"I'm leaving," Tsunade announced, absently thumbing the necklace that had betrayed yet another loved one.

It was not the first time Tsunade had threatened to leave, but it was the first time she had ever come before him with nothing left to make her stay in Konoha. Jiraiya was somewhere off in Rain, trying to atone for his sins but most assuredly creating new ones to compensate for those lost. Orochimaru was somewhere deep in the catacombs of the village, failing to find a cure for the common death. Nawaki was dead. Dan was dead. Her cat was dead—euthanized along with thousands of other pets—because of a wartime rumor that there weren't enough rations to feed Konoha's domestic animals. As it turned out, the rumor had only been a rumor and now there was a surplus of moldy dog biscuits in the storehouses that no one could throw away in good faith because there was a real food shortage as a consequence of the fall of Konoha Harbor. And her grandfather, also dead, was staring at him rather imposingly from the mountainside.

Hiruzen folded his hands and wondered when this little girl—who'd once been so competitive that she'd fashioned a makeshift penis to pee faster and further than Jiraiya—had turned into this wan, haggard woman who had patiently waited her turn in a never-ending line to see him. His gaze flickered from the Shodaime's stony visage and back to the dark circles seemingly tattooed under Tsunade's eyes. "Why?" he asked redundantly.

Tsunade raised up her hands and scrutinized her palms. For once, they were impeccably clean. Not a single cut or stain marred her smooth skin. And strangely enough, her customary red manicure had been removed, leaving behind ten neat fingernails trimmed to the quick. She caught his curious look and laid her hands flat on his desk. "Do you know why I always had red fingernails?" she asked.

Someone snorted from the back of the room. Tsunade's head swiveled, scanned the line of fidgeting people, and identified the perpetrator who was doing a marvelous impression of a frightened turtle. Her lips curled into a thin, red smile. "Bloodstains are hard to clean," she remarked offhandedly, still smiling. The room fell silent. There wasn't much fidgeting after that.

"Care to enlighten me?" Hiruzen asked in an attempt to preserve the structural integrity of the Hokage Tower. He lit his pipe as he waited for Tsunade's fists to unclench. "Have a seat," he offered belatedly, gesturing to the armchair in front of him with his pipe.

Tsunade turned back around and eyed the chair for a moment before shaking her head. "No," she said, trying to rake a hand through her lanky hair. Her fingers snagged and came through with a cobweb of hair that she sent fluttering to the ground with a disdainful wave. "I won't be long."

"I see." He couldn't remember the last time they'd exchanged more than a few clipped words in passing. Always cool and professional. Nothing more than platitudes. And now she was planning on leaving.

"Yeah, bloodstains are hard to clean," she repeated. "You know, every operation I performed would get blood under my nails and turn them a nice shade of shit brown. So I always had them painted red. My toenails too, but that's just because I can't stand how shinobi-grade shoes don't cover your toes. What an eyesore."

"Yes, I suppose that's true," Hiruzen agreed with forced levity.

"But I don't paint my nails anymore," Tsunade said, "because…" She bit her lip and looked away, drilling tiny holes into his desk with her nails. "Well, there's really no point. I can't heal anymore. I'm useless. That's the end of it."

"No," Hiruzen said, brows furrowed. "No, Tsunade. You heal regardless of your jutsu. You heal every day simply by being at the hospital. You heal by teaching and leading, and yes, by doing paperwork," he said, smiling ruefully. "You heal by breathing and living and being an inspiration for this new generation."

She looked about as impressed as a doctor encountering a foreign object in one's rectal cavity—not that Hiruzen had intimate knowledge of such things, but Tsunade probably did. "Indeed," she said, matching his formality and affecting an exaggerated lilt reminiscent of her days as the Slug Princess who used to wave regally from inside her slug-shaped palanquin during the summer solstice festival. "I suppose you could consider me an inspiration for alcoholics who are so hemophobic that they need a medical team and a Yamanaka on standby every time their vagina bleeds."

Out of the corner of his eye, Hiruzen saw Danzo raise his eyebrows and heard him sigh very delicately.

"I'm not needed anymore," Tsunade continued. "I've taught my assistant everything he needs to know to lead the hospital. Nothing's going to change if I leave. In fact, I think it'll be better for everyone involved. You can have a Chief Medic who can actually see what he needs to see in order to operate. You'll be able to fire that insufferable Hyuuga you hired to babysit me and 'be my eyes,'" she said, slashing angry quotation marks through the air with her fingers. "It'll be better. I promise."

