The Bloody What?

Chapter 3

Still Free Me

A/N: Well... here goes. Tsunade hates herself as she is left alone with her thoughts and the power of the nine tails can cause numerous things, including anger. That's it. Read.

Disclaimer: Don't own. I own the rights to this fic though.

Summary:

Uzumaki Naruto did not come back after the battle in the Valley of the End. He did not make it back to see all of his friends and surrogate family members after the ordeal with a smile, nor did he get to say a word about how hungry he was, how much he wanted ramen, or how much he so wished to train.

Uzumaki Naruto died. And in the eyes of those close to him, he was murdered.

His sensei, Hatake Kakashi, the son of White Fang, did not make it in time to stop him from battling, nor was he fast enough to get to Konoha to save his student. Instead, he was able to save Uchiha Sasuke, who assed out from fatigued with his battle with Naruto.

Subaku no Temari and Nara Shikamaru did not win in their fight with the Sound Four member Tayuya. Instead of taking her out with her fan, Temari overestimated the distance and sent a barrage of trees crashing down on not only herself, but Shikamaru and Tayuya as well, instead of her original target. As they tried to escape, they all were seemingly crushed under the trees. They were quickly recovered.

Rock Lee and Subaku no Gaara, unaware of the goings on around them, succeeded in defeating the Last Kaguya, Kimimaro. However, it was not because of sheer skill. Even with Lee's superior taijutsu and Gaara's sand, Kimimaro was more than a match for them. In the last seconds of battle, Kimimaro lunged at Gaara and Lee from within the forest of bones he created, planning to kill them. With Gaara nearly out of chakra, he started to couch erratically, and eventually blood, and this event allowed Gaara to use what little chakra he had left, to crush him in a sand like coffin, crushing his most of his bones instantaneously. And yet, he did not die. Kimimaro lived.

Kimimaro and Tayuya have been captured and interrogated for the plans of their master, former shinobi of Konoha, and snake Sannin, Orochimaru as soon as they were well enough to be out of the emergency room. Meanwhile, Kakashi arrived with the battered and bloody body of one Uchiha Sasuke in his arms, and the prone, nearly lifeless body of Naruto as well, being carried by a shadow clone.

It's been three weeks since then. Uchiha Sasuke is being held in the emergency room from severe chakra exhaustion. It has been decided behind closed doors that he will face the village council to determine his ultimate punishment for betraying his home.

The body of Naruto Uzumaki is gone.

This is where it begins.

Of course things wouldn't stop with the knowledge that it was her fault he died. Or better yet that she was the one that worked on his mangled, lifeless body while all else rejected the duty because she didn't fulfill her duties as a god-mother and look after him like she was supposed to.

After all, she was a poor gambler, a poor Hokage, an avid drinker, the least capable mother figure ever and she made so many bad choices in her life it was only to be expected that the divine forces of the heavens decided to give her one more reason to regret everything she had ever done.

That day, she had been there when he died. Unlike reports that had flooded the entire village not ten minutes before the fact, he didn't die until he was brought back to the village. It had all been such a mess. Such a bloody and horrible mess. It was almost as if there wasn't any point into fighting the deathly aura that had embraced him like a stingy child. His- everything was so bad, it didn't really matter. She had failed and that was all that mattered. No more, and certainly no less.

Not one had volunteered to try to help him, save the most obvious exception being Shizune. They had taken up the entire thing by themselves after taking care of those injured in the invasion. He was breathing then, of course. He wheezed, he choked, and he spit blood right in her face when he tried to speak. It broke her in ways she could never imagine. She had seen worse, much worse happen to others, but that didn't stop the cold façade of indifference to help her get through with the operation.

The fox had been trying its best to heal him up and save its own ass, but considering there was a fist sized hole in his chest and his shoulder nearly blown off, it was pointless. Most of the wounded flesh had been charred and dead, and it was slowly spreading like a burning piece of paper. Not even the great demon lord could heal a gaping hole without flesh to bridge the connection between the two separate parts. Not even she, could rebuild flesh quick enough in her status. It required time and patience, something that was rare with the given circumstances.

