Morning, Sunshine
Summary: Coffee. Loads of coffee are just what she needs right now. OneShot- Tsunade, Jiraiya. A life of a dream. Or was it the other way round?
Warning: I was intending to write fluff. (That means this is not fluff.)
Set: Completely story-unrelated, AU.
Disclaimer: Standards apply.
A/N: Sept 2013. Part 2 of a massive upload session. I won't do this too often, don't worry.
She wakes up with a start.
The world materializes in front of her eyes: her bedroom, her apartment. Her home. A cabinet, a chest of drawers, the bathrobe on the exact same chair she threw it on yesterday. A window, wide open to the world, and the sounds of the street in the distance. Everything is normal here, just an everyday morning. Early, because her shift starts at half past seven. Her alarm clock starts ringing the second she stretches out her hand to silence it. Her face is covered in sweat and her hands are trembling. Her entire body is.
Tsunade lays still for a few heartbeats, desperately trying to will away the last remnants of her nightmare. There are dried tears on her cheeks – damn, she hates it when this happens but she can't help herself. Furious, she ignores everything else around her and marches into the bathroom, splashes water into her face. The mirror looks back at her: blue eyes, blond, long hair, a worn face. She's forty and some people say she's not as beautiful as she used to be. What does she care for them, she thinks, but the pinprick of hurt still remains. It blossoms into a full spike of pain when her traitorous mind recalls the images of her dream.
Get a grip.
Still shifting between anger and terror, she rubs her face dry with her towel, uses more force than necessary. Her hair is especially difficult to handle today, she cannot find her concealer, and the throbbing in her shoulder, memory of a car accident, blossoms into full-blown pain. I have three bad news for you. Today's not Friday. Tomorrow, it won't be Friday, either. And the day after tomorrow… Not. Not that it changes anything. She has the weekend shift this month.
It's not that Tsunade doesn't love her job. She loves being a physician. She loves working with and caring for children. She loves to see them brighten when she hands them a lollipop, and to see them smile when she tells them they are good to leave the hospital. She hates to see them sad and tired and sick. She's a doctor because she wants to heal, not to treat symptoms, but nowadays this seems pretty unrealistic. Well, better than the other choice, she thinks grimly. These are days she hates, too, when nothing is wrong but she just feels like she wants to crawl back into bed and not come out for the rest of the week. The relization that she, as a woman, is a failure because she cannot bear children herself backhands her in the face and she doubles over, and then hates herself because if she had kids she'd fail them, just as she failed everyone else-
Coffee. She needs coffee, now.
Just when she drops the filter and swears under her breath, two strong arms wrap around her hips and a scratchy face buries itself against her neck. Tsunade freezes, caught off guard. He sneaked up on her, she didn't even hear him coming, and for a second everything is there again: His smile as he left, knowing he would never return, the scroll with his name, the stone, the eulogy. The memories, clear like crystal in her head: children, teenager, adults, a whole life in which she knowingly send them to their deaths, unable to change anything, a whole life in which she never had the chance to love him and in which she lost him before-
"Princess," Jiraiya whispers into her shoulder, feeling her tense shoulders and her trembling and reading her mind. "Everything will be alright."
The tears burn at the insides of her eyes but she refuses to let them fall. Instead, she breathes deeply and slowly, slowly, relaxes against him.
Tsunade closes her eyes. Her heart is still screaming that this is impossible while her mind tells her the facts: Forty, married, alive. She's a seasoned physician, married to one of the most influential writers of their time. She's childless, but Minato's son's always around, and Shikaku's brat and Inoichi's girl. She lives a good life. She is happy. There is a ghost of a memory hidden somewhere deep inside her that forces itself to light now and then, and although it has been there for years she still cannot cope with it. But this is her life, now. She should be glad that she has him back, that she has been granted a choice-
Tsunade forgets the coffee as she turns around and buries her face in Jiraiya's chest. Her husband just holds her – how on earth he always seems to know what is wrong with her she has no idea. His body is warm and reassuring against hers. He is not dead. You are not alone. She is not the one responsible for sending people to their deaths, and she does not have to fight a war. Where do these dreams come from, she wonders, and feels like crying.
Jiraiya holds her. When she resurfaces, the world looks better.