"Tsunade—" Hiruzen started.

"—So I'm leaving. I can't stay here anymore."

"Tsunade—"

"—You don't even care so why are you arguing with me?" She made the mistake of pausing in her tirade to take a breath and stumbled when her eyes fell on the picture of a younger and happier Team Hiruzen on the desk. There she was in the middle, fifteen years younger with two jaunty fingers raised behind each of her teammates' heads. The same photo had once had a privileged place among the numerous frames on her mantle. And then one day, she'd come home without Dan, without Nawaki, and had hurled all of her pictures at her bathroom mirror.

She looked away hastily, guiltily. A wet film slid over her eyes as she seemed to shrink into herself. "I have to go, Sensei," she said in a low voice, calling him by a title she'd rarely used even in her genin days. "Please."

"Tsunade," Hiruzen prodded gently. He heard her take a shuddering breath and reached forward to grasp her cold, trembling hands. Tsunade squeezed her eyes shut, gnawing on her chapped lips. After a few moments, she gently extricated her hands from his, took a deep breath, and stood up straight.

"Sandaime Hokage-sama, I, Tsunade of the Senju hereby tender my formal resignation as Chief Medic of Konoha Hospital and as a jounin of the Village Hidden in the Leaves. I understand that with my resignation I will no longer fall under the protection of Konoha and her affiliates, that I will no longer serve as a representative of the village, and that I renounce my ties with my clan and fellow shinobi."

Hiruzen watched as she delivered her resignation without stumbling over her words despite the tears pooling in her eyes. He couldn't help the pride that overcame his regret. His heart swelled, smothering any further attempts to compel her to stay.

"You will no longer be Tsunade of Konoha, nor Senju Tsunade, but simply Tsunade. Do you understand and wish to proceed?"

"I do."

They spoke more than words across the great chasm that had gradually come between them over the years. Petty differences, serious disagreements, harsh blows. Tsunade was stubborn and brash. Hiruzen was cautious and all too aware of his image. They'd butted heads and clashed shoulder to shoulder until one day they'd both been too stubborn to reconcile. Dan was fresh in the grave and Tsunade had come to Hiruzen in her grief to blame him for not acting sooner, for being too cautious, for not caring anymore. And she had been right. He had been too slow and had become immune to the concerns of his people.

Time had smoothed away the jagged edges, effacing the harsh inscriptions of past grievances and leaving them with a blank slate. Why and how had they become strangers over the years? How had Tsunade missed the birth of his second son? How had he abandoned her to fight her demons alone? Somehow, it had become clear to Tsunade that she needed to swallow her pride and meet him halfway by coming here and playing by the rules for once in her life. And it was becoming clear to Hiruzen that he needed to do the same. It was time to let her go.

"Then I accept your resignation, Tsunade."

Tsunade nodded, surreptitiously swiping under her eyes. She hesitated before blurting out, "Thank you and sorry. For everything. You were the best mentor anyone could have ever asked for."

"Don't be a stranger, Tsunade," Hiruzen said, trying to keep the wise, thoughtful look on his face from twisting into something sad, regretful, hopeful, proud—he wasn't sure. "Don't drink too much. Don't provoke civilians. And please for the sake of all that is good in the world, don't gamble your inheritance away."

He set his pipe down and struggled to find the right words to say, feeling the eyes of his silent audience and wishing he could shed the guise of leaderly composure. "Most importantly, I ask you—hopefully as a friend—to heal yourself. You're rather good at that, I hear."

Tsunade's lips turned upwards, this time in a genuine smile that revealed her dimples and chased away the years from her face and the shadows under her eyes. "Don't bet on it."

And just like that, she was gone. In and back out of his life the moment she'd dared to test the waters. She had chosen her stage well. Her performance had been inspired. Her script had been perfect, hitting the most poignant chords to garner the most sympathetic chorus of rumors. Like all the best tragedies, it had relied on the subversion of expectations: the princess without a prince, the sister without a brother, the healer without the ability to heal. He didn't doubt her story, but he knew how skilled she was at manipulating public perception. Now, no one could resent her for leaving.

