She's never been the maternal type, Tsunade knows. There are kunoichi who look at enemy shinobi with carefully blank eyes, eyes that calculate weaknesses and chakra levels and stamina, who could come home and turn the same eyes, now turned warm and brimming with affection, love too fertile for a single heart to contain, towards sleeping toddlers who reached out with chubby, questing hands. Tsunade's known, just as Dan knew, that she would never be a mother.
It's never bothered her. It's never kept her awake on long missions, far from home, reading maps of unfamiliar land by starlight. There was already so much to grieve, so much to be ashamed of. Mourning the inability to be something she'd never have the opportunity to be seemed – trivial. Shameful in itself, almost.
She has her moments, she knows. Her students burst into her office with conclusively red eyes and she'd drum up some stock answers –of course he sees you as a woman and no, that scar'll fade away in a couple of days, you'll be pretty as ever and tell him to share with the other teammates and if he keeps coming into your tent, punch him to the ground.
It's not much, but they stumble out feeling better, and Tsunade can breathe a sigh of relief and stop entertaining the possibility of beating the hormones out of every teenage shinobi in the ranks.
But sometimes, stock answers don't cut it. More often than not, in this dark, terrible world they live in, the words that pour out of her students' mouths and spill on the polished wood of her desk are corrosive, the kind of poison that can rot a person inside out. Sometimes she has to watch, stricken, as her shinobi –her children- grieve and grieve until the very essence of them is wrung out, and they're left with eyes that don't blink enough to seem human and smiles like shrapnel.
Then, it's her that's reaching out, even though she knows that there won't be anything on the other side.
On most days, Sakura talks. She talks angrily and she talks fast, her hands weaving her words into the air. Her voice is always, always angry, and she shakes with it sometimes, even when she's talking about something like going shopping.
Sakura talks loud and fast and angry, and when she comes to the topic Tsunade sent for her to discuss, her words dry up and her voice slams to a halt, choking badly on thin air.
Once, she says, "Those bookshops are going crazy, there's this new book in that stupid Icha Icha series and I kept thinking how happy it would make-" and that's it. She never can manage to say his name, scrabbling for it desperately in her throat but staying silent.
She doesn't say his name, and when Tsunade tries to, she leaves so fast it feels like all she was was a shadow clone of herself, defeated by a memory.
It took twenty-three summons, fifteen chuunin messengers, nine ANBU and a personal visit where Tsunade kicked down the door and stared him down to drag Sasuke in. When he came, he stood in a corner and didn't say anything, smiling a smile that was for most part ironic and bitter, but sometimes turned hauntingly empty.
Tsunade kept him standing to attention for three hours, without him saying anything. Just that smile, wielded like a kunai. Cold, distant. Little brat, she thought.
When she tried saying, "Kakashi was a good man," Sasuke looked up at once, panicked, his eyes wide and terrified. He looked like a child, shaking and shivering, looking at her like she might try to tear his world –his crumbling, fragile world, barely held together by his thin hands, hands that could kill, hands that had once been soaked in his entire family's blood- apart, snatch it from him and never let him see it again.
Tsunade's breath caught. "My boy," she whispers.
Sasuke struggled to paste his smile back on. She saw it –how the corners of his lips trembled, how his teeth were gritted, how much physical effort went into it, and how, after it had been painted on, it clung to his mouth grotesquely.
It was like watching her little brother bleed out on the floor, hearing his rasping, wet coughs, but still, Tsunade forced herself to watch Sasuke Uchiha smile.
For a while, it looked like Naruto would never, ever so much as think the words. He came to her office, laughing and chatting about Kakashi's dogs (dead, buried with him in the grave that Sakura never tears herself away from and Sasuke keeps talking about visiting but never does) and Kakashi's mask and how Kakashi still owes him ramen for missing his birthday.
And then they fought, Sasuke and Naruto, while Sakura watched from the sidelines, too numb to say anything.
Tsunade doesn't know the details, but the entire village seems to; how Sasuke kept screaming, he's dead, you fucking moron why don't you fucking understand, he's dead dead dead, and Naruto kept punching him, over and over and over because Sasuke didn't defend, and Sakura couldn't summon the healing chakra to her hands because Sasuke's sharingan looked too much like Kakashi's and the next day Naruto came into her office to submit a report with red knuckles and dead eyes and-
For a little while, Naruto was happy. He only talked about his sensei, proud in a way that only a fifteen-year-old can be. He referred to Kakashi as being away, and when Tsunade tried to broach the subject of the grave with its pink-haired ghost, he looked at her like she'd grown an extra head and then went right on talking about pervy teachers, and when he left, it was with a gruesomely cheerful, "See ya later, granny Tsunade!"
On other days, Sakura doesn't say anything at all. She cries instead.
She sits and cries; softly, silently, looking out the window over Tsunade's shoulder, and it's as if her words and her anger have all been quietly washed away.
Tsunade offers her a handkerchief and Sakura would make eye contact for the first time, and would nod. "Thank you, Master," she'd say, before cleaning up and leaving, still silent.
