A Senju Woman Shouldn't Be This Pathetic

"What are you doing in a place like this instead of sleeping in the middle of the night?"

Tsunade's voice was terribly slurred, her final syllables drawn out long, like a piece of chewed-up gum. She raised her head and used the faint moonlight leaking through the clouds to size up the uninvited visitor before her.

A thin boy. Messy black hair hung over his forehead, and his right eye was black as ink. His clothes had been washed pale, his shoes badly worn. There was no ninja tool pouch at his waist, no chakra fluctuations from his body—at least, none within the range she could still sense while this drunk.

An Uchiha collar, the red-and-white fan crest.

A child.

Tsunade looked down at the right hand she had just used to release killing intent and suddenly felt rather stupid. Pulling a blade on a twelve-year-old brat—if people heard Hashirama Senju's granddaughter had done something like that, half the shinobi world would laugh their teeth out.

She clicked her tongue, the taut muscles throughout her body loosening as she slumped back against the tree roots, like spilled liquor.

"What are you still standing there for? Get lost once you've had your fill of staring."

Yan did not get lost.

He squatted down three meters away from Tsunade, his back against another tree. That distance—close enough to speak, far enough not to pose a threat.

Tsunade could not be bothered with him. She fumbled around on the ground for the only bottle that was not empty yet, pulled out the cork, and took a huge gulp. Liquor ran down from the corner of her mouth, but she did not wipe it away. She let out a loud belch, then cast Yan a glance that held thirty percent drunkenness and seventy percent impatience.

"Uchiha brat, are you trying to figure out how to glare people to death with that signature Sharingan of yours? Or did you get lost and can't find your way home?"

"My Sharingan hasn't awakened yet." Yan's expression remained blank.

"Hasn't awakened?" Tsunade raised a brow. "Then why did you come out here? To admire the moon?"

"To train."

"You came all the way to the Forest of Death to train? Are you tired of living, or—"

"Aren't you doing the same thing?" Yan cut her off. "One of the Sannin, coming to the Forest of Death in the middle of the night to drown herself in cheap shochu. Is your liver just too healthy?"

Tsunade's mouth opened.

"...You know me?"

"Our teacher told us about you. One of Konoha's Sannin—a pretty blonde big sister with a diamond-shaped mark on her forehead." Yan's tone was as flat as if he were reciting a textbook. "She can shatter a mountain with one punch."

Tsunade did not know how to react to being called "pretty big sister." She glared at Yan for two seconds, then let out a snort.

"Your teacher's pretty honest."

Silence hung for several seconds.

The chirping of insects filled the gap.

Yan stared for a while at the necklace crumpled into a ball on the ground. The green gemstone refracted a faint light beneath the moon. The First Hokage's necklace—something he had seen countless times in manga in his past life.

He looked away.

"Big sister, you look unhappy. Let me tell you a joke."

Tsunade drank without saying a word. She tacitly agreed.

"The Senju clan has vigorous life force, while the Uchiha clan has excellent eyesight." Yan spoke as though reading a weather forecast. "Yet when war breaks out, the Senju are always up front taking the blows, while the Uchiha are always in the back awakening their eyes and watching. Generation after generation. In the end, the ones who live long all go crazy."

He paused.

"Like you."

The air went still for two seconds.

"Pfft—!"

Tsunade sprayed out the liquor in her mouth.

The alcohol arced through the moonlight and splashed all over the ground. She coughed several times, one hand pounding her chest while the other pointed at Yan. Her expression kept swinging between wanting to laugh and wanting to beat him up.

"You... cough, cough... what the hell are you talking about, you little bastard?!"

"The truth."

"Who's crazy?! Who are you calling crazy?!"

"If you aren't crazy, then what do you call a Sannin-level ninja curling up under a tree in the middle of the night with empty bottles? Wellness training?"

Tsunade's fists clenched and loosened, then loosened and clenched again. In the end, she did not hit him—not because she did not want to, but because she was laughing too hard to muster the strength. Her rough, liquor-scented laughter carried far into the night, startling two unknown birds from the trees.