"You always were too soft with that one, Hiruzen," Danzo muttered from the side once Tsunade was out of earshot. "No discipline. No spine." He was half right as usual. And yet, Hiruzen wondered, was Danzo courageous for having raised his objections only once Tsunade was safely out of punching distance?

Hiruzen chose not to dignify Danzo with a response, opting instead to wave forward yet another petitioner from the line of genin, chuunin, and jounin, men and women, and the young and the old comprising the mass of bodies stretching from the street to the top of the Hokage Tower. Most wanted missions for the money they needed to sustain themselves and their families. A small minority sought missions for the sake of relieving the agitating itch that had settled in upon the war's end. These were young ninja who had lost their loved ones during the war and wandered around Konoha restlessly, looking for and finding nothing to anchor them. And finally, there were the multitudes of single mothers and disabled veterans who came here as a last resort to beg some kind of welfare or loan from the state. They had been denied at the banks, turned away from the overflowing community centers, and exhausted the minimal support they could receive from their friends and families. This public forum was their last lifeline and it was being tugged out of their hands by others in the same boat.

"Hokage-sama, I am deeply honored to have been invited to an audience with your magnificent presence today," the man greeted distantly and obsequiously through the haze of Hiruzen's thoughts.

Hiruzen glanced over at the unctuous man who was bowing so deeply that his hair was sweeping the floor. At second glance, Hiruzen noticed the empty sleeve fluttering from the blessed breeze coming through the window.

Many shinobi had returned from the frontlines deaf, blind, mentally ill, missing limbs; an unlucky minority had a combination of these deficits. And there was a far greater number of disabled shinobi returning home alive then there had been during the First War. Towards the tail end of this recent war, Hiruzen had implemented a mandate requiring medic-nin on all outgoing squads. This had raised the survival rate, even if it meant that a ninja survived with a life-long disability.

"What can I do for you?" Hiruzen asked.

The man pulled back his sleeve to reveal a stump decorated with the creeping white scars that were the calling card of Mist's motley crew of inhuman shark children, who lurked below shallow waters and leapt up to catch their prey unawares. "I am here today to request a small loan—

"—I'm sorry," Hiruzen interrupted. "We are not approving any loans at this time. Have a good day."

"But I heard—"

"—Next," Hiruzen called. He watched, unable to feel anything but mild regret, as the man was escorted out of the room. There was nothing he could do.

Ninjas were tools. Like any tool, once a ninja was permanently damaged, it was cast aside indifferently and replaced. So, despite the vast numbers making up this specific demographic, disabled ninja were unduly neglected. For one thing, even if they wanted to work, they couldn't pass the physical exam which was one firm requirement for all ninja on active duty. And without active duty status, they weren't fit to receive health care benefits from the village. They had the option of taking up positions in the civilian sector, but this was undesirable for they had no work experience in the pertinent areas and really had no chance of competing with other more experienced civilians for these positions.

It was a sad reality that most disabled veterans—abandoned with no job prospects, no healthcare to cover the considerable costs of therapy and treatment, and discarded by the very home for which they had fought—left Konoha to settle in small, rural villages spread throughout the Land of Fire to live out the rest of their lives in shame. Some committed suicide, seeing no way out.

But still, it was quite a remarkable thing in the world of shinobi for there to be an institutionalized healthcare system. Konoha had the premier healthcare system of all the shinobi nations. And by that, it was understood that Konoha had the only such healthcare system in all the shinobi nations. This was due entirely to Tsunade, no longer of Konoha, and Dan, for whom the healthcare initiative had done a fat lot of good.

When the next petitioner came forward, Hiruzen was staring at the photo of Team Hiruzen, wondering if he had done right by any of them. At this point, Konoha's best kept secret was the fact that the so-called Sannin were rarely in one place at the same time to be lumped together as a functional trio. It was so typical and paternalistic of Hanzo to act like he was some benevolent explorer, running around the villages like a particularly amorous dog and forcing names on things and people who already had names and weren't in any way affiliated with him. And now that one of the three was officially out of the club, how could anyone maintain that terrible façade, that terrible title? Hiruzen supposed that one could reasonably rebrand the remaining duo as Ninin, but that sounded more like a stutter than a title for two of the most formidable ninja in the known world.

