.”
As the anbu read, his grip on the scroll tightened slightly.
So he’s not totally emotionless, Tsunade noted, and he didn’t know what was in there.
The anbu rolled the scroll back up and passed it back to Tsunade.
“Well?” the fifth hokage asked. She arched an eyebrow at the anbu and waited.
“I’m not one a member of Danzou’s Root division. I haven’t been for several years.”
Tsunade nodded, but now she was more confused than ever. Not that the answer didn’t ease her fears. The fact that this man’s first impulse was to distance himself from Danzou was a good sign, but it only raised more questions as to why Danzou had sent him.
“And?” Tsunade prompted after a long minute.
“I believe Danzou-sama is grieving the death of the Third and is deeply concerned for the safety of the village. His words are harsher than he would normally speak.”
The man was choosing his words too carefully, walking the same political landmine that Tsunade was.
Tsunade took a deep breath and let her professional mask slip ever so slightly. She didn’t want the politically correct answer of a soldier caught between 2 different generals. She wanted him to relax and give her a straight answer.
“Why don’t you sit down?” Tsunade waved at a chair in the corner. “You can just push the papers on the floor, they won’t get any more unorganized.” She said it with a half smile.
The anbu did as he was told, well except for pushing the papers off the chair. He scooped them up and set them carefully on top of a stack of books.
“Sorry about the mess,” Tsunade nodded towards the piles of books, papers, and scrolls scattered around the normally tidy office. “Sarutobi’s filing system was the sort that makes no sense to anyone other than him and I have lots of questions that only he had answers to.”
The anbu nodded.
“Do you know why Danzou sent you?” Tsunade asked.
“I have some ideas.”
“Care to share them?”
The anbu shifted uneasily in the seat.
“You have permission to speak freely. I’m aware that I am not exactly a popular choice for the hat. You won’t offend me. I’ve already heard it all.” She gave the anbu another smile that felt more like a grimace.
“I assume I’m meant to be a distraction or a way for Danzou-sama to take advantage of your known weaknesses.”
Tsunade swallowed. Of course Danzou would consider loving people a weakness. “But you’re not his soldier.”
“But I was. I still carry his marks.”
Tsunade closed her eyes. Root was one of the topics she’d spent the last week scouring the Third’s paperwork for information on. References to the seals that kept the Root anbu on a short leash popped up frequently in reports. They were based in part on the Hyuga Clan’s Branch Seal and shared some of the same functions-- obliterating the body’s secrets upon death and acting like a potentially lethal shock collar.
“I can’t say much more than that,” the anbu sounded apologetic.
“You don’t have to,” Tsunade muttered. She opened her eyes and saw the anbu stand up. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t want to weaken your position. I’ve read your proposals and I think you’re the sort of leader we need right now,” the anbu explained.
“Show me what Danzou wanted you to,” Tsunade said it like an order.
The anbu nodded. He collapsed his hands together and Tsunade felt a surge of achingly familiar chakra. No doubt he’d been suppressing his chakra this whole time, like anbu were taught to.
The anbu stepped closer to the desk and set a single yellow rose in front of Tsunade. He stepped back and waited.
Tsunade picked up the flower and looked it over. It smelled sweet.. “You probably can’t tell me where you came from, can you?”
The anbu shook his head. “I was an experiment. Who I was before and where I came from, I don’t remember. Now, I’m an anbu and servant of Konoha. I have a skill. It’s useful. It doesn’t have to mean anything else to you. It doesn’t to me.”
Tsunade let out a bark of laughter. It was a bitter, humorless sound. “I forgot how well we trained the kids born during the war. Konoha’s perfect little soldiers.”
“That’s why we need a medic, not a general, to lead us.”
Tsunade nodded. “I’ll do my best. If the anbu require anything, let me know and let them know they are free to ask me. Kami knows Danzou won’t communicate with me on your behalf. You’re dismissed.”
The anbu nodded once, a sharp and decisive movement and then he was gone from the office in a swirl of air.