After laughing, she rubbed at the corners of her eyes and let out a long breath.

For some reason, the suffocating heaviness pressing against her chest had been pried loose at one corner by this brat's vicious tongue.

"You've got guts." Tsunade pointed the bottle at him. "Do you know what happened to the last person who spoke to me like that?"

"Hospitalized?"

"For three months. Six broken ribs."

"Then I'm lucky. You're drunk right now, so your aim's off."

"...Do you believe I can still punch you into the ground even when I'm drunk?"

"I do. But you won't."

"Oh?"

"If you wanted to hit someone, you would've done it already." Yan's voice softened slightly. "You just... don't want anyone to see you like this."

Tsunade's smile vanished.

Not because she was angry. He had simply stabbed a place she did not want anyone touching with a single sentence.

She lowered her head and stared at the empty bottle in her hand. A blurry face reflected off its surface—disheveled blonde hair, reddened eyes, cracked lips.

The distance between that face and the words "Legendary Sannin" was probably as vast as the entire shinobi world.

"Seriously, kid." Tsunade's voice suddenly lost its earlier drunken vigor, as though it had been sanded down. "Why did you leave home in the middle of the night and come to a place like this?"

Yan stood.

He did not answer her question. Instead, he walked a few steps away, crouched down, and picked up a pile of dry branches from the ground.

Tsunade watched as he arranged the branches into a fairly decent stack, then—

A faint dark-red glow surfaced at the tip of his right index finger.

Only at his fingertip. Less than a centimeter.

Yet the temperature was absurdly high. The dry branches ignited the instant they made contact. Flames flared up, orange-red light illuminating both of them.

Tsunade narrowed her eyes.

That was not Fire Release.

No matter how drunk she was, she still had enough judgment for that. Fire Release produced chakra fluctuations when lighting a fire, but that just now—was so clean it did not resemble ninjutsu at all. It was more like his finger itself was generating heat.

But she did not press him.

A twelve-year-old child had lit a fire in front of her. Nothing worth making a fuss over.

At least, that was what she chose to tell herself.

Yan sat down across from the fire. Firelight reflected on his face, making those black eyes gleam.

"Because I'm too weak." He spoke with the same calmness one might use to discuss something unrelated to oneself. "So weak that I could be swallowed by the village's undercurrents at any moment. My parents are dead, no one in the clan cares about me, and people in the village are watching me. I come in last in the practical classes at the Academy every year."

He poked at the dry branches in the fire. Sparks crackled and scattered.

"So I came here to train. No one sees me at night. During the day, I keep pretending to be useless at school."

The hand holding Tsunade's bottle froze.

"Pretending?"

"Pretending," Yan said. "Being weak isn't an excuse, but revealing your trump cards before you have the strength is suicide. I need to become strong enough before I show them."

"Strong enough—and then what?"

"Then I'll protect the moments that make me feel like living in this world still has some meaning. Protect the people I cherish."

The campfire light danced over his face.

"An idiot who brings me food every day. An omelet that's salty as hell. The sunset on the way home from school."

He looked up.

"And—set right the injustices of this world."

Tsunade did not move.

The campfire crackled.

When the words "protect the people I cherish, set right injustice" landed in her ears, something in her mind was struck hard.

Nawaki's face.

"I'm going to become Hokage and protect everyone!"

Dan's face.

"This world should be covered in peace, not war."

Two young faces.

One had died on the battlefield, a shuriken piercing his chest, still clutching the necklace she had given him when he died. The other had died before her eyes, blood pouring through the gaps between her fingers no matter how she tried to stop it.

She had healed hundreds, thousands of people.

Yet she could not save them.

Tsunade set the bottle on the ground and hugged her knees.

The firelight flickered.

"Do you know what a battlefield is like?" she asked.

Her voice was so soft that Yan had to lean forward slightly to hear her clearly.

"A little."

"You don't." Tsunade shook her head. "Everything in those textbooks is bullshit. A real battlefield—"

She looked down at her hands.

"These hands have been stained with too much blood. Not enemy blood. The blood of comrades. My brother's blood. And..."

She did not say that name.

