The younger blonde kicked in that door despite all of Shizune's requests not to bother the Hokage.
He looks angry, but for some reason it doesn't read as angry at HER specifically...
"WHY ARENT WE TAUGHT THE REAL TRUTH?"
He was never really taught anything that mattered past how to use jutsu and how to fight. Nothing about his family, his history. Or even the villages history.
"I had to be told by the last remaining member of my clan what happened to us. How Konoha turned a blind eye while people were being hunted and SLAUGHTERED. How a whole village of people were viewed as a threat over a POSSIBILITY and not anything substantial. WHY Grandma Tsunade? WHY doesn't the village talk about any of this stuff? Why wasn't I taught I was a jinchuriki? Or that it's my JOB to protect the village? Why wasn't anyone taught about the slaughters of the Uzumaki?"
The scroll poised to crack against his forehead stalls mid-motion, lowering inch by reluctant inch.
Tsunade stares at Naruto, openly startled. There’s a flash of pain she doesn’t hide fast enough, sharp and treacherous, cutting across her face before she can slam the door on it.
Her hand drops. Fingers curl around the scroll until the paper gives way with a soft, ruined sound. It tears. Crumples. Disintegrates into dust that slips through her knuckles.
Slaughtered. Ruined. Destroyed.
Her mind drifts back to the island anyway — traitorous, tender — to turquoise waters that once laughed in the sun, to gleaming towers etched with spirals meant to endure forever. To a place that had promised permanence and lied.
She can still feel as if it were just yesterday that her feet had dug into the sands of Uzu. The air always smelled of salt and spirals, of that endless, half-flirtatious dance between sea and river, and every breeze tasted like promises she was too young — and too foolishly hopeful — to put names to.
She remembers the whisper of water everywhere — a place the tides had chosen and stubbornly refused to leave. River veins threading through steep hills, wooden bridges arching like lazy, knowing smiles over currents that never quite stopped humming, even in their sleep.
It used to be a place where the whirlpools in your head made just as much sense as the ones in the sea — chaotic, beautiful, and somehow kind — and she had loved it, fiercely, for every maddening second she had belonged to it, before the world decided to prove that nothing gentle was ever meant to last.
Blinking out of her memories she lifts her gaze to Naruto — the child who, infuriatingly, impossibly, gave her a reason to keep breathing when she’d been done trying.
Does he understand why she fights so hard to mend Konoha? She doubts it. He sees the walls, the title, the stupid hat. He doesn’t see the rot sunk deep into the bones of the place, the old compromises and quieter cruelties that never quite wash out.
Still, the truth doesn’t change. She does this so that when he finally inherits this seat, Konoha’s darkness won’t rise up and swallow him whole. She spends her days and nights clawing at decades of decay, scraping and suturing and bleeding for it — all for the hope that when Naruto takes on the Hokage mantle, it won’t crush the light out of him. She wishes to preserve that light.
And yet… she can’t hide the truth from him either. She won’t lie. Not to him.
“Because of politics, Naruto,” she says at last. “Because of old men who cling to power with white knuckles. Who hoard information like it makes them superior.” Her mouth twists, sharp and bitter. “Who play gods in the shadows and move the rest of us around like expendable pieces on a board.”
She pauses, letting it settle.
“They feed us narratives of their own choosing as a battle strategy,” she continues, quieter now. “To keep us loyal. To keep control. They don’t want shinobi who question — they want obedient tools.” Her gaze sharpens, unyielding. “How can you not understand that, after working with Sai all these months?”
Telling Naruto he was a Jinchūriki? That would have given him too much power. And why risk that? Just like making his lineage common knowledge would have given him too much power.
The council had never liked sharing it. They hadn’t when the Sannin rose and refused to be small. They hadn’t when Minato wore the hat and made it look too easy. And they certainly didn’t like it when it was his child — inconvenient, uncontrollable — threatening their neatly ordered little system.
They hadn’t shared power then, either. Not when Uzushiogakure fell.
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Special mention: CI's fanfic that inspired Uzushiogakure's description though I can't do as good a job, I'm afraid: https://archiveofourown.org/works/73348936/chapters/191203271#workskin