They could have been a joke, albeit a terrible one. A philanderer, a snake charmer, and a hemophobe walked into a bar. The philanderer found a drink and a woman to disgust with his bawdy jokes. The snake charmer headed into the men's restroom and proceeded to do what he did best: charm snakes. The hemophobe was a sad, angry drunk who invariably ended up throwing lecherous men like the philanderer through the walls. And the fourth member of the team was stress-balding in a squeaky office chair as he attempted to solve post-war debt, international tensions, a food crisis, unemployment, reconstruction, healthcare and treatment for disabled veterans with PTSD, and education—all while juggling a newborn baby, a recalcitrant teenager, and a wife with postpartum depression. Indeed, a terrible joke. But that was all the humor Hiruzen could muster.

He turned his attention back to his audience. "How can I help you?" Hiruzen recited pleasantly to yet another faceless person who stammered his way through an utterly uninspiring performance. This one had evidently neglected to rehearse his lines. Tsunade wasn't the only actor. They were all performers in one grand theatre extraordinaire.


The unpleasant thing about suicide, Hideki thought, was that you couldn't choose the way people saw you after death. This particular specimen hanging in front of him was an exemplary model to prove his point: it was a spectacular shade of puce—a color he could never have imagined or used until he'd taken on this job, but one that had seemingly been created for the exact purpose of describing hanging corpses—and in full view of a growing crowd of appropriately horrified people. He scanned the faces of the people around him. They were all so polite and dignified.

"Oh goodness, that poor thing," murmured one sympathetic woman wearing a purse with a live dog tucked inside.

"I knew him. He was a good man," simpered another, though sans a purse-dog. Her accessory was a hand clutching her heart.

"Fuck." That was the only genuine response, but one that was met with gasps and disdainful mutterings.

Hideki neither knew the man nor cared to know him. If anything, he was tired and annoyed. When he'd brought up how tired and annoyed he was, he was made out to be some kind of heartless psychopath. Maybe it was true. Maybe it wasn't. Hideki did have a piece of paper from the Intelligence Department which had certified his brain as "well-adjusted" if that made any difference. In any case, he would have to wait until the ANBU arrived to clear the crowd and remove the body from the tree. This one was a Hyuuga with a pair of bulging Byakugan staring blindly back at Hideki, and therefore required more security than the standard Uchiha Police sweep. Apparently, the Uchiha couldn't be trusted to keep their hands to themselves when it came to people's eyeballs. It was a fair assumption given the Uchiha clan's sordid history, but the Uchiha had never given a damn about anyone but themselves. That was why Hideki was annoyed: he didn't need a team of ANBU to babysit him to make sure he didn't pluck out the Hyuuga's precious marbles.

As for why he was tired—if Hideki cared to psychoanalyze his emotions, he would likely find probable cause to quit his job. This most certainly wasn't what he had signed up for. Nowhere in his treatise of a job description had there been any mention of cleaning up the messes people left behind when they committed suicide. In all fairness, Hideki hadn't exactly read the entire thing, but this wasn't what he'd envisioned at all. After the tenth, twentieth, thirtieth case, the shock of seeing a hanging corpse had turned into resignation and then a chronic fatigue that seeped into his bones and made it harder and harder for him to get out of bed in the morning. But he was an Uchiha and he couldn't quit the Military Police without consequently being labeled as a flaky wimp and excommunicated henceforth from the most noble clan of glorified conjunctivitis. That was what had happened to his cousin, one Uchiha Yoshino—a cautionary tale. So tired, annoyed, and most importantly employed he would remain.

This wasn't what Hideki had envisioned. He had once entertained the fantasy of swooping in and saving the day. He'd thought that there would be laurels and medals of achievement. Maybe even a girl, and then a family. He hadn't known that he and his peers would be called upon to scavenge the dead like a murder of crows. Disappointment? Disenchantment? Despair, perhaps? All he knew was that reality had failed to live up to his expectations. And maybe this was what the Hyuuga had felt after losing a few limbs and returning home to a thankless village. Hideki could only speculate.

Konoha was the Village Hidden in the Leaves. This meant that there were more than enough trees for each citizen. Like every village, it had its own culture, its own way of doing things.


AN: Thanks for reading! This is a rewrite of my other story, Hide and Seek. If you've read it, you might recognize some passages and themes, but the changes are substantial enough to warrant a new story.

Love and gratitude for my illustrious beta, WesDunne, whose support and editing services have indubitably enhanced your reading experience.