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“The soulmark… It’s fading.”
The pain in Tsunade’s eyes hurt Shizune more than any knife ever could. She’d always been emotional, and seeing another person, especially someone so close to her, in such grief felt like a stone was lodged deep inside her chest.
Tsunade had always been steady as a rock. At times, of course, a few lonely tears had found their way down her cheek. Righteous tears full of anger, tears grieving what was lost only to stand up and fight on, controlled and powerful, with not as much as a quiver in her voice. Seeing Tsunade weep, actually weep and sob, was a rarity. In the twenty years Shizune had known her, she’d only seen her weep twice before.
The first time was at Dan’s funeral. Shizune, far too young to grasp the gravity of the situation, had watched Tsunade’s face, swollen from crying, red and ugly, and suddenly felt a growing sense of dread. It had been Tsunade’s crying that ultimately made her weep and grieve the death of her uncle.
During the weeks after Dan’s passing, she’d sometimes heard Tsunade cry in the privacy of her room. It started softly, built up to hysteria, until, accompanied with a loud, inhumane scream, something shattered. A vase, a glass of water, a pot, nothing in arm’s reach was safe. Then, the crying died down to soft sniffles that Shizune could only hear when she pressed her ear against the door. She wasn’t proud to have breached Lady Tsunade’s privacy like that, but she’d only been four years old, and filled with sorrows and loneliness. At the funeral, she’d overheard Jiraiya say he was worried about Tsunade, that she’d always been an over-emotional girl with a tendency for dramatics, and that she might do something rash.
Shizune had been blind with fear of that “rash thing” Tsunade could do. At the age of four, she had very little understanding of the things Jiraiya was talking about, but having just lost her uncle, any lack of control over what was happening to someone was impossible to bear.
She’d imagined Tsunade would pack her things and go away forever, for example. So when one night she, again, waited in front of the door until Tsunade stopped crying, but heard multiple things being smashed and screaming that just wouldn’t stop, the fear was just too big. At first it immobilised her like a prey in the face or a predator. Then, she ran. Not away, but into the lion’s den. It had become quiet by then. Eerily quiet.
“Lady Tsunade!”
That was the second time she’d seen her cry. Her eyes red and swollen, cheeks gleaming wet in the light that streamed through the door, she’d sat on the floor in the middle of the room, a shard of porcelain from the smashed teacup in her hand. Shizune hadn’t understood the significance of the shard until much later. All she managed to conclude was that Lady Tsunade was in no way mentally stable enough to have something so sharp in her hands. So, she ran towards her and snatched the shard from Tsunade’s clammy hands. “Careful! You might cut yourself!”
Tsunade had looked at her for a very long moment before she’d averted her eyes and smiled ever so slightly. “You’re right, Shizune. I ought to be more careful.”
They’d never talked about the incident in the twenty years they’d spent together since, and Shizune didn’t think she would bring it up in the next twenty either. For all she knew, in that fateful night, she had saved Tsunade’s life, and Tsunade had shown her gratitude in her own special way: By taking her under her wing and making her one of the best Jonin in all of Konohagakure. Shizune hadn’t considered leaving her side in all those years. At first, she didn’t have anywhere else to go, then, she felt like Tsunade needed her, and in the end, well, humans are creatures of habit, and Tsunade was a habit that Shizune could never get rid off.
Tsunade was a rock in a stormy sea, an oak surviving each storm and providing a shady spot for people in the summers. Shizune couldn’t bear to see her cry, and wasn’t proud to admit it was mostly for selfish reasons. She didn’t want her image of Tsunade to shift into something more human, which wasn’t only unfair, it was also ridiculous. After all, she’d seen Tsunade through all the stages of grief, she’d seen her accumulate debts and drink so excessively she couldn’t remember the day before. Such experiences would be enough to demystify anyone, no matter how hard you wished to keep the euphemistic image of them in your heart. Yet Shizune had somehow managed to do just that. Especially now that Tsunade was the Hokage, it was so easy to forget all that happened before.
Now, though, Tsunade was crying, and Shizune was there to see it for the third time in her life. Heart-wrenching sobs from deep within her chest shook her shoulders and tears ceaselessly streamed down her face. She looked weak and sick and equally older and younger than usual.
“May I see?” Shizune asked as softly as she could.
“What do you want to do? Heal it?” Her voice was rough, her tone cynical. Shizune had long learned not to be offended. Tsunade’s rudeness was almost always a sign of emotional distress.
