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“I missed you,” says the ghost.
“I did, too,” she says.
“You never came to visit,” says Rin, long-dead.
“I should have,” says Shizune.
She’s had this dream many times before. It aches at her, tears at her, when she thinks of how long she had lived happily without knowing. Rin… Obito… Both gone, both dear friends. War is war. She had lost her parents to it, and then her Uncle, and the only reason she hadn’t lost Tsunade as well is because Tsunade had whisked her away the moment she graduated.
Sometimes Obito accuses her. Sometimes both.
But mostly it is Rin. The girl that sits before her in the dream is nine-years-old. Even though Rin had lived until thirteen, and Shizune is now fifteen, she had never seen Rin again before her death. She doesn’t know what thirteen-year-old Rin looked like.
To her, Rin is nine in perpetuity – nine years old forever, never older, never younger. Shizune sits at fifteen, at an age Rin was never allowed to reach, and watches her ghost. They sit on the top of the Hokage monument together, looking down at the city below. It’s been six years since she’s seen her home – is it truly home, then? Is it home if she has no one there for her anymore?
She’s written a few letters to Kakashi, especially once the news came that the Fourth Hokage and Uzumaki Kushina had passed, because she knows he must be completely alone, and yet has never received a reply. It’s not too surprising. They had never been close.
But she knows he is alone, and she understands his loss, and so she writes.
Shizune looks at Rin, at this dream-Rin, and the dream-Rin smiles at her. “I could have visited, too,” says the dream-Rin. “I forgive you,” she says.
It’s just her imagination, just the dredges of her mind trying to make her feel better.
“Thank you,” she still says. “Thank you.”
When she wakes up, Tsunade is still sleeping. She usually sleeps in. Late nights, drinking, and then sleeping in in the morning while Shizune putters around and does whatever she wishes. It annoyed her, at first, because when she was young she usually just wanted to get moving with the day, but now Shizune has grown used to it. It’s nice to have this time to herself. It’s nice to have some space.
She takes the time to write a letter.
A letter to Kakashi will go unopened. Or perhaps not unopened – she likes to think that Kakashi at least reads them, even if he doesn’t reply. But whether he reads it or not, she likely won’t get the answers she desires.
The answers to how.
She knows Uchiha Obito is dead. Nohara Rin. Uzumaki Kushina. Namikaze Minato. She knows how the latter two died, even if the specifics escape her – dealing with the Kyuubi sealed inside Kushina. Shizune doesn’t know enough about Jinchuuriki to really figure out anything else.
But Obito… Rin… They died in the war, but how?
Shizune has thought it better to not ask Kakashi the specifics before now, the wound too fresh, but she has wanted to know. She wants to know. It haunts her, haunts her dreams, and even though she could go back to Konoha and probably get the answer straight from the Hokage himself, her teacher’s teacher, it feels like doing so is almost a… betrayal, to Tsunade.
Tsunade would likely call her a fool. Tsunade would likely tell her to go and come back, quickly, if that was truly the only reason Shizune was going. But she can’t do it. She can’t.
Maybe she can’t write to Kakashi and get her answers, but… there are others. She thinks of one, bright-eyed and sincere, teeth flashing and heart warm, and knows he will write her back.
Shizune pens a letter to Maito Gai with hope in her heart.
It takes time – that is how it goes. She gives Gai the address for their next stop, but the letter does not turn up in that city. When they live, she tells the innkeeper not their next stop but the one after, leaving him some money, and he’s the honest sort who does in fact forward their letter.
That stop, three stops after the town where she originally sent it, is when she gets her reply.
The letter is flowery. His calligraphy is impeccable, his words long, language full of flourish and odd poetry that she can read in the cadence of his voice even though she hasn’t heard him speak for many years (it is not as though they were close, but Gai is very… memorable).
He tells her exactly what she needs to know.
Obito pushed Kakashi out of the way, and was crushed. Rin had the ticking timebomb of a Bijuu sealed inside of her, and threw herself in front of Kakashi.