It was a lost cause.

Then she had gotten an idea. It was pathetic really. The entire belief of bridging the flesh together so that the Kyuubi of all things would help her save him that is. She hadn't put it through, it was a desperate, last ditch effort. To think of the flesh like a bridge after it had been blown up in the middle. It was near impossible to rebuild it without air support, so the only way to reconstruct it would be to patch it up as best as one could and send in the repair people to do their job, slowly expanding as the built more and more.

If she had done that, healing what she could here and there, and then the fox would have done its job, everything would have been okay. She had overestimated the Demon Lord's generosity, plain and simple. That chakra… no, she couldn't call it chakra. It was worse that raw and unfiltered chakra. It had attacked her, hissing at her skin as close as she got when she tried to enact the plan like an angry and dying animal. It didn't want her to save him, it was truly just a mindless beast driven by a depraved loner instinct.

She hadn't had much by then anyway. Before Kakashi had brought him in she had been working her best on shinobi injured in the invasion. She overlooked her own limits for the good of the village. The thought had made her laugh a bitter laugh. Sarutobi and the brat would have guffawed at the thought, wouldn't they?

She had used shadow clones. Shizune too, but mostly her. They had spread them far and wide until they used up their virtual reserves and popped out of existence. It apparently had drained her too much. She had been tired and beaten by the time she had gotten to see that idiot, that brat, that worthless little bastard she would have done anything to save.

It had all left her defenseless, utterly open to anything.

The Kyuubi's chakra was unlike one she had ever felt before. As a child the stories she had heard were things that put the beast's 'great power' into imagination, something that could be comprehended by the simplicity of the human mind. It had been too simplified. She didn't know why, but being able to imagine a stories tall monster causing disasters in her mind made it easier to capture the power on the scale. But… Now, she hatefully realized that one titled as the nine tailed fox, the demon lord, the lord of the tricksters was never meant to be charted.

What an understatement.

The Kyuubi's… whatever it was, had eaten her chakra like a hungry dog. It devoured almost all of it until she had nearly lost consciousness, reeling around in a circle in a dizzying state. The feeling had been so intense and numbing that she had stood there, helpless while it feasted on her energy. Then it stopped. There was no sign of how or why, or when or what caused it, it simply stopped.

Then he died. The morbid flat line had been the only thing in the room that had made a sound, other than a choking, drowning sound from him. The Shinigami's presence was thick in the room, even after that. That's how it had gone, pretty much. She had refused to put the experience in the report, or even write a report to begin with. She hadn't been, and still wasn't ready. That feeling of being used as a dish was just… disgusting.

She shook her head pathetically. When all had been silent, her body moved on its own and cleaned his corpse up using the regular procedure. Broken pieces of bone completely blown to bits because of whatever had did that to him, lodged in his flesh, shoulder, chest, and all were cleaned out in less than an hour. The rib cage that had been shattered in numerous places and collapsed on his lung like some sort of sick vice, or belt was pulled out and straightened.

So in the end, not even the great Kyuubi no Kitsune could save its second (As far as she knew) vessel. To say good riddance would have been a double edged sword. If she had to have that thing alive, she would have abided the possibility as long as Naruto was still breathing and grinning like the idiots she had come to know him and his mother as.

But…This was all of her fault, wasn't it? That horrible necklace that she'd given him. She knew what would happen if he wore it, history would repeat itself, and she would lose another loved one. Her brother, her grandfather, Dan, Sarutobi…

If she had just tried harder! If she had been at her top game she could have saved him! That hole was nothing! To hell with what the Kyuubi did! She'd dealt with worse in the past!

She had broken down and cried. Just the thought made her hate herself. She hadn't cried that hard in years, decades probably.

