Tsunade was drowning. Everywhere she moved she was buried, unable to breathe. She thrashed around but couldn't get any leverage. All around her was bright. Was the sun illuminating the water that much? No, not water at all—paper. Everywhere paper, she was buried in it, unable to move, lungs paralyzed, reams and reams of paper crushing her beneath their weight…

"Tsunade-sama!"

Her eyelids crept open. She realized, much to her relief, that she could breathe normally after all. A thin line of drool connected her face to, yes, a piece of paper.

She raised her head—with some effort; it seemed simultaneously to not be connected to her body and to weigh a thousand pounds. She groggily found her assistant, Shizune, who tightened her lips at the sight. Tsunade sighed. "I have ink on my face again, don't I?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"I see. Tea."

"Yes, ma'am."

I'm getting too old for this, Tsunade thought. I've used illusion to hide my appearance—even from myself. But I know how I feel. There's no hiding that.

It would have happened anyway; we don't live forever, and my life has been full, but… I've also hastened it, haven't I? Mitotic regeneration. It seemed like such a good idea at the time. I felt so clever, coming up with a new jutsu others hadn't even considered. I didn't reckon the costs until later. Now I'm old, thanks in part to my own efforts. Now learning anything new is harder and harder, so I have to lean ever more heavily on what I've already mastered. Which exacerbates the problem. A vicious cycle…

My friends never had to deal with this. Orochimaru couldn't face mortality, so he bent all of his will towards finding ways to cheat death. And Jiraiya…

Tsunade's hand clenched automatically, but the thought wasn't the piercing pain it had once been. It was a dull ache, still painful, but lined with enough sympathy to be handled.

He died young. Well, not young, exactly, but… before he got really old. Before those relentless little claws started chewing into him, breaking down his brain, weakening his joints, clouding his eyes, thinning his bones… ugh. Medical ninja should never grow old. I know exactly what's happening to me, and I know just as much that I can't stop it. The juggernaut is running me down and I have to watch every step it takes…

"Your tea," Shizune offered. Tsunade started. She'd been so deeply lost in thought she hadn't noticed her attendent's return. She accepted the hot liquid gratefully. It took several sips and a minute or two before her brain began to return to where it needed to be.

"Ma'am?"

"Yes?"

"There's… more paperwork waiting. If you can get some off of your desk…"

Tsunade began to realize that her dream had not been too far removed from reality. How did Lord Third ever do this? She wondered. I *never* remember him behind a desk.

Oh, right… he had staff ninja. We had enough numbers, then, that we could keep a team of extras on-hand at HQ to help carry the load. These days, it's just me.

She grabbed her official Hokage seals, readied an inkpad, and steeled herself to tackle the next stack.

She came to a screeching halt three papers in. Her brow creased and her eyes narrowed.

"Shizune," she called.

"Yes, ma'am?"

"Is Nara Shikamaru in the village?"

"I believe so, ma'am. I'll check."

"Bring him here, if he is. Immediately."

"Yes, ma'am."

It seemed so innocent, so banal. It was written in plain, straightforward language, with neat script tightly arranged on each page. Even the graphs were an unassuming black-and-white, with a touch of gray only when necessary. The author of the report had not put great stock in its presentation. No, that wasn't it, Tsunade decided. The author had tried his best to make it so that presentation did not distract. He didn't want to draw attention away from his arguments.

The furrows in Tsunade's brow deepened as she read. It was different, for her, to read something in its entirety; most reports she could get through just skimming. She knew what was important in them, and what was there to satisfy the formatting requirements. This one she read, from the first character to the last. It didn't take long, as the report was quite short, but it seemed to take a while, since the task consumed her whole attention.

She folded the report back to its cover page and placed it carefully on the center of her desk. She leaned back in her chair. Her shoulders sagged as she did. The tea had bought her a respite from her weariness. The report had trumped the tea.

"Ma'am?"