Tsunade stared at the rose in her hand and decided personal resolutions be damned, after today she deserved a drink.
---
Tsunade was sure she was being followed by someone who wasn’t supposed to be following her.
She knew the flicker of her anbu guards’ chakra and with a little bit of luck, she could pick them out of the shadows. They were never far from her.
Someone else was shadowing her at a distance. It was just a hint of chakra every now that gave the stalker away. Sometimes, Tsunade could feel eyes on her back in a crowd.
For 2 weeks, she tried to catch her shadow and never even managed to come up with conclusive evidence of his or her’s existence.
At the start of the third week after her coronation, Tsunade sent her anbu guards home. It was the spring equinox and the start of the moon festival. “Go be with your friends and family,” Tsunade ordered. She was safe in the hokage’s office, half buried under paperwork, and had zero intention of leaving before sunrise.
They had gone begrudgingly and Tsunade had breathed a sigh of relief at being really alone for the first time in a month, since Jiraiya and Naruto found her.
It was after midnight and tsunade was on her fifth read through of the new peace treaty with the Hidden Sand (everytime she read through, she found something else that needed discussed or outright removed before she could even consider signing the thing and half of them were additions from “her” council), when an unfamiliar chakra surged in the hallway outside.
Tsunade was on her feet with a kunai in her hand before she could think.
She was halfway to the door when a familiar chakra responded and the unfamiliar chakra ended suddenly as something slammed into the wall outside her office door.
Tsunade yanked the door just in time to see a vine as thick as her forearm drop the body of a man in black to the ground. Tsunade’s eyes followed the vine as it disappeared back under the cloak of a man with brown hair and wide, frightened brown eyes.
In that instant, Tsunade realized she’d seen those same eyes in the crowd a dozen times over the last few weeks. She’d seen him in the market buying groceries and in the park feeding the pigeons.
The man seemed frozen by Tsunade’s stare.
Tsunade lowered her kunai. “I’m pretty sure I sent all the anbu home.”
“You specifically told them to be with their family and friends.”
Tsunade snorted. “Fair enough, but if that’s the card you’re playing it means you have no excuse not to go grab a drink.” She glanced to the side, at the smear of blood on the wall from the assassin’s skull and his body on the floor. “I think we’ve both earned it.”
---
Tsunade and the anbu sat across from each other in the tiny corner booth of a rundown shinobi bar. It was the sort of place that no one would expect to see the new hokage, so eyes skated over the 2 of them.
A look of surprise flitted across the anbu’s face when Tsunade ordered green tea.
“I’ve got to finish marking up the draft of our new treaty with Suna before my morning meeting, Tsunade explained. “But order whatever you want.”
The anbu ordered a beer.
Tsunade didn’t recognize the name, she never was a fan of beer, but when the bottle arrived the label was familiar, 2 crossed kunai on a black label. It was shinobi beer-- barely alcoholic with a flavor best compared to scummy pond water. She doubted they even sold it outside of the hidden village.
She remembered the smell of it from nights spent on her grandfather’s knee while he taught her to play poker. She remembered the taste of it on Dan’s lips the last time she’d kissed him. The shit had been his drink of choice even though Tsunade knew there were shinobi beers that actually tasted like beer. She remembered giving Jiraiya shit for bumming cases off of older shinobi when they were teens, if he was going to the trouble of begging why not beg for real beer?
“Are you okay?” the anbu asked.
Tsunade realized she was probably staring. She made herself smile. “I’m fine. It’s just been a long day and there’s a lot of ghosts around the village.”
The anbu nodded and sipped his drink.
“What should I call you?” Tsunade asked. She stirred a spoonful of honey in her tea and did her best to look approachable.
“My friends call me Tenzou,” the anbu said softly.
“A good name.”
“I don’t use it much. Don’t have much of a life outside the anbu.” Tenzou ran his fingers through his short hair. His lips twitched into a frown.
Tsunade thought it odd how little he hid the emotions on his face and then realized someone who lived behind a mask had no reason to keep their face impassive. It was refreshing and made him look younger. Or more accurately, look his age.
