I don't own Naruto, but it means a lot to me.


Doctors always make for bad patients.

There's a slight rain, more a mist than a downpour, that washes over the courtyard. The water sticks to the stone, leaving tiny bubbles of moisture that ripple and slide down its edges.

Coming to the stone was like stepping into a time machine. The silence of the garden let a person's memories echo through their mind. Words and thoughts and memories twist and turn and wring you dry.

Take your medicine, sensei. You need to rest, sensei.

It's me, sensei. Sakura. Your student. You remember me, right? Sakura.

Her cheeks are wet again. It's probably the rain.

It was selfish, really, for her to get this upset. Senju Tsunade had lived a life even more extraordinary than history books could tell. The fifth Hokage was more fable than person amongst the people of Konoha, if not the shinobi nations as a whole. Her own life had cemented her achievements, but the Nanadaime's near beatification of his 'Granny' made her footprint larger than life.

Maybe that had been the problem, all along. When you're that high, falling was so much worse.

It had taken years, but old age had finally come to claim the aging Godaime. Like life's vengeance for being denied its normal processes for so long. Tsunade was fit as an ox midway into her eighties, and damn proud of the fact. Still out and about, touring the town and teaching impromptu lessons at the hospital - to the average citizen, it seemed as though Senju Tsunade would live forever.

Just after her eighty-seventh birthday, however, the signs started.

"Hello?"

The pinkette blinked, startled from her concentration as the small voice peeped through her doorway. With little delay, a blond woman peeked her head inside the doorway and looked around.

"Tsunade-sama!" Sakura exclaimed, rushing from her desk and striding over to the woman. As the pinkette approached, Tsunade greeted her with a warm, grandmotherly smile. Old-Tsunade was a far cry less abrasiveness than her stressed, overworked, and often over-served younger self.

"Hello!" Tsunade greeted. "I'm here for my yearly checkup, of course!" the old woman beamed before adding a coy wink. "And undoubtedly to teach my star pupil a thing or two."

Sakura smiled and returned the comment with a wink of her own. "As you always do, Tsunade-sama." she said, ushering the woman into her office and into the seat.

"I'm just wrapping up a few, quick forms, sensei." the pinkette apologized as she scrambled to unbury the pile of papers across her desk. "I'll be with you in one second!"

"You have a lovely view from your office." the old woman said, peering behind her desk and out to the sprawling park district below. Sakura didn't look up from her papers, but gave a light chuckle in reply.

"One of the terms with Naruto, that idiot, was I that I would get first dibs at an office."

"Ah, Naruto." she heard the woman sigh. "He's made such a fine Hokage."

"Yeah." Sakura nodded, giving a sigh of her own in response. "And somehow we're the idiots for ever doubting him."

For a long time, the room was silent save for the furious sound of scribbling as Sakura tried to finish her work.

"Excuse me, miss."

Sakura's hand froze. A tremor exploded in her chest.

"Tsu-" she whispered, finding her voice cracked and fading. "Sensei?"

Tsunade didn't answer. The smile on the woman's face never faltered, but her eyes seemed to glaze.

"I'm looking for my pupil, Haruno Sakura." she said. Sakura could feel something in her chest twist, and it was like her insides were shredding.

"Do you know where I can find her?"*

The body could be healed, could be lied to. Cells told to duplicate, bones to mend long after the natural course for such things. A woman well into her eighties didn't look a day over fifty-five, and the miracle of chakra healing spirals ever onward.

The mind, however, was another story.

In all Sakura's years as a student of medicine, they had learned about as much about healing the mind as they had in the three hundred years before that. That is to say, nothing. It's weeks before Tsunade's test come back to confirm her concerns, but the symptoms paint the picture long before the science connects the dots.

The Godaime Hokage was losing herself, and the rest of the world was going to lose her, too.

Naruto takes it rough, because of course he had. If she and Naruto were brother and sister, Tsunade was the mother they shared. He always was a Momma's boy. The first time she tells him that the signs are there, that they are losing her, he crashes out a eleventh story window and activates nine tails of crimson, demonic chakra to get to her side.

Baa-chan, he screams as he careens through the city, a rocket of yellow and panic. Glass breaks from the pressure his chakra emits as he tears across town. Baa-chan!

She remembers him when he arrives, thank the gods. As much as it hurt to be the first forgotten, Sakura doesn't think she is strong enough to bear Tsunade not recognizing both of them. Not all at once. If it had to be either of them, it's easier to let him down last.

But that victory is short lived. Forgetting faces turns into forgetting places, and they move Tsunade into a supported care home before her 90th birthday. The last time she remembers Naruto's name, the candles are smoldering on her 92nd cake. The fifth Hokage passes a month later.

There was mourning, of course. Burying Tsunade was like burying her own mother - like digging a hole in the ground a throwing a part of herself down in it. The fanfare of burying a state politician of Senju Tsunade's status had only compounded the hurt. Press coverage swarmed the capital, and it took Gaara creating a six-block wall of sand for the noise to allow a silent memorial.

The part that eats her, however, isn't the sorrow. Through all the pain and the anguish, she was never fully able to quash the wave of relief that Tsunade's passing brought her - brought them all. The thought made her sick, but the feeling was there. The day after the funeral, it was as if a weight had dissolved, and she hadn't even realized she'd been drowning. When she saw Shizune and Naruto's the next day, their eyes were still wet with tears, but their shoulders looked lighter, too.

Having to watch her surrogate mother waste away over years took its toll. Sakura had never appreciated the grace and dignity of a quick death, more.

By the time she leaves the shrine, the morning sun sweeps hot across her face. Her hand lingers on the memorial stone, and its dry and warming under the golden glow. The morning mist is long gone, and she can hear the forest clatter in delight.

She doesn't say goodbye because she'll be back tomorrow. At least her cheeks aren't wet, anymore.


This one was hard to write.

- Free Drinks