"I'm a medical ninja. My hands should be used to save people. But war doesn't give you a choice—save ten people today, twenty die tomorrow. The day after that, you send the people you saved the day before back to the front lines, and then they get carried back again. Missing arms, missing legs, their insides completely ruined and still gasping for breath."

"You heal them, and they go off to die. You fail to heal them, and they die anyway. The only difference between healing and not healing them is how many more days they get to live."

"That kind of blood—"

Her voice caught.

"There was so much that seeing red makes me want to vomit."

Hemophobia.

Yan silently repeated the word in his heart.

"Nawaki died when he was twelve." Tsunade put great force into saying that name, as though lifting a stone heavy enough to sink to the center of the earth. "My little brother. Twelve years old. The same age as you. He said he wanted to become Hokage."

The campfire popped.

"Dan died too. He died in my hands. I'm the greatest medical ninja alive. I saved hundreds of strangers, but I couldn't save him. He lost too much blood. My hands were pressed against his chest, chakra pouring into him again and again—"

She closed her eyes.

"It was useless."

The night wind passed through the forest, bending the flames sideways.

Three meters and a campfire separated them.

Yan remained silent for a long time.

He did not say, "You need to pull yourself together." He did not say, "They wouldn't want you to be like this." He did not offer any of the empty platitudes a normal person would say in a moment like this.

Because he had heard too many such empty words in his past life. The day he worked himself to death from overtime, someone had told him to hold on, that the ambulance would be there soon.

And then he still died.

Empty words could not save anyone.

"Are you done crying?" Yan asked.

Tsunade opened her eyes and looked at him with a trace of confusion.

"Drowning in the pain brought by the dead," Yan said. His voice was not loud, but every word was hard as stone striking stone, "is because you feel powerless in the world of the living."

Tsunade's pupils widened slightly.

"You're one of the Sannin. You can shatter a mountain with one punch. Your medical ninjutsu is the best in the world. You're the First Hokage's granddaughter."

Yan stood.

The firelight shone up from below, turning the reflection in his black eyes dark brown.

"A Senju woman shouldn't be this pathetic—a wreck with her spine broken by fate."

The air congealed for an instant.

Tsunade's breathing stopped for half a beat.

She stared at this twelve-year-old brat. He stood on the other side of the campfire, thin as a bamboo pole, his clothes torn where branches had snagged them, the soles of his ninja shoes worn so thin they were nearly full of holes.

Yet his words hit harder than any strong liquor she had ever drunk.

Hard enough to make her ears burn.

"You..." Tsunade tightened her grip on the bottle. "What gives a child like you the right to speak to me like—"

"Because I just died once too," Yan cut her off. "Not metaphorically. A few days ago, someone kicked me into a river. I nearly drowned. When I woke up, there was only one thought in my head—I wasn't willing to accept it."

"If I wasn't willing to accept it even after dying once, then what right do I have to give up while I'm alive?"

He did not look away.

"If those two were still alive, do you think they'd want to see you like this?"

Those words were too heavy.

Heavy enough to make Tsunade's hand tremble.

Not from anger.

But because she had asked herself that question ten thousand times in her heart, and ten thousand times, she had not dared to answer.

Today, a twelve-year-old Uchiha brat who had not even awakened his Sharingan, dressed in tattered clothes, had thrown it right in her face.

The campfire burned brightly. Their shadows stretched long, overlapping against the tree trunk.

Tsunade lowered her head. Her long golden hair fell down, covering her entire face.

A long time later—

She laughed.

Not bitterly, not in self-mockery. It was the kind of laugh that came after getting punched hard and suddenly feeling clear all over.

"You little bastard." She wiped at the corner of her eye with the back of her hand. "That mouth of yours is vicious."

"Inherited," Yan said. "My mother was sharp-tongued too."

Tsunade laughed again, and this time it was more genuine than before.

She sat against the tree roots for quite a while. The campfire lit her face, and beneath that thick layer of despondency and drunkenness, something began to loosen.

It was not instant healing—the wound ran too deep, and one sentence could not fill it.

But through the crack, a little light seeped in.