Possibly the worst thing of all was that if she had fulfilled her duties as his guardian, this wouldn't have happened. But she was ashamed of herself, then and now. Did she really deserve to be considered a Hokage? No, of course not. If it weren't for her pride as a descendant of the Shodaime and a Sannin, as well as her respect and love for her late teacher, she would have damned that stupid hat and the 'Will of Fire'. She could never fill in her sensei's shoes, her grandfather, or her great uncle. She would never come close to succeeding the Yondaime no matter what anyone said.

She only wondered what it would have been like if she had chosen to be a mother. A better one to Shizune, and a real one to Naruto.

She wouldn't forget that this was her doing, in one way or another. She wouldn't let herself forget either. Instead of looking after him like she had promised, she neglected her duties. Instead of being there to save his mother, she wasn't, which she deemed to be the start of the dark ages of her life. Instead of coming back to the village when her sensei had all but begged and pleaded with her, she had chosen to drown her sorrows in the sensation of losing money and drinking booze. Oh yeah, just wonderful.

She had definitely known who he was the second he and Jiraiya had come to retrieve her. And yet, she fought him. She couldn't even say that she fought with him because of the sheer fact that struck her pride like the sharpest blade. He was so weak! If he had been in a normal environment with her those chakra scalpels would have never even gotten close to him!

None of that mattered at all. She could go on and on about how Jiraiya could have helped to, or that the Third could have revoked her title as Sannin long ago and forced her to come back to the village, or that her 'god-son' would have lived a torturous half-life until the end of his days and that he was better off dead anyway. She could have said that the village didn't even deserve his baby teeth or his clothes, which, in her own way, she did. It all boiled down to the fact that none of it would make a difference, it was all moot.

The word 'Godson' was a word that tasted so acrid and horrible in her mouth she wanted to vomit vehemently even when it was spoken in her mind! She didn't deserve to say, think, or even use that word in anyway. 'Godson' was just another representation of her many failures in life, the responsibilities she rejected, and the way the people in charge of the universe were screwing her over.

That little twerp! Had he had any real hope in being Hokage, he wouldn't have died like this! He wouldn't have died in battle like some- some martyr! Hokage's lived to protect their village! He didn't even get that far yet! Had he had any sense in that thick little head of his, he would have let her deal with it or someone else! But no, the stupid little bastard made a promise, and he always lived up to his promises! Idiot, she screamed in her mind, you can't live up to anything when you're dead!

And today the celestial forces decided to strike her another one and kick her while she was down. His body had gone missing? It couldn't get any worse… it couldn't, it was impossible. Tsunade forced out all of the possibilities about what the thief might be doing to his body or where they might have put it. She would go to the scene, find out who did it, beat their entire body into pudding, resign as Hokage and leave. They'd wouldn't just ignore her, like they had all of his life while she had been gone. They'd beg her to stay, but she'd simply refuse and leave them with the callous shell of what the Village used to be.

She ran as fast as she could, and then faster than she ever did before. When she found the bastard that did this, she would leave. No sidetracks, no exceptions. Her mind was made up.

"Hokage-sama, stop!"

Out of all the voices that she had ignored that yelled for her to stop, she stopped abruptly and whirled around in rage at this one. Her fist ready to knock Kakashi's head into orbit.

She recognized it, his voice that is. How could she not? If anyone was at fault just as much as her and Jiraiya, it was him! He was guilty of as many crimes as she was, if not more! Better yet, he was the one that trained Naruto's murderer!

"Hokage-sama!" Kakashi narrowly avoided the fist of the Godaime by jumping back after widening his eye. Tsunade didn't let that hinder her once, and stood up and drew her fist back again and clenched it. "What do you want Hatake?"

The jounin pointed behind her at a large gathering of people that currently targeted their eyes and ears to the two of them, though it was fairly obvious that it was previously on something else. They pointed at her and whispered, she could instantly tell that as fast as she had been sprinting she would have trampled them all… and wouldn't have cared much either.