“Really Kakashi’s the only one who calls me that,” Tenzou admitted.
Tsunade burst out laughing. “Of course you’re one of Kakashi’s friends. Kami that explains so much.”
Tenzou narrowed his eyes. “Kakashi was my captain. He’s an excellent shinobi.”
“And prone to questioning authority figures, disobeying orders in the name of protecting his people, and generally being a massive pain in the ass for bureaucrats the world over.”
Tenzou shrugged. “He’s the one who got me out of Root.”
Tsunade flashed a smile. “Of course he did. And I’d bet he’s also the one who introduced you to the world’s worst shinobi beer.”
Tenzou frowned down at the bottle. “I wasn’t aware you were so familiar with Kakashi.”
“I’m not, but I know Jiriya and I knew Minato. Figures Kakashi fits the same mold. It’s not just skills that get passed from mentor to student. Jiriya loved Minato like a son. All evidence points to Minato feeling the same about Kakashi. Sometimes family isn’t blood.”
“I’m not a Senju,” the words burst out of Tenzou’s mouth like he’d been trying to hold them back for weeks.
Tsunade had a feeling he had. She shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t really consider myself one either. Yet here we are.”
Tenzou blinked a couple times and Tsunade thought he looked a little bit like an owl with those, big, dark eyes of his. To Tsunade, it was a painfully familiar expression. At 24, he was only a little younger than Nawaki would have been now. That thought hit Tsunade like a gut punch.
Tsunade took a sip of tea and stared down into the murky liquid. “Two remnants of a dead clan. It’s lonely, huh?”
“I suppose.”
“Outside of the village, the name’s a liability. The abilities in our DNA are a prize worth more than gold. Inside the village, the name comes with expectations, responsibilities, and more enemies.”
“I suppose, but it also comes with opportunities.” Tenzou looked at Tsunade earnestly. “People listen to you.”
Tsunade snorted. “Begrudgingly, but I suppose so. What about you? Do the anbu have you all tangled up in their business?”
“I’m a captain.”
“Do you like it?”
“Being a captain?”
“Being an anbu? Being a captain? Any of it or all of it? Are you happy?”
Tenzou didn’t answer right away. He traced the woodgrain of the table and thought about his answer. “I’m happy,” he said and after a beat added, “I don’t have any other life experience to compare it to, but I’ve never wanted to not be an anbu. I like the opportunities I have. I like traveling and helping people. I like being useful and I find the mental and physical challenges of the work to be satisfying. I don’t have many friends and if I ever had a family I don’t remember them, but I’m happy with the people I have.”
Tsunade nodded. It was an honest answer. She couldn’t ask for anything more. Part of her ached to have an answer like that-- work she enjoyed and people to come home to.
“Are you happy?”
Tsunade grimaced. There it was. I supposed turnabout’s fair play. Tsunade shook her head and gave Tenzou her honest answer. “No, but I’ll get over it. I’ll finish putting this place back on track, clean up the messes Sarutobi-sensei ignored, and find someone better suited to take my place.”
“And then you’ll leave,” there was a hint of uncertainty and sadness in Tenzou’s voice.
“I don’t know. If I didn’t have all this paperwork, maybe I’d have time to really settle in and improve the village’s medical system. I swear it’s slipped backwards since I’ve been gone. Maybe I’d take on a student or repair the Senju estate and turn it into a medical school or something, so that when I’m dead the clan’s legacy isn’t just a couple faces on Hokage Rock.”
Tsunade’s voice was soft and wistful, but her eyes were sad. She was looking past Tenzou like she could already see that future.
Tsunade would be the last to carry the Senju name unless Tenzou wanted it, and she had the distinct feeling he didn’t. Even if he did, Tsunade didn’t want to give it to him. The name got the clan hunted to extinction for a kekkei genkai few of them had. It was a burden she’d decided to carry alone. She’d told the Elders that more than once and then they’d gone and let Orochimaru take the choice away from her.