"Yes?"

"Nara Shikamaru, ma'am."

Tsunade gathered herself and donned what she called her hokage-mask. Her posture straightened, while her face became impassive and even. "Send him in."

The teenager entered. He had grown more fully into his chunin uniform. Recent events had made him more comfortable in it and less self-conscious. His hands were loose by his side where once they might have been in his pockets. He betrayed no nervousness, though he must have known the reason for his summons. He met the hokage's gaze with self-assurance. Tsunade was struck by his eyes. They seemed to know more than they let on.

"Lady Third," he said respectfully.

"What are you trying to accomplish, Shikamaru?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean." She held up the report. "Are you trying to scare people?"

"No."

"'On the Extinction of the Shinobi'?" she read.

She watched Shikamaru pick his words. "It's an accurate description," he said.

"And?"

"And it was a title I thought would get attention," he admitted, grudgingly. "I know how much paperwork comes through here. I wasn't trying to be sensational. I just wanted to make sure it got read."

Tsunade nodded. "Not even so much as an exclamation point," she agreed. "But why write something like this?"

Shikamaru gave her an unblinking gaze. "How many children do you have, ma'am?"

Tsunade felt her insides tighten. She had to unclench her jaw in order to speak. "None, as you know full well," she replied. She controlled her voice rather well, she thought. Shikamaru hardly flinched at all.

"And I'm an only child," Shikamaru said, regaining his composure. "My friends and cell-mates, Choji and Ino—they're both only children, too. Naruto, Rock Lee, Sakura, Hinata, Neji… all of us are only children. In fact, out of my whole generation, the only ninja with a sibling was Sasuke. That didn't exactly turn out well. And that's saying nothing of all the members of the older generation that are childless—Kakashi, Guy, Iruka, just to name a few." He shrugged. "I couldn't help but notice, and that started me thinking."

"Go on."

"Well, most active-duty shinobi are of child-bearing age. When we have casualties, a lot of the time it means we lose out on children we would have later. That's something we always have to manage, and by and large it's not that bad, but casualties lately have been really severe."

"Operation: Destroy Konoha, you mean."

"Yeah. We lost half our shinobi there, mostly chunin and up. That means the generation we'd expect to start getting, say, eight years from now, is going to be really limited."

Shikamaru frowned slightly. "My master told me to protect the next generation. The king, he said, is the youth of Konoha that will grow into tomorrow's shinobi. But unless we change our ways, that generation will be smaller than this one—and the generation after that smaller still. Because as it is, we can barely make up for our routine operational losses. There's another ninja war on the horizon. I think we can reasonably expect to lose a lot of shinobi to that one. It might be enough to put us into a death spiral. In fact, if Nagano Pain hadn't performed that little resurrection trick, his attack probably would have been the tipping point."

Tsunade's belly ached. A terrible feeling of inadequacy tore at her. Long ago she had decided never to bear children, and by now she was no longer capable of it. It was something she'd wrestled with for years, and some amount of regret was inevitable. That regret was joined by new feelings—feelings of betrayal, of inadequacy, of dereliction. The village needed her to help it survive, and she'd squandered her precious gifts to serve her own personal desires. That was exactly the person she'd been, wasn't it?

She shook her head. "But you can recruit ninja from the non-ninja population," she said. "People became ninja, once upon a time. Yes, it's preferable to have the children of ninja as our primary source of ninja. But it's not required."

"Granted," Shikamaru said. "There's no genetic requirement to become a ninja… except when there is."

Tsunade's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?"

"Kekkei genkai."

Of course. The traits carried only by blood. Ninjitsu that couldn't be taught, only imperfectly imitated; could not be possessed, only incompletely stolen…

"Unless Sasuke somehow starts producing children—and at this point, given how many people want him dead, that seems unlikely—the sharingan is lost. Kakashi has the eye, but he can't pass it on, he doesn't have the blood. When Sasuke dies, his kekkei genkai will fade into history. The byakugan is just as vulnerable—the fate of the entire clan now revolves around two children, Hinata and Neji. If either of them dies, we go from two branches of the clan to one. How many more generations can we support at that rate? Not many, given our losses."

