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Her lady is drunk again, sprawled out about the table and fast asleep. Her shoulders are a mountain range half the length of the desk, rising and falling in her slumber. Shizune is tired. She closes the window tired, she gathers the sake bowls tired, she rubs her eyes on her sleeve and she is still tired with her vision clear.
Her exhaustion is laid into her muscle and crystalized, she can feel it when she prods down into tissue. It’s the way she has to take her lady across her shoulders, her lady’s breath on her cheek, a heavy exhale, sharp and fermented. It’s the money, how it only ever seems to go. It’s the way the days stretch longer and longer with her lady’s grief – between them, their only consistent possession.
“Lady Tsunade,” she coaxes, but expects it when she does not wake. Shizune is a proficient shinobi – she has to be, for Lady Tsunade to have taken her as an apprentice, relations notwithstanding. She is their steadiness – when there is weight to be borne, she can bear it. When there is money to be hidden away in her bottommost layers, she can hide it, and there is always water to be mixed into sake and apologies to be made and lessons to be haggled from her lady.
She tips Lady Tsunade off her back and onto the bed closest to the window – in a flight of fancy, she pretends that her lady picked the bed furthest from the table to keep Shizune in shape, and then feels an awful pang of guilt that sticks to the inside of her throat and makes her sentimental.
On the bed, her lady burrows into her pillow – well and truly out, then, further evidenced by her relaxed henge bringing out the furrows of her cheeks. Soft and silent, reduced to something gentle. One strand of blonde hair is creeping out onto her cheek, but the rest is fanned out down her back and doing its very best to escape its tie. It’s the least Shizune can do to smooth it back, at the very least so that it doesn’t bother at her nose while she sleeps.
She’s turned before Lady Tsunade stirs, she’s sure of it – she’s readied herself for the task of folding her lady’s discarded outer layers to be put away when she feels the hand at her wrist, the soft skin of the palm, calluses smoothing with time and neglect. There are furrows around her lady’s brown eyes, a keen shine to them even in half-sleep. In the silent hollow of the night, she’s struck by the warmth of her lady’s presence, the blunted edges of something sharp and brash and clever.
“Caught you,” says Senju Tsunade. A gentle tug and she does not relent. Her lady’s thumb is pressed to the node at the base of Shizune’s wrist, and in the soft light that permeates the room, she can see her lady’s wry half-smile.
Her pulse gallops to her throat.
“My lady,” she says, soft and impotent. Lady Tsunade draws her in until she’s sitting on the edge of the bed, gentle with all the cutting precision of her chakra scalpel. Only when she wants to be. Only when it serves her.
Shizune is many things, but she’s not stupid. It feels like a seduction – the stroke at her pressure point, the gentle light, the teasing, the muzzy heat rising off of her lady’s body stripped down to her undershirt by Shizune’s own hands.
There is a very large part of her that would love to let herself have it. She already belongs to her lady in all the ways that matter. Some days she’s hard-pressed to remember a time before Lady Tsunade and all her big and bright and all-encompassing – her hands at work, their stains in the same places, the circles they draw around each other, the companionable silences between violent interjections and hot tempers and endless circular arguments. There’s a tug in her gut that tells her where to follow a second before her lady finds a direction to lead.
There could be something good for them, if she’d have it. Her lady presses through skin, to bone, against a drumming pulse. Her eyes are dilated. She’s loose and easy, nearly playful, shades of all that terrible, wonderful brightness that draws the world in around her.
Shizune could have it. She’d have it, she’d have it in a heartbeat, but there is also a terrible twist in her gut, a twist at the side of her mouth, a wander in her eyes that Tsunade has told her is her uncle’s when she’s too far under and grasping for dry land, and for all the love there, it settles poorly to be stared straight through. Seen for someone dead and gone.
Another tug. Her lady’s grasp slackens, mouth turning down. There is sorrow there, maybe the same as Shizune’s sorrow. Everything theirs is shared, it seems. There is something in this that settles poorly too.
“You’re no fun,” Lady Tsunade says, tucking her face back into her pillow. And to herself, “you never let me have any fun.”
It’s endearing, in its way. Comfortable, for her lady to be acting like a child. Familiar, at least. Shizune smiles. “It’s late,” she says obliquely, covering her lady’s hand with her own. And she’s very nearly gathered her wits back about her when her lady takes her around the waist, but she lands on the bed so gently that she can’t find it in herself to be upset.
“So stay, will you?” Says the sleepy rumble that is her lady, Senju Tsunade, and her arm is warm and heavy over Shizune’s nervous stomach that is still hoping for something she keeps herself from. And she wants.
She wants. There is very little in her that wants with this gaping sort of necessity. She wants to settle here, to feel her lady’s low voice reverberating through her ribs, to smell her sour breath. She wants all this, even if she can’t have what died and was buried alongside her uncle.
Shizune takes a long, shuddering breath, pinned under the wonderful scrutiny of those brown eyes.
She smiles, a private, hesitating thing. Compromise, to force herself down from her high, but with a promise swaddled therein.
A breath, drawn in, let out, left to mingle in the space between them.
“I’ll stay.”