CHAPTER 7

"So, who's got the shift to watch Sasuke tonight?" Kakashi casually asked Tsunade.

"That's what you interrupted my work for?" Tsunade responded irritably. She was buried in paperwork, and then this silver-haired child of a man – for she would never really stop thinking of him as the bratty kid he once was, some twenty-odd years ago – had interrupted her flow of work for this. "If you're going to volunteer for the night shift again, go hassle whatever ANBU is assigned to him tonight and stop annoying me." She was almost growling. It had been a long day for her.

Sasuke's return was giving her a headache. Just why the Uchiha boy picked the worst time to be back, she didn't know. The post-war paperwork was almost as bad as the pre-war paperwork, and she had been so sure that nothing could be as bad as the pre-war paperwork had been. The fact that the Kages of every major shinobi village were constantly writing her about what they thought Sasuke's punishment should be didn't help it, of course.

What is it with these damn Sharingan users, Tsunade wondered to herself unamusedly. Absolute pains in the asses, all of them. She looked up once again at one of the Sharingan users in the flesh in front of her desk. "I don't see you leaving, Kakashi."

"Was there even an ANBU assigned to him this morning and afternoon?"

Why was he being so persistent? And annoying? So persistently annoying, even more so than usual?

"Of course there was," Tsunade was actually growling at the jonin in front her her now. "I just read the report on the boy from the ANBU that watched him today – he was just sleeping all morning." She narrowed her eyes. "What the hell is this about, Kakashi? I really doubt you're volunteering to take a shift right now. I thought hell would freeze over last night when you volunteered, and twice in a row just isn't normal for you." Lazy bastard, she silently added.

"Tsunade-sama," Kakashi said quietly. "I left Sasuke during my watch last night."

There was a moment of silence in the room while Tsunade just stared at the silver-haired shinobi.

"What did you just say?" She finally got out the words.

"I told Sasuke that he could leave if he wanted to. Then I left him."

Tsunade could have punched him with a full-on, chakra-enhanced fist right then. She really could have.

"What the HELL is wrong with you, Hatake?!" Tsunade pushed aside all her paperwork from her desk in anger, causing papers to fly around everywhere around her as she fumed. "Do you have ANY idea how much shit Konoha would be in if we lost him right now?!"

Kakashi did, in fact, know just how much "shit" his village would be in, had Sasuke chosen to leave. He also knew that he wouldn't have been able to dodge punishment in that case – that he could have even maybe lost his leaf-engraved forehead protector over it.

"Hokage-sama," Kakashi looked into her brown eyes. "He stayed."

This temporarily stopped Tsunade's anger. He stayed - the words echoed in her head.

She had been following Sasuke's health reports thoroughly. She, therefore, knew that, as of yesterday, Sasuke was out of the danger zone as far as his body was concerned. He wouldn't be hopping around wielding five Chidori's in a row or anything any time soon, but Tsunade knew that, should he have wished, he could have left last night, especially if Kakashi had left that window open.

But – he had stayed.

Why?

Kakashi watched the Godaime closely as her facial expression went from that of anger, confusion, then, finally, clarity. When she finally spoke again, her words rang through the room with authority of a true Hokage.

"Get the idiot and the Uchiha in here. Now."

Sasuke had never been face-to-face with the Godaime of Konoha before – at least, not while he was fully conscious, as the first and last time he had been in her direct presence was when he had been brought to the hospital after his fight with Naruto.

His impression of Tsunade as he stood in her office was, simply put, that she just didn't like him. Every word and look directed at him spit out venom, whether it be on purpose or not. Sasuke briefly wondered what he had done to offend her so.

Then he remembered the times he had almost killed each of the members of Team 7 – including Sakura, who had turned out to be Tsunade's personal apprentice.

He stared vacantly ("insolently" was the word Tsunade would have used) the Hokage, wondering why he was brought here from the hospital.

Especially with the dobe.

"Tsunade-baachan, what did you want?" Naruto asked – rather idiotically, Kakashi thought. The jonin sighed.

Some things never changed.