Tsunade shook her head. "Even if we lose kekkei genkai, new jutsu are under development all the time," she said. "It's unfortunate, but it's something we can overcome."

"Those are almost as vulnerable," Shikamaru said. "Shadow manipulation jutsu are unique to my clan. If I die, maybe my father can teach another family's child to use the jutsu… or maybe not. Maybe the technique dies with me. It's happened before. How many jutsu were lost when Uzushio Village was destroyed? We may never know."

Tsunade's hands clenched the arms of her chair ever more tightly. It wasn't as if Shikamaru was saying anything she hadn't already read. It was entirely different hearing it read aloud. A death sentence seems inert on paper, but very real when spoken…

"I remember," he said in a more conversational tone of voice, "when Orochimaru's Sound Ninja attacked. A few of them had unique jutsu, sure. Most of them? Most just had your basic taijutsu and shuriken jutsu. I remember thinking they were so… generic. It worked alright because of surprise and numbers and their alliance with Sand, though our unique jutsu gave us the edge we needed to turn the tide. Still, it was a portent. We could be headed there, you know. We could have been seeing the future when that happened."

Tsunade exhaled deeply. "A world where, to survive, the ninja villages have to recruit from non-ninja populations. The children aren't exposed to ninjutsu until later in life, slowing the learning process and setting a harsher ceiling on their potential. They lack unique jutsu and the pool of known jutsu steadily diminishes."

"Kekkei genkai gradually disappear, through attrition. Eventually, shinobi blood gets so thin that ordinary people with ordinary weapons could hold their own against them… and there are far more of them than us."

"So the ninja become extinct," Tsunade concluded softly. "They go out with a whimper. It's the natural trajectory, isn't it? They say that the First Hokage and Uchiha Madara were capable of extraordinary things—storybook feats. If even a fraction of it is true, then they were far beyond what we could do these days. We have gotten weaker, haven't we? One generation at a time…"

She shook her head. "No. I will not passively accept this fate. That was one glaring weakness in this otherwise comprehensive report. What do you propose we do, exactly?"

Shikamaru suddenly looked uncomfortable. "Well, we can't exactly tell people to have more children. I mean, we can pursue some policies in that direction, like moving of-age kunoichi off the front lines when we can afford to..." It seemed as if an idea suddenly came to him. "Now that I think about it, there might be a couple other things."

Tsunade's eyes narrowed. "Like what?"

"Well…"

Shikamaru re-entered the darkened room. A voice greeted him. "What did she say?"

Shikamaru shut the door. And locked it. And then used shadows to seal the doorframe. Only once that was done did he turn to reply. "She said… she said that we need to do what we can to maintain ninja populations and ninja bloodlines."

The other voice waited.

"So I pointed out that other villages were probably looking at the same problems that we were. Looking at it another way, those other villages probably also want to try and fix the problem. But it will only work if people from both sides are able to understand the problem and agree on a solution."

"So what you're saying is…"

Shikamaru smiled. "Checkmate."

The other person in the room advanced on him, then, quickly and surely. He settled back defensively, even though he knew the other's intentions. She always was direct, wasn't she? The most straightforward approach was always the one she'd favor.

And then all thought ceased. Temari hit him with a kiss so fervent and passionate that all other thoughts were swept from his mind.

Ah, diplomacy.

Author's note: happy ending aside, the characters of Naruto have family patterns relatively close to those of modern Japan- and even with modern Japan's extremely low mortality rate, Japan's population is shrinking. It doesn't seem to have occurred to Masashi-san that attrition is real.

"Naruto" is copyright one or more of the following: Viz, Shounen Jump, Masashi Kishimoto.