He's an Uchiha; she's a Senju. She isn't really surprised when the council members turn to her and say, "He's violent, uncontrollable, and a liability. He's injured five of his ten-man ANBU team."
Sasuke was promoted to C.O. a few months ago, one of the youngest, and most brilliant ANBU they had. Naruto and Sakura had thrown him a party, and Tsunade remembers the expression of desperately-concealed pride Sasuke had when Kakashi had ruffled his hair and cut the dog-shaped cake. She'd overseen Sasuke's ANBU initiation herself, and remembered rolling her eyes when Kakashi turned up his nose and said passable, after Sasuke had set a new record in the taijutsu exam, and then taken him for ramen later.
"Plus," the head of the Hyuuga clan, the ANBU captain says, and Tsunade's eyes narrow with dislike, "he doesn't talk."
Tsunade's disdain of this petty, arrogant man recedes as she gapes at him, open-mouthed. "At all?"
"His men tell me he only uses gestures," Hyuuga says complacently. "He stopped talking after-" he trails off delicately. "I suggest he gets discharged honorably, in view of his…services."
She once spoke to Kakashi about Sasuke; he's a shinobi, Kakashi had said, lazy drawl, slouched figure. He'll do.
Tsunade stands up. "He'll be on probation," she says, in a loud, carrying voice, looking directly at Hyuuga, "for two weeks. And two weeks only."
The outcry this causes follows her out of the room. That's Godaime-sama to you, Hatake.
Naruto doesn't come when summoned, either, but drops in just when she's about to call it a day. He walks in – no joyous skidding, no laughter. No call of granny Tsunade!
Naruto was the one who was scouting ahead that day while Sasuke supported an injured Sakura. He's the one who dropped to the ground to investigate the marks left in the snow.
Naruto's the one who found him.
Naruto spends an hour mechanically listing every gruesome death a shinobi is taught; he invents a few of his own, a stream of profanity and cold-blooded violence spilling from his lips as he talks about what he's going to do to those fucking-cunt-Kiri-bastards.
He leaves Tsunade shaking.
Two scrolls sent out at once, to ANBU headquarters and Sasuke's apartment. They meet outside Tsunade's office, Naruto in his uniform and Sasuke in a faded Uchiha jacket.
Tsunade watches as they studiously avoid each other's eyes, until Naruto twitches suddenly, and says something.
Sasuke looks at him sharply, and his mouth moves –makes the shapes hesitantly, unused to motion. They both have identical rings around their eyes.
"Shinobi die all the time," Shizune says, watching the scene unfold before them. She sounds cautiously happy, because at least Sasuke's talking and Naruto doesn't look like he's got a madman trapped under his skin.
"Kakashi was-" not different, because he was a patchwork of everyone he'd loved. A genius, yes, but equipped with a fine sense of personal honor and pride.
"Section D's done," Sakura says, coming in through the side door, saving her the trouble, "Master, I think we might have to- oh," she says, softly.
They watch as Naruto laughs and Sasuke rolls his eyes, oblivious to their surroundings. Before Tsunade can say anything, Sakura shimmers over to them and they stare at each other for the longest time.
Then, Sasuke reaches out a hand to touch Sakura's bright hair, and Naruto laughs again, and Sakura hugs them both tight, tight.
Tsunade watches, with a mother's acceptance, as her –Kakashi's- children grow. She watches as they slowly, fumblingly find each other. Naruto's hatred and Sasuke's numbness and Sakura's fury- she watches as they wash over each other and settle. She watches them reach out for each other, watches something leave Naruto's eyes as something else enters Sasuke's. Sakura runs between them, her pink hair turning into cords binding them together.
Sasuke cracks his first smile, possibly in his entire life, while waiting outside her office and in the middle of a shoving match with Naruto one day, and then, and only then, does Tsunade let herself visit the memorial stone.
It's good to get out of the office, and she walks barefoot, indulging in the memory of running through these fields when there wasn't anyone to mourn. Her dead brother's laughter. Her dead fiancé's kind eyes. She takes her time, because time was a luxury she'd been given, time to slow down and take a look around and maybe, maybe set things right.
Kakashi's name sits comfortably on the stone, making it seem casual in a way only Kakashi could. She thinks about telling him, Sasuke nearly died of grief, but now he's better. He should be back in ANBU, being a passable shinobi, in two days' time.
She thinks about telling him, Naruto became someone else for a while, but he's Naruto again, unfortunately. He's back to keeping Ichiraku in business.
Or maybe: Sakura was too young, you lazy bastard, much, much too young. But she's got Naruto, and she's got Sasuke, and maybe she'll be alright.
She dismisses these as maudlin ramblings of a very old woman. She traces the name once: Hatake Kakashi.
"You bastard, leaving me your kids like that," she said to the clear, cool air, and imagined laughter filtering through a mask.
THE END
A/N: Apologies for the fluctuating tenses, this a fic of the written-in-an-hour variety. Feedback welcomed with open arms, and hands that killed Kakashi for personal angst reasons.