Better to leave the name to a school, where it could do some good, and to the stone faces who it couldn’t hurt.
“You shouldn’t wait until you retire,” Tenzou interrupted Tsunade’s spiral of melancholy thoughts.
“Maybe… We’ll see if. I can get this treaty in place and get the council under control… We’ll see,” Tsunade mumbled into her tea.
They didn’t talk much after that.
In the early hours of the morning, Tenzou walked Tsunade back to the hokage’s office. The festival was stil login strong and the streets were crowded with people in nice clothes. The smell of fried dough lingered sweet in the air and music whispered underneath the overlapping voices.
The administration building was quiet and empty when they stepped inside. The dead assassin was where Tenzou had left him.
“You’re not going to leave are you?” Tsunade asked, lingering in the door to her office.
Tenzou shook his head. “I’m going to get this cleaned up and then I’ll stay outside.”
“How about you come in and keep me company? Let me bounce some ideas off of you.”
“I’m not cleared for the sort of intel you’re dealing with.”
Tsunade groaned and rested her forehead against the wooden doorframe. “I’m clearing you. I need someone else who’s sane to talk this through with and you’re the only one I’m likely to find before the council meeting.”
Tenzou had some thought about being dumped in the “sane” category. He was self aware enough to know he wasn’t raised in any sort of sane way. Kakashi liked to say none of them played with a full deck, because they’d learned to keep all the aces tucked up their sleeves. One look at Tsunade’s face killed all of Tenzou’s arguments. She was making the same face Kakashi did when Tenzou found him at the Memorial Stone. “Okay.”
Tsunade was halfway through her sixth reading of the treaty when Tenzou stepped into the office. He knocked on the doorframe as a courtesy.
Tsunade just nodded.
Tenzou surveyed the office. It was much cleaner now. Clearly labeled filing cabinets had replaced about half of the bookshelves. Looking at the remaining bookshelves, they were organized by topic and author.
The mementos of the Third hokage were gone now. Almost gone . One picture was left over. A young Hiruzen with his team. Tenzou figured they couldn’t be long out of the academy in the picture. They looked smaller than Tenzou ever remembered being. They were born in war, too. Tsunade’s fought in 2 of them. No wonder she’d haunted.
On the desk beside Tsunade was a small pot of dirt with a single green stick poking up. Tenzo picked it on and frowned. The energy of the plant was familiar. With a trickle of chakra, he examined it. It was a rose stem and it was just beginning to root.
“I might not have the mokuton, but I’m not a totally useless Senju,” Tsunade mumbled. “I do what you do, just slower and with a much lower success rate.”
Tenzou set the pot down. “It’s rooting really well. Seems very happy.”
Tsunade gave Tenzou a tired smile. “It’s all in the food. I can teach. Not that you really need it, but there’s a lot of old Senju recipes and tricks for growing plants.”
“I’d like to learn.”
“Great,” Tsunade gestured to the chair, “Brief me the Suna shinobi who were here for the invasion and then we can talk plants.”
“You should have received a detailed report,” Tenzou said, but he sat down.
“Yeah, but anbu reports never cover the human bits. Were they scared? Did they seem like they wanted to fight or were they just following orders? Any particularly blood thirsty ones? Anyone who made a point of disabling rather than killing?”
Tenzou frowned. “I was with the barrier team, so I only saw the start of the fighting with the Suna nin. We were focused on the Third and Orochimaru.”
“But you had to have seen the Suna nin around before the attack. We normally put anbu captain on guard duty when we have visiting dignitary, or has that changed?”
“It hasn’t changed,” Tenzou thought. “My impression of them was that they were disciplined. We never suspected anything. Their fighting was the same. They gave nothing away.”
Tsunade nodded.
“Their jinchuuriki was violent. He went off script during the attack. It’s part of what saved us. When he lost control, the Suna shinobi abandoned the attack.”
“And yet I have reports here saying that the jinchuurki’s team saved our genin from Sound Shinobi a month later.” Tsunade waved at one of the scrolls on her desk.
