Chapter 2 : Cold

"You look like death." Tsunade said without looking up from her papers. When she heard a snickering from the direction of her doorway she added, "–that's not a compliment."

The small female shinobi leaning against the wall gave a simple nod in apology, but said nothing else in her defense. The aging village leader sighed inaudibly, tsking herself for entertaining the hope she would ever be able to illicit more than the usual listlessness from the young solider silently warming the wall by her office door.

"Take off your mask, shinobi, there's no enemies here." Tsunade muttered coolly from beneath her graying golden hair, agitated that she would even have to mention such a thing to a former pupil. Their village was hidden away among the densest, darkest forests in the world, which was how it got it's name. Konoha, Village Hidden in the Leaves. Few enemies could find them the leafy haven without help, and if they got that far, there were the village shinobi to contend with.

And the shinobi are fiercely protective of what is theirs…Tsunade smiled to herself as she waited expectantly for the female shinobi before her to comply.

Instead of immediately obeying though, the black and grey clad shinobi cocked her head to the side, as though judging the seriousness of her Village Leader's request. Tsunade paused in her work and just stared, stern and cool at the two holes in the mask where the girl's eyes were hiding among the shadows.

"I'm not kidding, ninnin…" Tsunade hadn't seen the girl in several months, and it pained her to realize that she had almost forgotten what this particular solider looked like without their armor.

There are people under there…Tsunade reminded herself fiercely…normal, average human beings…well, normal and average when they're not armed…

There were two soft clicks, and the pale porcelain mask, painted to look like a falcon head, was dropped, swinging loose around the girl's neck. Tsunade exhaled, reading the look on her former pupil's face all too well. The young woman was different than she remembered–prematurely aged by the effects of war, with a cold hollow look to her soft sage colored eyes, and the odd air of repose offsetting her long lost tempestuous attitudes.

Not much tempest left now…Tsunade noted, slightly irritated with herself for the thought. Sakura's formerly delicate features were marred with scars and scrapes; small injuries that Tsunade knew were leftover signs of much larger ones that Sakura had never let her heal. Her petal pink hair had darkened drastically over the years, for reasons that the girl would still not reveal to her former sensei, and it was now a startling pink wine color, dark and rich, strange, exotic, and apparently entirely natural. Tsunade figured that it was just the way it was with the Haruno clan, something in their gene pool that made them go darker instead of gray or white with age and stress.

And there's been plenty of that…Sakura's charka, her life force, was barely a blip in the corner of Tsunade's senses, meaning that she had already probably healed a great deal of the damage before she arrived, just to avoid being sent to the hospital. The girl was probably masking her remaining reserves by habit, so as not to frighten anyone with the amounts she managed to store due to the tightly sealed reserves she maintained with the aid of several charka seals tattooed on her torso. Of course, the seals weren't just for storing charka, but only Tsunade, and her assistant Shizune knew that.

You reduced her to this, wore her down to a thread with some stupid, relentless crusade for peace…Tsunade chided herself…What you really should have been trying to protect was her.

The dark tattoo visible on the young nin's right arm labeled her as Anbu, one of the Leader's few, but talented personal soldiers. A smaller mark on her forearm designated her as an "elite", but was often kept under athletic wraps as the title brought with it connotations of dark intelligence, icy resolve, and an unnerving lack of hesitation to do literally anything to see their orders thru to the vile, bitter end.

Desperate times called for desperate measures.

Sakura, like many of the other children of her generation, had been forced into adult hood via the violence and loss of her trade, which sadly, had become a necessity at present. The village survived off of the money they made from renting out their soldiers to those who could afford their highly skilled services. Most of the requests they received were for guards or escorting village dignitaries to and from some of the more politically dissident areas outside their thick, sturdy walls.

Desperate times…Tsunade told herself, reiterating the age-old mantra that the good of one had to be sacrificed for the good of many. But she could feel the shame building up in her gut again. Though she would never say it out loud, she felt she'd failed as a leader. The village had never seen more war and loss than under her leadership, and each generation that followed seemed to be dwindling down to almost nothing.

Looking up at Sakura, Tsunade felt the shame of her failure as a teacher, too. She'd trained her soldiers to move mountains only to turn around and ask them to immediately knock them down. The contradiction made her head spin, and she wasn't even drinking.

"You've forgotten your report." Tsunade said tersely, pretending to shuffle around some useless papers on her desk as she tried to avoid the young soldier's analytical gaze. The young girl had become almost as bad as General Ibiki, Head of Interrogation, in the way that she studied people.

Tsunade could just about feel Sakura breaking her down piece by jagged psyche piece, and sorting the information in her head. Tsunade herself remembered Ibiki's observation training. There were things to always look out for, unconscious actions that could tell you a person's entire life story in an instant: physical ticks, whether they look at the floor or at people when they're walking, their body language when approached by a stranger, et cetera. Tsunade could see all this and more going on behind the shinobi's pale green eyes. The young woman's mind truly was fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God.