Immediately, without even pausing, Shizune sets down Gai’s letter and pens a quick one to Kakashi. She doesn’t mention what she knows – Gai will tell him, or he won’t, and she’s honestly not sure which he’ll do – but she wants him to know that she’s thinking of him. That there is a string connecting them, something still binding them, that she is out here too and she misses them just as fiercely. A guilt shared makes for comfort, and while Shizune cannot claim to feel as he does, she still holds the guilt.
Once that letter is done, Shizune takes a moment to sit back and properly absorb it. It’s not like there was a good way to go – not really. There are deaths that feel more senseless than most, and neither really feels… senseless, not truly, but.
When Tsunade returns for the evening, Shizune is weeping, unable to stop, the tears rising up from somewhere deep inside here when she thought she had no more, and she buries her face in Tsunade’s shoulder. She shakes and she shakes and she shakes, and the arms around her are warm, the puff of air against her head a comfort, the kiss pressed against her harm a consolation.
They’re gone. They’re truly gone, and Shizune can’t help but cry.
“What happens to a Bijuu if the Jinchuuriki dies?” Shizune asks Tsunade.
Her mentor pauses, about to take a drink. She looks at her, and then downs it anyway. “...Bijuu are made of chakra,” Tsunade says. “After some time, they reform.” She pauses, and then, “You want to know because of the Isobu.”
It’s not a question. Shizune jerks. “Ah-”
But she can’t lie to Tsunade, not about serious things, and she ducks her head. “Yes. If it reforms, I…” Shizune presses her lips together in a thin line and exhales shakily. “I want to find it.”
Tsunade rests a warm hand on her head. “I’ll send off a letter,” she says, and Shizune glances up at her. The hand shifts as she does so, making her own hair fall in front of her face, but Shizune peers through it at her mentor. “Maybe they can find it.” It’s a lot, to be doing that, and Shizune tries not to let her face crumple. “Oh, Shizune…”
She’s tugged in, face pressed in her mentor’s shoulder as she holds her, squeezes her tightly. “I don’t know what answers you want, kiddo,” Tsunade says softly. “I don’t know if you’ll get anything.”
Shizune doesn’t know either, not really. When Rin died… she wasn’t there. She wasn’t. Kakashi was, but after knowing what she knows, she cannot ask Kakashi about it. The thought is unfathomable. But there was one other person, one other being there, at Rin’s death. Who may have known her final thoughts.
She doesn’t know anything about Bijuu, but she doubts the Bijuu had any more choice in being sealed into Rin than Rin had the choice of carrying it. She hopes it was kind to her. She hopes there was something more than terror. She hopes it can give her something, anything – even just to tell her that Rin was at peace with her decision. It’s nothing at all. It’s everything.
She hopes, she hopes, she hopes.
Tsunade sends off letters that Shizune doesn’t see – multiple, which does confuse Shizune, because if she’s writing the Hokage surely there only needs to be one? – and they continue to travel. Shizune writes Gai, now, along with Kakashi, and Gai replies every single time. He even gives her updates on Kakashi, which she appreciates, and it sounds to her complete lack of surprise that he’s doing terribly.
It’s funny. Shizune really doesn’t know him. But Rin cared for him, and she knows that even if Kakashi didn’t care as much or the same, there is no way their deaths don’t weigh on him.
Gai writes to her of the moniker, of Friend-Killer Kakashi, and Shizune swallows down the bitterness.
Konoha never changes. The villages never change. They eat people up and spit them out, whether they are dead or alive. They kill people like her parents, like her Uncle, like Obito and Rin and Tsunade’s Nawaki, and destroy people like Tsunade, like Orochimaru, like Kakashi. They wreck and ruin whatever they touch and Shizune has to set the letter aside or she’ll tear it apart with shaky hands.
She tries to keep herself calm – because someone here has to be alert, has to be reasonable, has to not drown themself in sorrows and aches – and she and Tsunade continue. Shizune continues to forward her letters, manual, and Tsunade receives nothing by hawk.
Every bird in the sky could be a messenger, every whisper a truth, and Shizune is on edge. It’s hard. She just wants to take off and see where she ends up, hunt on her own, not wait for whatever whispers the Hokage can dig up.
