Continuation of Drabble 11. Seperate Poisons.

-

"Sakura, how long has it been since you've slept?"

This sentence broke a silence of many hours, but the pink-haired woman merely shrugged. "Oh, you know what they say," she said, gray smoke rising from her lips like a desert cobra. "I can sleep when I die."

Tsunade said nothing; in her mind she imagined Sakura as a photo whose edges had gone gray and were furling in. She thought of her apprentice as ashes; the product of a beautiful fire.

"What's the average age limit for ANBU, anyway?" Sakura continued. "Thirty? Thirty before they just get tired, and slip up? I'm not so far away. Compounded with the strain of constant healing on my body–"

"Stop it, Sakura," Tsunade snapped.

The Hokage's apprentice cast a knowledgeable smile over her shoulder. "A sharp tone, coming from a woman who hasn't healed her own liver in over five years."

She got her reaction – a sudden, vicious narrowing of Tsunade's eyes; and then, minutes later, there was a small rustling as the Hokage rifled through in a drawer and finally pulled out a scroll. Sakura watched her, a hint of a smirk on her face that was somehow so much smugger than anything that Uchiha brat had ever been able to pull off.

"Another mission?"

It always came down to this. Eventually Tsunade would get annoyed with her – always hanging around the office, cynical green eyes watching, judging, a thin plume of smoke snaking from her lips – and Sakura would be sent out of the village. Short missions, for Tsunade was wise enough to know she would begin to miss her apprentice, but difficult ones. A-rank, S-rank, who knew. Sakura could handle them. The suicide missions. Voluntary participation highly preferable. They both knew that if Tsunade didn't send her on them, she would volunteer anyway.

Would there ever be a mission from which she wouldn't return? No; Tsunade had convinced herself that there would not. Honestly, the jutsu-lovely, pseudo-young woman didn't know what was worse. The darkly watchful green eyes and the bloody, beaten body of her apprentice upon her return were annoying. Sakura never had the decency to look strong when she was not, or at all emotional, when clearly, clearly she was not.

Sometimes she thought Sakura spent so much time in her office out of spite. Surely she knew she caused her master pain; that her master could see failure clearly written in the strong line of her jaw, and her forest-filled eyes. They were animal eyes, Tsunade felt, belonging to a great beast of the forest. They were shinobi eyes. But they were not the eyes of the young girl who had so determinedly demanded training from the fifth Hokage, which was, Tsunade knew, her biggest failure.

Growth, she had expected. Change was too hard.

Sakura spent so much time in her mentor's office for the same reason Tsunade let her. This process of dying – fading, really – was too hard to weather alone. And the cost of poison – to speed the process – was too high and steeped in blood.

Sakura sauntered forward to take the mission scroll from Tsunade's hands, and the older woman almost snatched it back on an impulse, but the tilt to Sakura's mouth was a degree too arrogant and the scroll exchanged hands. To Tsunade it was a moment in slow-motion, as if some higher power was book-marking it for her, so she could know exactly what to point to when everything came crashing down.

"Crack a window before you leave," Tsunade directed irritably, feeling naked and obvious; like a genin among jounin, every movement telling too much.

Sakura opened one all the way, dimpled mysteriously, and disappeared out of it.

Tsunade sighed, and put her sake away. It was bad luck to drink alone.

Sakura, how long has it been since you've slept?

Really, Tsunade had just wanted to know if anyone else kept count. She pulled a kunai out of her pristine Hokage's robe and carved another notch in the tidy line underneath her grandfather's desk.

What had Sakura said? Thirty, before they just "got tired"? Tsunade felt impossibly old and empty. She pulled out a list of names, Naruto's on the top: candidates. Replacements. This was an important decision for the future of the village.

She smoothed out the scroll and reached for her sake.