“They made friends.”
Tsunade raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?”
Tenzou nodded. “Yeah.”
“They crippled one of our genin and tried to kill the rest more than once.”
Tenzou shrugged.
“Is that how you make friends?”
“That’s how I got Kakashi. I tried to kill him a couple times and he just kept showing up on my missions. He saved my life and now we’re friends.”
Tsunade groaned and muttered something about how she should have known better, because all anbu are crazy bastards.
It didn’t stop Tsunade from dragging Tenzou to dinner a week later to talk about politics and the cultivation of heirloom rose bushes. And then declaring Thursdays “Not-a-Senju Family Dinner” while laughing like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.
It didn’t stop Tsunade from letting Tenzou help her home when she got drunk on Dan’s birthday.
It didn’t stop Tsunade from sharing history lessons and Senju secrets, the sort that Danzou hadn’t considered an asset to his weapon.
---
In the weeks after the 4th war, Tsunade found herself buried under paperwork with no end in sight. There were supply exchanges to coordinate and transfers between hospitals to be arranged. There were villages to be rebuilt, funds to be raised, dead to be buried, and marriages requests to be authorized.
Tsunade told herself she would keep the hat until they’d cleared the MIA list. Originally she’d said until they had all of the Akatsuki accounted for and the threat they represented eliminated (in whatever way necessary), but that was done in less than a month and the MIA list kept Tsunade awake at night. She’s sent those shinobi to war. She was the reason they hadn’t come home.
2 months after the end of the 4th shinobi war, a messenger hawk arrived from a hospital in Grass. “We have one more of yours. An anbu captain. He had no identification and was unconscious when we recovered him. He woke up for the first time yesterday. He’s not well, but was able to tell us his village and rank.”
Tenzou spent another month in Konoha’s hospital. He didn’t speak.
Rumors drifted through the village. The white Zetsu army had been fueled by mokuton. The newspapers called Tenzou the Stolen Senju. They didn’t know his name. Tsunade considered that a small victory.
Tsunade was sitting in Tenzou’s room, reading a trade report from the Land of Waves, when Tenzou looked at her and for the first time since he’d returned seemed to really see her.
“I think I understand what you said about being a Senju,” his voice was rough from lack of use.
Tsunade set down her report. “It’s not all bounties on your head and responsibilities. It comes with some opportunities.”
They repaired the Senju estate together. Tsunade drew up plans from memory and threw herself into redoing tile and stucco.
Tenzou brought books on architecture when Tsunade’s memory failed. He raised the collapsed roof of the main hall with shaky mokuton.
Somedays, Sai wandered in with a paintbrush and let himself be pointed at a project.
Slowly, the empty shell of a building became a home. Slowly, wounds healed.
Tenzou returned to the anbu, but he didn’t move back into the dorms. He settled in the room at the end of the Senju Estate’s western wing. He had a sliding door that led to one of the gardens and overlooked the forest.
Sai came with him and claimed his own space. Sometimes Tsunade walked into an empty room to find the wall covered in a mural she didn’t remember being there the week before, she didn’t mind. It livened the place up.
Tsunade passed the hat off to Kakashi and stopped hiding the wrinkles in the corners of her eyes when she moved from the hokage residence to the Senju Estate. When Kakashi teased her, she punched him in the arm. “I am the matriarch of the Senju Clan. I’ve earned a few wrinkles and besides they make me look dignified.”
When the Yamanaka girl started coming around the estate, she brought fresh flowers for the dinner table and offered to help Tsunade plan the classes the med school would offer when the East Wing was done being modified. Tsunade accepted the help once in a while, but mostly she just pointed Ino in the direction of wherever she’d last seen Sai.
When Ino stayed for dinner, Tsunade whispered in Tenzous’s ear that “it’ll be good to get some new blood in this old clan.” They’d both snickered at that while Sai glared at them.
Sometimes a clan isn’t defined by blood or a name or a kekkei genkai.