A/N: Little Tsunade drabble, edited version, originally part of a drabble collection known as 'Quietly.'

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

fight for another's dream

For a second she can taste the blood in her mouth and the thrill of fighting adrenaline before her fists slam into him, again and again, and she swings with the full glory of a person who is young and strong—

(she can feel the air rush through her lungs, her blood stream, her heart, her brain—)

and doesn't care that the skin over her knuckles is bleeding back or that her chakra's run low. She doesn't care about the rips of sliced muscles, or the burn in her throat when she screams a battle cry for dragons and the dead.

She'd make a terrible dancer. She moves in fast, angry bursts of speed and force and pushes herself into another's face and demands their attention, slaps them around a bit, and crushes them if they refuse to look—

(isn't graceful in the slightest, her mother'd be ashamed)

at the deadly machine she has become. But her mind is old, even if her body is fake-young, and having a mind that is old enough to understand the terrible irreversible decline of youth and energy—

But her body is young, and when she sledgehammers her fist into her fist into Orochimaru's face she sucks in a breath—

It feels damn good.

For a moment she is able to forget her brother and her lover and even herself—and just breaths as she flies down to the earth, rushing to her opponent with aching muscles and the sort of agony that can only come from raw, physical damage.

She'd forgotten how it felt to fight.

(but just for that second, she thinks she remembers)

She fights because it is all she has left, because it will never die until the day she does. Because no curse shall take the ability from her, though sometimes she wonders why she bothers to keep the black-fortune necklace with her.

Orochimaru struggles upright. Her momentum brings her leg jack knifing down on his spine and she swallows—

(don't stop don't stop)

because sometimes it feels like by doing this, she's allowing herself to forget the ones gone.

She so desperately wants to forget.

(and is so terrified of doing so)

She is fighting Orochimaru, with whom she has a kind-of history, and Jiraya is here with his stupid, grubby orange kid who's still naïvestupidbrave enough to have dreams. Child dreams.

Tsunade's body has a kind of fierce joy in that it is alive—but she has long ago forgotten her dreams.

So she'll give the kid her necklace, and see if this time, someone will be strong enough to wish upon a star.

So stupid.

(and she'll die for this kid

for his dream)