#idreamofdango

If Tsunade's curiosity got the better of her, she'd note that its weight did not signify. Once opened, if she'd dare, there would be an explosion of fine, purple glitter.

Severed heads? She could handle those.

Hell, she’d lopped off a fair few herself. Blood, guts—didn’t even blink.

But this? This was worse.

Her eye twitched. Violently.

Glitter. Everywhere.

She’d take gore over glitter any day. Any. Fucking. Day.

“MITARASHI!!!”

Incoming snowball.

SPLAT!

@idreamofdango @wolfdemonofkonoha

.........

Maa...maa... If I didn't know any better, I'd say you wanted to start something.

- 🍡 @idreamofdango

"ICHIRAKU?? ALRIGHT!"

-🍡

Nagato, Yahiko or Konan?

hah. ‘prefer’ is a strong word.

but if i had to pick? Konan.

she learns. she adapts. she doesn’t need to be the loudest or the strongest to be deadly. she knows how to follow without disappearing. and how to kill without enjoying it.

Note: @idreamofdango - here you go! Sorry the editing took so long.

Tsunade’s gaze drifted lazily from the stacks of paperwork she had long since resigned herself to ignoring, settling instead on the whirlwind of motion pacing before her desk. Anko was deep in yet another impassioned monologue—this time about some new variety of dango that had apparently been an offense to her very existence.

The Hokage exhaled slowly, fingers tapping absently against the armrest of her chair. Why, exactly, this particular tragedy needed to be relayed to her remained a mystery. But given the alternative—drowning in the endless sea of documents that had buried her desk since the day she took office—Tsunade supposed there were worse fates than enduring the dramatic ramblings of a crazed Tokubetsu Jōnin.

A sudden silence pulled her attention upward.

She found herself staring into deep brown eyes, so dark they nearly bled into violet under the dim office lighting. That color had a way of unsettling her, striking something deep and primal in her chest, something she loathed acknowledging.

Anko’s glare was pointed, her arms crossed in clear irritation at the lack of engagement.

Tsunade forced herself to smirk, feigning nonchalance as she gave a single nod.

The younger woman huffed, rolling her eyes before launching right back into her rant.

“…A complete waste of my money! Can you believe the nerve? Charging that much for garbage? I swear—”

Tsunade barely heard the rest.

Her attention had already drifted, her amusement fading into something heavier, something that settled like lead in her stomach.

She had seen those eyes before.

Not on Anko.

Not on anyone living.

They belonged to ghosts, to the ones who had never made it back, to the ones she had held in her arms as their light faded.

Whoever claimed that eyes were the windows to the soul had no idea how painfully right—and dreadfully wrong—they were. Because staring into Anko’s, all Tsunade could see were the dead.

She remembered the first time she had laid eyes on Mitarashi Anko—remembered, with startling clarity, the first and only time she had ever felt jealousy toward another kunoichi.

She hadn’t cared that the girl was just a child. Hadn’t cared how petty the emotion was. All that mattered in that moment was that Anko was taking something—someone—that belonged to her.

Tsunade’s fingers curled into fists as she glared at her pale-haired teammate, disbelief and frustration warring within her.

“What do you mean you’ve taken on an apprentice?” she snapped, voice sharp with accusation.

She was already losing too much. First Jiraiya, with his idiotic decision to stay in Ame and play babysitter to a group of war orphans. And now Orochimaru? Her last tether to familiarity, to stability, was being pulled away from her, slipping through her grasp like sand.

Behind him stood a small figure, her posture straight, rigid with attention. Big, inquisitive eyes locked onto her new sensei with a quiet, worshipful reverence that made Tsunade’s stomach twist.

Orochimaru didn’t so much as flinch under her glare. If anything, his lips quirked into that insufferable smirk that always meant he was enjoying himself far too much at her expense.

“Sarutobi-sensei thought it would be a good idea,” he mused, his voice calm, detached. “Besides, young Anko here is quite the exceptional little kunoichi.”

The way he said it—so damn smug—made something burn in her chest.

“Now now, hime,” he added, his tone turning light, mocking, “no need to be jealous. I’m sure you’ll be assigned your own students soon enough—once you learn to control that temper of yours.”

He was laughing before he even turned away, motioning for the girl to follow.

And she did.

Without hesitation.

Tsunade remained rooted in place, the training ground stretching empty before her, the ghost of Orochimaru’s amusement lingering in the air.

Her hands trembled at her sides.

Shaking in rage.