Behind them all, smoke rose into the sky. She saw this too and walked forward, the citizens parting a path for her. She bitterly looked to her sides past them and was greeted with the antiseptic cleanliness of the one of the medic sections of the village, attributed by the deathly aura that only the morgue held.

They had been looking at the building, the morgue section of the hospital. She scowled the moment her bloodshot, drooping eyes landed on it. It looked as if the face of the third floor had been completely blown out. The smoke came from inside, rubble littered the ground and glass and chairs were lodged in the concrete.

Tsunade was at a loss of what to do or how to react, so she called upon those that had been trailing her ever since she left the Tower. "ANBU!" The high ranking shinobi appeared almost instantly dropping from the roofs, causing the crowd to gasp in surprise. They immediately went to the site of the explosion and investigated, but Tsunade could have cared less about it.

"Kakashi." She growled out, her voice slightly slurred. "Put that eye of yours to good use for once and find out who did this. Now get out of my sight." Kakashi stood a few feet away from her, trying to stutter out a response but all that showed was a slight movement of his mask. Her face contorted angrily. "I said go!"

He moved without any other action to the scene, to the other ANBU. She turned back around to face all of them and squinted her eyes at the building. "I want a full report on the damages as well as everything else by the end of the day! Do you understand?"

The entire squad of ANBU, plus Kakashi nodded. "Yes Hokage-sama!"

Tsunade turned away from the scene with the hard and disgusted expression of hers turned distraught. The chakra around this place… how could she forget it? She hoped to Kami that somehow, someway it wasn't what she thought it was, but that it was what she wished it would be. This place couldn't… no, she couldn't deal with something like this. She was no Yondaime.

She shunshined out of sight almost immediately and headed back to the Tower to look for the imported sake. She would need a drink soon.

Kakashi had almost immediately pulled down and revealed his Sharingan and just as quickly widened his eyes. The morgue was always a depressing place to be around but when he had arrived, it had been much more restricting. He hadn't felt this since Naruto's death and before that when he was ANBU captain. It was black in sight to his Sharingan; angry and flowing through random places in the air like smoke.

But there was another. He saw two of them. Two different strains of chakra, as well as the broken façade of a cancelled genjutsu.

Her mind was wavering, she was losing consciousness. Step… step four was close. It was… getting really hard to think. Despite that slow, nervous shell shocked smile creeping up on the sides of her face like a snail, she paced the room frantically and ignored the desire to wipe her eyes. She sent glances at the bed ever second and every step she took, too cautious and hesitant to rule out it was a cruel joke, genjutsu or hallucination brought on by the fatigue of the shunshin. Despite this, she wanted to laugh maniacally, happily even.

Would he disappear again?

Two weeks? Shizune felt like pulling at her hair and ripping it straight from her head, which she didn't. Two damn weeks he'd been like this? She fumed on. Wait, no! Almost two weeks. It was only on Thursday that it would become two weeks! Oh, well, that changed everything! It was only Monday, and the last time she saw him was when she was trying to keep his pulse steady! She, and her teacher, her mentor, the woman who raised her, had only been crying their guts out for the past three weeks to a month come this Saturday! So two weeks was nothing! Absolutely nothing because she believed he was dead for a month!

Oh, he had been laying in a near comatose state in a slightly dilapidated apartment building that stunk of ramen. He was sonly being exposed to an unsterile environment, bedbugs, and other things that made her scream unsanitary!

He could have been lying in a hospital room and being taken care of where she knew he was safe and could take care of him while her teacher drank in joy. She could have been the one tending to his wounds and trying to keep him from getting a serious condition that only one such as herself, being trained by one of the Sannin would be able to handle apart from her teacher herself! And should anything go wrong, the nurses and other doctors would be on the ready to lend a helping hand!

Shizune stopped in her tracks. No, no they wouldn't. If they had helped out the first time, he wouldn't have been like this. They would have gotten the supplies faster and not wasted their chakra on shadow clones to help them, and they would have had enough energy to see him all the way through!

