Because Tsunade never gets enough respect. Neither does Sakura.
Warning: dark, dark, dark and nightmarish. You have been warned.
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She sleeps.
Four hours, a personal record. Four hours of sake induced, no nightmare, peaceful oblivion. No waking up to hear her own silent screams.
It is the longest she has slept in years.
They, who ever they are, expect her to be the leader of their village and a part-time dispenser of medical miracles.
Her hands are constantly soaked in blood. Those who die on missions, those she has killed by either order or her own hands, as well as those she is unable to save all stain her hands red.
She sometimes wonders if her nails have since been dyed that color. Crimson, she thinks to herself with a laugh, with a bit of vermillion-vanilla swirl.
She naps every chance she gets.
She knows it takes about twenty five minutes before her Rapid Eye Movement sleep cycle begins. And with it the crushed and mangled and rip to shred bodies that assault her senses. Many of them still breathing and begging for death. They are stacked, one upon another, in the walls of her mind.
Compartmentalization, she sometimes mutters, is a real bitch.
And that isn't the worst of it.
She's been places and seen things that would melt the eyes of her most jaded underlings.
(Ibiki has nothing on these guys.) Horrors and death that have stayed away from her little continent. Not that that will last longer.
Once, when both she and her newest apprentice were drunk they compared ways they would torture their personal villains.
Uchiha Itachi would have every one of his clan member that he killed grasp at him from under his feet. Pulling him down to hell, they would rip him apart as they go. Then the babies, the most innocent that he killed, would pluck out his eyes.
Actually, Sakura had been a lot more grissly in her description. TO the point where even Tsunade's stomach felt ill.
"Whose version of hell would he be sent to?" She asked.
"I really don't care," Sakura had said with squinted eyes. "As long as they can make him hurt."
She knew there was a reason why she liked the girl.
They have the same eyes.
Sometimes she wonders if the girl hasn't seen the same thing.
Only those who have seen a nightmare can truly choose to be that humane. Sometimes those who are most innocent are such because they choose to be.
Sometimes she looks at her apprentice and swears the girl's hair isn't pink but an amalgam of individual strands of crimson red and vermillion-vanilla swirl.