"Don't call me that, you brat," Tsunade glared at the blonde idiot. "And wait to be spoken to!" She then turned her glare onto the onyx eyes of the Uchiha. "You."

Could people actually spit words out literally? Sasuke thought – rather darkly – that Tsunade has managed it pretty well.

"What do you want out of this?" She demanded.

Sasuke had no idea what she was talking about. So he just kept on looking at her – which further aggravated the brown-eyed woman.

"Don't just look at me, boy! Kami, I thought you were supposed to be smart. You came back." She paused to glare at Kakashi for a moment before glaring back at Sasuke. "We healed you enough that you could leave if you wanted to – maybe even if we hadn't given you a way out – shut it, Naruto, not now." She held up a hand to the confused-looking blonde, who had opened his mouth to ask what she was talking about. He clearly had no idea that Sasuke had been given a choice to leave by Kakashi. As angry as Tsunade had been, she decided that she would keep Kakashi's name out of the conversation. "So level with me here – what is it that you want? One day, you're jumping around all over the continent screaming your hatred for Konoha, and the next, you're here and all docile about it."

Sasuke's eyes were unreadable. "I don't want anything."

"That's exactly the shitty response that I didn't want." Tsunade retorted, throwing her hands up in the air angrily.

The blonde-haired woman suddenly got very quiet, and dropped her angry hand gestures. When she opened her mouth again to speak, it was with an air that let Sasuke see, for the first time, that she really was an old woman beneath all the reverse-aging jutsu. She was – tired.

"Uchiha, I don't know what the hell happened with you and Naruto that day when you both came to the village's gate half-dead, and I don't really want to hear an explanation, either." She knew she wouldn't understand it. It was between Naruto and Sasuke, whatever the hell it was. Just as it had been between Jiraiya and Orochimaru. The difference was the Naruto genuinely cared for Sasuke just as the raven-haired boy had been his brother.

Jiraiya had never cared for Orochimaru like that. He couldn't, because, deep down, he had known that there was no pulling Orochimaru out of his evil darkness. Orochimaru had relished in his perverseness – he actually attained joy from torturing and killing others.

Of all of the reports Tsunade had read on Sasuke, she had never come across one that said that Sasuke had ever tortured or even killed any civilian.

Shaking herself out of her thoughts, Tsunade continued speaking to Sasuke. "The other Kages of other villages are furious that you're here and still alive. They're furious that we healed your injuries and that you're not imprisoned, if not executed. If you want to stay here, you'll have to spend the rest of your life trying to appease those old men and not making Konoha a target by extension. You'll have to spend months, no, years, ingratiating yourself back into this village. You'll be expected to perform missions without pay for a long, long time, and you'll always be watched, even if you don't know it."

Tsunade stopped and observed that Naruto had become increasingly red in the face from being restrained from speaking by Kakashi's firm hand over his mouth. She could see that Naruto hated that she was speaking to Sasuke like this. She was treating him like a criminal, and in Naruto's eyes, Sasuke was still a shinobi ninja who had just fallen off the tracks – but to the blonde boy, Sasuke was still one of them, regardless of his mistakes.

"…But." Tsunade started once more. "If you choose to stay – if you choose to stop running… You'll have a Hokage that will shut the other Kages up for you. You'll have a host of the people with whom you've graduated the Academy that won't begrudge you of their comradeship. You'll Sakura, who has become one of the most influential shinobi of this village, and this lazy bastard" – she pointed at Kakashi – "on your side, not to mention this absolute idiot," she pointed at Naruto. "If you stay, you will have to pay for the past seven years that you were gone without permission. But if you stay, everything that you've built then broken down when you were twelve can be built again. The choice is yours."

When Tsunade finished speaking, silence filled the room. Naruto had even stopped struggling against Kakashi, and had actually become quiet.

All eyes were on Sasuke, but Sasuke's eyes weren't looking back at any of them. Instead, he had dropped his gaze to the floor.

No one spoke. No one moved.

After what seemed like forever, Sasuke finally spoke.

"I came to stay."

A/N: I'm sorry I haven't updated the story since (I think) last week – I promise I will start updating almost every day again! And I promise more Sasuke and Sakura interaction in the next chapter!