It’s not the Hokage that sends a message, though.
When something finally does arrive, Shizune hovers. She does. She can’t help it. No reading over Tsunade’s shoulder, of course, but she waits so eagerly, sitting on her knees and fists curled on her thighs as her eyes follow Tsunade’s, flitting over each line of the letter.
Tsunade exhales heavily. “I’ve got something. I’ll send a letter to Konoha. I’m not letting you go alone.”
There’s a few things wrong with that sentence. Shizune trips over them, blinks rapidly and tries to get them in order. “You’re not coming with me?” is what she first asks, because maybe she shouldn’t have assumed, but she hasn’t been truly apart from Tsunade since they left Konoha together. They have time apart, of course, but always in the same place. Same village. The second question, “Who sent that, then?”
If not Konoha…
Tsunade doesn’t look at Shizune. She gropes blindly for a drink, instead, always at hand even when Shizune tries to get rid of them, and takes a long gulp before she begins to answer her questions. “No,” she says to start. “I’m not going with you. I-” She jerks her head. “I can’t. I’ll leave you a slug so we can meet up again after.”
It… something in her aches at that, but Shizune is fifteen years old. She’s old enough. She doesn’t need Tsunade there constantly, and she gives a jerk of a nod before staring intently at Tsunade. She’s not getting out of this one.
“...Called in an old favor,” Tsunade says, and her voice is quiet. Her entire demeanor is one of pain, and ah. Shizune understands.
Even if people have turned broken and twisted… it’s not so easy to turn the love off, is it? She knows who Tsunade wrote. She speaks nothing more on this topic.
“I’ll wait for Konoha to send someone, then,” Shizune says instead. “As long as they’re quick.”
Kakashi arrives within a day.
It’s such a shock to see him that Shizune almost drops the cup she’s holding when he slips into the bar and stands before them. “Let’s go,” he says, and Shizune has to take a moment to even form words.
“Kakashi?”
He looks at her – for a moment, it’s like he hasn’t changed. Physically, obviously, he’s grown so much, but he still looks so similar, even though she can’t see one eye. (Obito’s eye, Gai had told her, and she aches to see it once more.) For a moment, it’s as though he’s nine-years-old and deeply unimpressed with the existence of literally every other person in the world.
And then that moment fades, and they’re both fifteen, and he’s looking at her with absolutely nothing in his gaze. Deadness. No spark of anything. Flat and dull and exactly what Gai had told her.
No wonder he doesn’t return her letters. Is there anything left to him?
It’s a horrible way to think, and Shizune instead nods, slipping off her stool. “Just a moment,” she says, and she goes to say good-bye to Tsunade and to get her slug. Tsunade watches her approach.
“Heading out?” she asks, as if Shizune is just going back to the hotel and not out to track down a Bijuu. Tsunade’s not that drunk, not that oblivious. She knows.
Shizune just nods. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she says. “But I need…” She doesn’t know what she needs, still. Closure?
It’s something. In truth, it’s probably just the fact that she can do this that is driving her. It’s something to do. It’s something to soothe her.
She hopes, she hopes, she hopes.
Tsunade nods, and they share a lingering hug before Shizune returns to Kakashi’s side. There’s something in his eyes now, just a spark of impatience, and Shizune considers it a win.
“Ready,” Shizune says, because she knew it would be quick, and has been ready to go at the drop of a hat. Kakashi looks at her.
“...What are you hoping to find?” he asks.
She doesn’t know. She doesn’t think she’ll know until she finds it – if she even does. Instead, Shizune reaches out and takes Kakashi’s hand. She squeezes it, sharp and warm. “I don’t know,” she tells him, “But if you’re here, you’re hoping to find something too, aren’t you?”
He looks at their hands, and then pulls his sharply away. Just like his letters, Kakashi doesn’t answer. He doesn’t reply. He turns on his heel and starts to walk sharply away. She watches him for just a moment, looks at his back, and she feels as though she can see every sorrow piled upon it. She wonders if he can see hers.
If there’s anything to find here, any answers, anything… they’ll find it.
Shizune follows. Shizune hopes.