Inside the Hokage Building, the largest administrative structure in the village, Tsunade stood alone in the main office, staring out through the wide windows at Konoha below.
The village looked calm from up here now. Almost polite.
Her face didn't match it.
She looked tired, not only physically, but in the deeper kind.
Lines at the corners of her eyes.
Brows drawn together in a permanent frown she hadn't bothered to smooth out since taking the hat, which was even heavier today.
Some time had already passed since she'd returned, since she'd agreed, reluctantly, to sit in this chair and pretend she still belonged here.
She rested a hand on the windowsill, fingers tapping once, then stopping.
"Funny," she muttered. "Still standing."
Her life hadn't exactly pointed her back here.
She'd grown up as a Senju prodigy, granddaughter of the First Hokage, groomed for greatness whether she wanted it or not.
Instead of walking the traditional Senju path laid out for her, she chose medicine, not for glory, but to save as many people in the village as she could.
It didn't matter.
People kept dying around her anyway.
Nawaki first. Then Dan.
Alongside countless others, names and faces blurring together until death stopped feeling tragic and started feeling routine.
Every promise she made broke in her hands.
Every dream she touched turned into a grave marker.
So she ran.
Years of wandering, gambling, drinking, patching people up just enough to keep moving.
Telling herself she was free, while flinching every time someone said the word "Hokage."
Telling herself Konoha was done with her, while never really cutting the cord.
In the end, Naruto hadn't dragged her back.
He'd just reminded her of something she'd buried.
Hope, stupid and stubborn, wearing a familiar grin.
Tsunade exhaled slowly, forehead pressing against the glass.
"Guess I lost again," she said quietly, then straightened.
Outside, Konoha kept breathing.
And whether she liked it or not, it was her problem now.
Nawaki dreamed of becoming Hokage, of protecting Konoha and their grandfather's legacy.
On his twelfth birthday, Tsunade kissed his forehead and gave him Hashirama's necklace.
He died the next day in the war, and the necklace came back to her.
She pushed for medical-nin on every squad so others wouldn't die as he had.
Hiruzen agreed, but the war left no room to act.
Dan Katō also shared her belief and confessed his own dream of becoming Hokage to change the village and protect the people he loved.
Tsunade eventually kissed his forehead too, and gave him the same necklace.
She watched him bleed out anyway.
The necklace returned again, and with it a cruel pattern.
Tsunade developed a fear of blood, then something worse, a certainty that dreams only existed to get people killed.
Hokage wasn't an honor.
It was a fool's job.
Everyone who reached for it, Nawaki, Dan, her grandfather, Tobirama, even Hiruzen, paid for it early and pointlessly.
So she walked away.
From the village.
From shinobi life.
From believing in anything.
She wandered with Shizune, telling herself survival was enough.
Then she met Naruto.
He shattered her logic by existing.
He chased an impossible goal with no regard for how the world was "supposed" to work, mastered what shouldn't have been possible, and carried Nawaki and Dan's dream without even knowing their names.
For the first time, Tsunade saw that a dream could outlive its dreamer.
That was why she took the hat.
Not because she believed in Konoha.
But because she chose, once, to believe in a future again.
Because she now especially believed in that blond boy more than she ever admitted.
She watched him train until his legs shook and his chakra ran dry, watched him collapse, get up, and do it again the next day.
He kept forcing progress out of nothing, turning "impossible" into something merely inconvenient through sheer, unreasonable will.
In the end, she even gave him that stupid necklace.
Somewhere along the way, the paranoia and depression loosened their grip.
Not all at once. Quietly. Day by day.
Her spirit started to move again, pulled along in his wake.
She didn't know yet whether the fear of blood was truly gone.
But her spirit and chakra responded. Her instincts sharpened.
Her hands stopped shaking when it mattered.
She probably could fight again. Think again.
She wasn't drowning anymore.
And for the first time in years, that felt like enough to stand up straight.
But the world didn't give her much time to enjoy that recovery.
The moment she turned back toward Konoha, its darker side caught up to her again and put that fragile optimism to the test.
Jiraiya had explained everything he knew on the road, in pieces.
The details of Orochimaru's previous attack.
The invasion.
Their teacher's death.
Mysterious accomplices moving alongside him, one of them a strange white-haired teenager no one could quite place.
Akatsuki stirring.
Old ghosts resurfacing.
Itachi Uchiha, among them, has made his presence known recently as well.
It sounded overwhelming even then.
And yet, watching Naruto train and his resolve, listening to Jiraiya's half-joking encouragements, seeing Nawaki and Dan inside the boy again and again...
Stubbornness, conviction, refusal to lie down and die...
Additionally, for the first time, it didn't feel like another pointless war being fought on inertia.
It felt like an existential crisis; the village might not survive without her. So she agreed.
She returned with Shizune, escorted by Jiraiya and Naruto.
Along the way, Naruto filled the road with stories, loud, clueless, and somehow motivating all at once.
Tsunade found herself wondering how someone could be so ignorant of the world and still inspire people to stand straighter.
That illusion lasted exactly until she stepped into this office.
The 'inauguration' itself was pretty smooth.
Too smooth.
Almost suspiciously so.
Sitting in the chair, feeling the weight settle in, she understood immediately that her real trouble had only just begun.
It wasn't the workload.
Not the reconstruction, not the manpower shortages, not the neighboring villages circling like hungry animals.
