Prompt 64: Bruises: Shizune knows how much more the intangible bruises hurt than the corporeal ones.

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.


Shizune has become a good judge of emotional trauma in her patients.

They're willing to talk to her, to confide in her because she is sympathetic and to them she understands. She will always listen to them, and if she's writing on a chart while doing so they know she's still listening.

Shizune always handles the victims of emotional trauma far more carefully than those of physical trauma, even by her own standards. They will receive kind words and soft tones while those who simply have incurred bodily injuries may hear a snap, a quick command or a sharp question inquiring how it happened or how they did that to themselves.

Those who have suffered emotional and mental wounds are always quicker to snap and break; they become more fragile than even the most severely physically injured patient in the hospital, and Shizune knows she has to tread lightly.

She has nothing but sympathy for those who bear wounds on their heart and mind. They have been affected by events often far outside their control and while broken bones will heal, their injuries never will, not in full.

There is little she can do, except write long-term prescriptions, suggest a therapist, and offer heartfelt but hollow words of sympathy, and it frustrates her. Shizune has always been a fixer, someone who looks at a problem seeking a solution, and when there are no answers, she is both frustrated and sad, looking into the haunted eyes of a patient and feeling some misplaced feelings of guilt, sickened to the core. A question without an answer infuriates her.

She knows better than to meddle, though. People's lives are half-destroyed, and Shizune knows how easy it is to make half-destroyed into totally destroyed. Always be gentle, never pry—that's the therapist's job—and do not try to make it all better single handedly. A single handed attempt at anything usually has a tendency of blowing up in people's faces, and Shizune won't play with people's lives.

Watching Tsunade has given Shizune most of her experience in emotional trauma.

However much Tsunade tries to hide it, and however well she holds it together on her good days, she is bruised. She is embittered by things she could not change, shaken by things outside of her control, and driven half to madness by the things she can change but won't.

Some, but not all of her habits, stem from this. Tsunade was always a drinker, Shizune knows that, but the binges were always for fun and on dares before everything fell apart for her. Now, attempts to destroy her liver are made with the sole intent of forgetting everything, just for a little while. Tsunade never will be able to forget everything that's happened to her, but she thinks she can with an outside toxin, and nothing Shizune says to her can make her believe otherwise.

The compulsive gambling is an over-compensative reaction. Tsunade suffered in the past often because she wasn't willing to gamble, because she was too cautious and too circumspect, and now it is just the reverse. Now Tsunade has a gambling addiction as severe if not more so than her chronic alcoholism, because in a way she wants to put right what she got wrong and wishing her savings away is the only way she can think to do it.

Tsunade is not an unintelligent woman; she must know what she's doing to herself and why. But she doesn't stop; she can't. Emotional trauma is an especially pernicious vicious cycle, and in a way, it never ends.

Shizune can't fix Tsunade. She's afraid to even try, for fear of making the problem worse.

And she knows from bitter personal experience how deep the cracks laid down by that sort of injury can go.