Or, the image of that other guy…Tsunade tried in vain to hide the slight upward quirk of her lips. Leaders did not smile, she reminded herself coarsely. And they especially didn't laugh when their people were in emotional turmoil, economic ruin, and physical decay.

"Apologies, your Ladyship. The report was delivered to General Ibiki in accordance with your instructions prior to mission's start." The reply was brief, monotone, and direct. And if that wasn't the most professional 'F.U.' Tsunade had ever heard, then she didn't know what was.

"I don't care what I said before the mission," Tsunade snapped, rubbing her eyes in exhaustion.

"I will request the report back from the General's office, immediately," Sakura pushed off the wall ready to leave, but Tsunade held up a hand to stop her.

"No," She interrupted, "It's fine. I'll get a copy later from one of the intelligence officers."

The leader's sudden overreaction seemed to surprise the shinobi, at least as much as a shinobi could be surprised, and the young woman stood, frozen mid-step halfway to the door. To Tsunade, it looked like the girl wanted to make a run for it.

Kids these days…Tsunade's fingers tabbed through a thick manila file on the desktop, looking for something useful to take her mind off of the much changed Sakura presently trying to escape from her office.

Tsunade had seen little of Sakura Haruno in the past year. The young woman had gone from one mission to another, sometimes without ever setting foot back in the village, allowing herself to be deployed and redeployed without leave. Strategists like Shikaku Nara, thought it rather pleasant to have a robot-type solider in the ranks, someone who would do what they were asked–no questions asked.

Tsunade knew better though. Running could only be sustained for so long, this she'd learned from experience. No one could outmaneuver their pain forever.

"I'm tired of chasing you," Tsunade said wearily, "I don't know how to help you. I want to, I just don't know how…"

The young woman was silent, but Tsunade could see rather than hear her breathing quicken.

She must be nearly twenty-two now, Tsunade did the math quietly in her head. The young woman was so far lost from her own sense of childhood that Tsunade had a hard time remembering how or who Sakura had truly been before. Had it really been seven years? It was true that the reconstruction of the village had taken some time (more of a work in progress, really), but how had a near decade passed without the Leader realizing it? How did her shinobi grow from bright young, hopeful little cadets to battle-worn warriors, bringing home spoils and trophies from a war they didn't even start?

"I'm getting too old for this," Tsunade grumbled, waving her hand at the door, "All I ask is that you at least consider cutting down the field work. It's not healthy. You need to rest. And if you won't take time, I'll make you." Screw thinly veiled threats, Tsunade wanted blatantly obvious.

The shinobi merely replied with a slight bob of her head and returned to leaning back against the wall by the doorway like she had no where in particular to be. Sakura's father had been the exact same way. Strong, brief, efficient...

Absolutely infuriating…Tsunade kneaded the back of her neck with a pale, rough, wrinkled hand. She'd given away too much charka. One event, one act of terrorism that had happened almost a decade prior and she was still tired. They had been lost, political fanatics with utopian delusions they sought to bring about through destruction. Their leaders name, ironically, had been Pein. A bitter coincidence if ever she'd heard one.

When she had given away all that energy, that life force to sustain those who were wavering on the edge, she had no idea how old she would get, or how quickly. Granted, Tsunade knew she should probably be dead, but she still had a few tricks stashed up those long sleeves of hers. Looking at Sakura's stiff and stony posture, Tsunade knew she wasn't alone in that.

"Will that be all, your Ladyship?" Sakura's voice was ragged and soft, yet somehow still managed to retain some sort of clarity in the tone despite her obvious discomfort of being without her mask. Tsunade could see it on her face. She felt exposed without something to hide behind.

"Yes, that's all. For now," Tsunade warned, turning away from the young woman's burning glare. Sakura didn't like being watched, likely part of the reason she never worked in teams by choice anymore. Trying to hide as she did, it was almost like the Sakura was begging for the opportunity for Tsunade to look the other way, to forget what she once was and accept that whatever she had been was dead and buried alongside most of her friends.

You're not dead yet…Tsunade sunk back into her chair, tired from the short, trying debriefing, and irritated at her own inability to block it's effect on her. She had hoped for so long that all she would have to do to bring Sakura back would be to talk to her, a few simple words and the deep green eyes she had once thought so bright would burst to life again.

But they hadn't.

There in the silence and solitude of her office, that Tsunade broke. Tears she had long been saving rolled out and down onto the floor like a great flood, dripping onto the sleeves and soaking the front of her robes.

The cost that she, Sakura, and the rest of the shinobi had paid for the little precious peace they had attained for the moment just didn't seem fair. It was an unbalanced equation, one in which more was given than was ever received.

Too much…the withering Leader thought…far, far too much.