After all, the Land of Fire sat on the most fertile, central territory on the continent, which typically made Konoha the strongest village, and inevitably the one most often tested by every other great power.
External enemies she could handle.
Those were problems with shapes and solutions.
The real shock was the rot inside the village.
Something sick, entrenched, and far deeper than she'd ever imagined.
Something Jiraiya hadn't mentioned.
Maybe he hadn't seen it.
Or maybe he had, and chose not to say it out loud to her before she returned.
Tsunade stared out the window again, jaw tightening.
She had come back to save Konoha.
Yet, she was starting to realize Konoha might not want to be saved.
She couldn't pin it on any single thing.
After returning, she'd been buried under a mechanical workload, barely sleeping, while also healing one body after another.
She treated the wounded from the invasion, stabilized the worst cases, and dragged people back from the edge.
She cured Kakashi and Sasuke of Itachi's strange ocular attack, a technique that still bothered her every time she thought about it.
She operated on Lee herself, hands steady, mind sharp, pulling him back from a future that had already been written off.
And yet, something felt… off.
It was as if she hadn't fully inherited the position she was sitting in.
Like the title had settled on her shoulders, but the authority a Hokage was supposed to have still hovered just out of reach.
She started noticing it in small ways.
Medical policies she had argued for years ago, ones this chair should finally allow her to push through, stalled without explanation.
Some minor reforms passed easily, the harmless, less visible ones.
But the larger changes, the reasonable ones, the urgent ones in the middle of a crisis, vanished into committees, reviews, and silence.
No one outright opposed them. They simply… went nowhere.
She couldn't see the hands doing it. That was the unsettling part.
The two elders, Hiruzen's former teammates, felt wrong as well. Not hostile.
Not openly defiant. Just distant.
As if they expected very little from her, which made no sense given the state of the village.
It was like they were relieved she'd accepted the position, but only so she could sit quietly in it. Their suggestions always drifted the same way: let them handle administration, let the assistants manage policy, and focus on healing the most serious cases personally.
As if her judgment didn't matter.
As if she was still just a talented, indulgent medic they could point at emergencies, not the Hokage.
That unspoken assumption grated more than open disrespect ever could.
And then there was Danzō Shimura.
She knew his reputation. Everyone did. Shadows, secrets, things best not said aloud.
But he didn't even bother with the pretense.
No courtesy visit. No formal acknowledgment.
Not even the empty politeness of a man recognizing authority he planned to ignore.
It was as if her appointment meant nothing to him and his current power base.
That stung.
Not because she craved respect, but because it told her something very clearly.
This village had layers of power she wasn't being shown.
And she was sitting at the top of one that wasn't as real as it should have been.
The real shock, however, came this morning.
Reports reached her in fragments at first, then solidified into something far worse.
Sasuke Uchiha had slipped out of the village. Not alone.
There were vague traces of Kabuto Yakushi and signs that Orochimaru himself had been involved, or at least one of his clones.
Her stomach sank.
She knew what that boy meant now.
To the village, as the last Uchiha.
To Naruto, as the bond holding him steady.
Losing him wasn't just a tactical failure.
It was a fracture running straight through Konoha's future.
For the first time since taking the chair, she pushed back hard.
And for the first time, the elders pushed back even harder.
They opposed any pursuit outright.
Spoke of conserving what little strength the village had left.
Claimed it was pointless to move against Orochimaru now.
One of them even accused her, calmly and coldly, of wanting to "provoke another disaster" in the village, as if the disaster hadn't already happened.
The implication was clear.
Don't move. Don't decide. Don't lead.
On the surface, she was forced to compromise.
No official pursuit. No teams dispatched. No visible action.
But Tsunade wasn't that naïve.
She turned to Jiraiya instead, quietly.
Asked him to trace Sasuke's path, to lean on his spy network, to find out what this really was and how far it had gone.
What she did with that information would come later, once the dust settled enough to move without starting a political firestorm.
Naruto didn't take it well.
She saw the disappointment in his eyes, sharp and personal, and it hurt more than she expected.
But for now, she swallowed it.
Because something told her this wasn't just about Sasuke.
It was about how much authority she truly had.
And how much of it this village was willing to let her use.
By her earlier understanding, and even by Jiraiya's, the elders should have stood far closer to her on this, closer to the chair itself.
Instead, on this single issue, it felt as though Danzō was speaking through them.
Worse, they sounded almost relieved.
As if Sasuke's departure was convenient.
As if the last Uchiha leaving the village carried no weight at all.
She knew she couldn't put this on Jiraiya.
She could read him too well for that
His frustration wasn't staged, and his surprise was real.
He hadn't expected Homura and Koharu to act this way either.
Even to him, they had never given the impression that they would close ranks like this on her once she returned to the village.
Yet, she wasn't foolish enough to back off and stay passive.
That had never been in her blood.
If anything, it stirred her competitive spirit.
This wasn't fear; it was a challenge.
And she decided she would understand exactly what was happening, and how to take back what the position was supposed to give her.
She was the Fifth Hokage.
Officially, unquestionably. She had accepted the role, and that meant anyone working against it was the problem, not her.
So she called in the people she trusted most in the village right now, the ones with real weight behind them. Politically. Strategically. In strength.
Jiraiya. Shikaku Nara. Kakashi. Not long after, all three stood together in her office.