“Please?”
Tsunade sighed loudly and turned around, slipping a jacket sleeve from her shoulder. Her mark was on her left shoulder blade. Shizune had seen it before, though never quite as close. Indeed, the only times she’d been close to Tsunade’s bare skin had been times of dire stress. Wounds, poisons, and similar occurrences where quickness was of the essence. There had never been time to look at the mark.
Tsunade was right. It was fading.
For the sake of everyone's safety... Being Hokage is my dream..
“Dan?” Shizune asked, voice low. Her heart was aching at the thought. Tsunade only nodded once.
“You know that it’s a… good sign, right?” She ducked a bit in anticipation of a potential outburst, but Tsunade remained quiet. “It means you’re healing.”
“It means I’m forgetting.” Tsunade walked away. Not towards the door, as Shizune had feared, but towards a chair to sit down.
“If you’re forgetting, then why are you sad?” Despite sitting in a chair and crying, Tsunade still seemed to tower over Shizune. “It’s not about forgetting where you come from, it’s about making room for something new.”
Tsunade scoffed and the sudden venom in her eyes made Shizune take a step back. “Someone new, is what you mean?”
Shizune frowned. She was used to Tsunade snapping at her. It just usually didn’t get so personal. The fact that Shizune had fallen in love over the course of their travels was a secret not well kept. When she was a teenager, the crush had been a silly one, and as expected at such a young age, very obvious to the recipient as well. For a while, Shizune herself believed it to have dissipated. Maybe this was the moment where she should leave, but when Shizune hadn’t been smart enough to do so when Tsunade was drinking, gambling and snapping at her every day, how on earth would she be smart enough now? Instead, she sighed. “No, that’s not what I meant. You’re the Hokage now, Lady Tsunade. And if you allow me to say…”
“I do not,” Tsunade thundered, but Shizune knew her well enough to recognize when she was losing her drive.
“You’re living their legacy, Lady Tsunade, you’re shaping the future instead of living in the past and ruining your life. And you’re doing it in the memory of Dan, just like you took me under your wing in the memory of Nawaki. Are you really surprised the soulmark is fading?”
“Don’t moralise, Shizune,” Tsunade scoffed and shrugged her jacket off entirely. Instead of folding or hanging it, she crumpled it and threw it on the desk in a desperate show of anger that she didn’t quite know how to channel. With a groan, she rested her face in her hands.
Shizune watched her with growing pity. “I’m not,” she whispered softly. “I’m only trying to help. Besides, you told me for a reason. So don’t push me away now.”
The low, reluctant chuckle that made Tsunade’s shoulders shake was music to Shizune’s ears, as broken as it sounded.
“Alright. So you don’t want to be left alone and you don’t want me to give you advice. What do you want?”
Tsunade lifted her head. She looked so tired. “What’s your soulmark?”
Shizune paused. “So a distraction?”
“Don’t you want to tell me?”
“Uhm.” No. Frankly, Shizune didn’t want to tell her at all.
“You do have one, don’t you?”
Most people developed the mark during puberty, although it was not unheard of for some to get it much later, or not at all. Sometimes, it changed throughout one’s life, and sometimes it stayed the same with no one ever coming to fulfil the fate. At times people got rather unfortunate, with their sentence being something utterly common like “how are you?”, or with ironic strokes of fate along the lines of “your dog is so cute” when the carrier had a dog hair allergy.
In Shizune’s case, it was neither ironic nor common. Just plain… stupid. “I do have one.”
“Where?” It was better than Tsunade crying, she supposed. “I’ve never seen it.”
“The inside of my thigh.” Shizune couldn’t help the blush spreading over her cheeks and down her neck. There was no research that indicated the place of the soulmark had any effect at all, but having it in such an intimate place still made people raise their eyebrows.
“Oh?” Tsunade perked up.
Shizune shrugged. On most days, she didn’t care about the soulmark at all. They weren’t a big deal for most people. In fact, some didn’t believe in their significance at all and thought the fulfilment of soulmarks to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Is it something naughty?”
“Lady Tsunade!” Shizune looked at her former mentor in shock. Surely they weren’t close enough to talk about that!
“Well, is it?” There was a rather… enticing twinkle in Tsunade’s eyes.
“No, I mean, I’m not sure, it’s a bit…” Shizune’s voice trailed off and she dearly hoped that Tsunade would just let her be. Or course, she had no such luck.