She had seen the girl many times after that day, always trailing after Orochimaru like a devoted shadow. Wide, pale-brown eyes brimming with laughter, with wit, with a confidence that made Tsunade's stomach turn. That same foul taste always rose in her throat whenever she saw them together, an unfamiliar bitterness curling in the pit of her gut.

Because this girl—this mere child—had done what no one else had ever managed.

She had made Senju Tsunade envious.

At first, she told herself it was nothing. That she didn’t care. But as the months passed, and those happy, adoring eyes continued to haunt her periphery, that bitterness only deepened.

Then, one day, those eyes changed.

The shock of loss had made Tsunade numb. Dan’s death was still fresh, his blood still staining the inside of her mind, and she had nothing left in her to react when the Sandaime sat before her, his mouth forming words she barely processed.

Orochimaru. Traitor.

She just stared at the aged Hokage, empty and unblinking, as he spoke.

She wasn’t sure she could feel anything anymore.

Not until the office doors burst open.

The sharp tang of iron struck first, thick and cloying, as ANBU carried in a limp, blood-soaked body.

Familiar.

“…found in one of the labs…”

“…traitor…”

“…needs medical attention…”

She barely heard them.

Because all she could see were those eyes.

Dead. Hollow. Lifeless.

The same eyes that had once gleamed with sharp, knowing mirth. Eyes that had once mocked her with their brightness, their joy.

Now they stared at her, empty, void of everything that had once made them burn.

The eyes of death itself.

The same lifeless void that had haunted her for years.

The same emptiness that had stared back at her in her nightmares—Nawaki’s, wide and unblinking in the rain.

Dan’s, frozen in time as the light left them.

Tsunade stepped back.

No one knew she had been within Konoha’s walls that night. Summoned back in the wake of Orochimaru’s betrayal.

No one knew she had fled before dawn broke.

No one knew she had taken those eyes with her, carrying the weight of a third pair of ghosts that would keep her awake for months to come.

And soon enough, she had learned how to drown them out.

Sake became her salvation, her escape, her means of silencing the ghosts that whispered to her in the dark.

By the time she lost herself at the bottom of a bottle, she was already in debt to half of Hi no Kuni.

On her return, she'd not been ready for quite a lot.

But the one thing she was most definitely not prepared for was this.

For the ghost of the child she had abandoned, now standing before her on her first official day as Hokage.

Not for the face-splitting grin—sharp, teasing, taunting.

And certainly not for those eyes.

They were still the same. Still empty, still lifeless, still laying bare all of Tsunade’s failures for the world to see. A hollow reflection of everything she had tried to drink away, now staring her down in broad daylight.

Her breath caught.

Guilt churned in her stomach, twining with a sharp, unbidden terror, clawing its way up her throat. Perhaps that was why the young woman’s expression softened. A flicker of something less cruel, something less dead passing through those pale-brown depths.

Perhaps it was pity.

Tsunade didn’t care.

Didn’t question it.

She was just relieved—painfully, achingly relieved—to see something there at all.

“Hokage-sama?”

Tsunade never did understand how it happened.

She doubted she ever would.

Somewhere along the way, their roles had shifted. The venomous resentment, the bitterness of years past, had faded into something else entirely.

Because if she had to name the one shinobi she trusted beyond all others—the one who would never falter, never waver—she wouldn’t have to think twice.

The snake mistress would always be one of the first few names on her lips.

"Will you please listen—"

Perhaps it was the shared understanding of loss, the unspoken recognition between two people who had seen everything they loved torn away.

Perhaps it was the betrayal.

"Will you listen, already?"

A voice cut sharply through the fog of memory, yanking Tsunade back to the present. She blinked, disoriented, only to find herself staring into a face much too close for comfort.

"Personal space, Mitarashi!" she huffed, one hand shoving the grinning menace away before settling into an all-too-familiar twitch of her eye.

That smirk. Damn that smirk.

"Whatcha dreaming about?" Anko chirped, as if she hadn’t just slammed Tsunade straight into the past.

How did she do that? The sheer whiplash—the impossible shift from one extreme to another—should not be possible. It defied all logic.

"None of your business, Anko," she muttered.

Mistake.

Tsunade knew it the moment the words left her lips. She might as well have drawn a target on her forehead and handed Anko a kunai.

Predictably, the younger woman took the opening with a victorious gleam in her eye, planting herself on the disaster zone Tsunade still begrudgingly called a desk, making herself right at home.