“Yes?”
“Uhm…”
Her embarrassment with the mark only occurred a short while ago, when she had slept with one of the casino workers in Tanzakugai. The girl had seen the mark and promptly asked “oh, is that something you’re into?”. They weren’t able to overcome the awkwardness afterwards and ended up going separate ways before anything could happen.
Shizune didn’t consider herself to be a prude, but the line “ I don’t believe in domestic discipline, but one more word and I’ll make you go fetch a very flexible twig ” had been with her for so long, she’d never even thought of the possibility!
As a young child she wondered if maybe she'd have a very strict teacher who used old-fashioned disciplinary measures, but while Lady Tsunade was a rather hot-headed woman, systematic punishment had never been her thing. She was more likely to smash Shizune into a wall to call her out for a lack of focus than even smack her. Her mentorship had been hands on, but not that hands on.
As time passed, Shizune wondered if, maybe, her perfect partner would simply be a very toxic man. That was the moment where Shizune started rejecting the idea of trying to find a soulmate in general. If her perfect partner was someone who’d hit her as discipline, she didn’t want to be in this relationship at all. Until that one fateful night in Tanzakugai, when she was reminded that there was, in fact, another probable context for this sentence. A rather naughty one indeed.
“Come on, Shizune. Tell me, or I’ll have to pin you down and check for myself.”
Shizune did a double-take. “Uhm.”
Was that an offer or did it only feel like one to Shizune’s sleep-deprived brain? She hadn’t slept much in the last few days, and her plans of an early bedtime had been derailed by a crying Tsunade today.
“I’m just kidding,” Tsunade eventually dissolved the tension, much to Shizune’s secret dismay. “Mostly.”
Shizune blinked in surprise. “Well, uhm. It’s not so bad, really.”
“What, you’d rather tell me instead of letting me undress you?”
The very last semblance of control failed Shizune. She stood there like a wet ragdoll, completely lost for words.
Not once in the course of more than twenty years had Tsunade ever flirted with her. Tsunade was not interested in women, not interested in Shizune, and most importantly, not interested in anyone since Dan. Shizune had lived with her for long enough to know that Tsunade had not once allowed anyone close enough for anything intimate to happen. No overnight guests, no alone time with a man, nothing, not even when she was drunk enough to pass out at the bar. The only time Shizune had ever seen her flirt was to get some free drinks.
A big and rather pathetic part of Shizune wanted it to be real. It would be so easy to say yes. They both knew that she hadn’t been able to ban Tsunade from her mind. And that was what Tsunade was setting her hopes on. Shizune took a deep breath against the stone lodged in her sternum. “The line is, ‘I don’t believe in domestic discipline, but one more word and I’ll make you go fetch a very flexible twig.’”
Her heart ached in ways she didn’t deem possible a mere minute ago. Deep and hollow and utterly distraught, she had to clench her jaw so she wouldn’t cry. That was it. She’d made a decision.
“Oh wow.” Tsunade’s eyes were wide.
“I don’t know the context, but who knows? Maybe it is naughty.” Shizune let out an awkward laugh. It was the right thing to do, she knew that. Tsunade was in a desperate state and not of sound mind. If she let Tsunade undress her, it would be the same as taking advantage of her. No matter who initiated it, it just wasn’t right.
“I see.” Tsunade thoughtfully looked down on her desk, not quite meeting Shizune’s eye. She’d taken the rejection at face value, and the reasonable part of Shizune was glad for it. The other part was better left untouched for now.
“Well, I should go to bed. Call for me if you need anything… I’m serious about that.” Because she’d do anything for Tsunade. She would go to unhealthy lengths for her. But now, she felt the tears pricking in her eyes and hoped that Tsunade would let her leave. All she wanted was to go to her room and cry into a pillow until her heart stopped feeling like it was ripping apart.
“Sleep well, Shizune, and… thank you.”
Shizune pursed her lips and nodded. “Of course.”
“Oh, and Shizune?”
“Yes?”
“I hope it’s naughty. If it’s not, tell me and I will smash that person into a wall.”
A small smile quirked up Shizune’s lips. “Will do. Good night.”
“Good night, Shizune.”
If Tsunade came to her with the same offer again on any other day, Shizune wouldn’t think twice before accepting it. She would jump at the occasion, gladly, gratefully. But deep down in her heart, she knew that Tsunade would never ask again.