Oh Kami in the name the name of all that was ironic in the worst way she didn't dare think what would happen once Tsunade found out!

Was it wrong of her not to be remorseful at the thought of Tsunade punishing Jiraiya worse than she ever did in their life? Was it mentally perverse and unstable? Was it bad that she smiled at the thought? No! Of course not, Shizune defended herself. That bastard hid this secret from them- he hid Naruto-kun from them all! She thought she had lost him forever! Her teacher's only reason for happiness in this village!

While he was slowly dying because of her senior's senior citizen judgment, they had looked everywhere in a drunken state of melancholy and anger, fear, and for her teacher, rage. For any sort of possibility that it had been a dream, no, a nightmare that dragged along painfully. From his apartment, to the- the training grounds, to the secret place of his he'd told them about atop of the Hokage monument!

He had begged them to come up there with him sometime. Training or playing, with him, she supposed, it never really made a difference. They had gone there nevertheless. It… It had been a stab to their pain and hope, further increasing their will to just give up, which, eventually, they did. Because they found nothing there; no kunai, spare clothes, sounds of running in the trees or curing because someone didn't get a jutsu right. Not a single flash of orange that stood out from the foliage. Nothing.

For you see the thought that he was alive and the events that had taken place in the past 15 hours didn't escape their minds. No it was the only thing that they could think of. Maybe they were dreaming. She hadn't had a single inkling to how it was possible, but she had hoped it was. It hadn't been.

He wasn't in his apartment. Tsunade herself had sent her there in a desperate state, the only things she couldn't make out being drowned by mumbles and tears, and her hand pawing at her face, muffling her voice. There

He kept him from them and he deserved any kind of punishment that was dealt. Shizune smiled the tiniest bit. Yes…

Maybe she was like that Mitarashi woman…

Shizune sat back in the chair. How long had it been? She knew how long chronologically it had been, but in every other sense it seemed like eternity! The nights had never dragged along so long when she drank. Her mind went from one thing to the next. Her eyes raced frantically over what was visible from the covers and she frowned.

How long exactly had his shoulder been healed enough to have those bandages wrapped ever so tightly around his neck to his stomach? Had he woken up yet? Though the temptations of questioning logic and facts pricked at her failing consciousness and sub-conscious, to simply brush this off would be… disastrous!

Her eyes flicked to the mop of hair that covered the pale, unconscious face that she thought she would never see again. Shizune stood up and walked over to the bed, her face calming down, and then turning into a sorrowful frown. When she got there, she looked down at the body on the bed and bit her lip.

"N-Naruto-kun…" She brushed the hair out of his face and sighed. If there was anything to sober her mind up, this was it. He was so… different when he was asleep. The sight of his face when she had recovered from exhaustion and checked on Tsunade after he had died was… she didn't know how to describe it. It wasn't peaceful. It wasn't happy and it wasn't the grin she had so quickly grown accustomed to. It was simply… empty.

But now he looked at peace. She smirked a little, sniffling slightly. The irony in that statement… She peeled the covers back a little and revealed his torso. It was almost completely wrapped in bandages and stained with red here and there. She wanted to run her hand across it but pulled back. She would injure the wounds like that probably, or at least irritate them.

The Kyuubi must have healed him, was the obvious conclusion she had made. There was no other way. She smiled. She didn't care, out of that sentence the only word that mattered was 'healed'.

She looked around the room and her shoulders slumped disappointedly. There weren't many things here she could use to clean his wounds. As Ayame had said, there were barely any bandages left, probably only a foots worth. There was almost an entire thing of alcohol left; that would be good for cleaning out the little wounds spread out but…

She nervously glanced at the biggest red stain; it was about the size of three of her fingers balled up. Right at his mid-section, on the left side, where his ribs were it looked slightly dried up, yet fresh, which showed that the wound was either having trouble healing, something she doubted, or somehow the scabs and stitches they had put in when operating on him were broken or being ripped.

Shizune bit her lip again. She was nervous… What if she hurt him? No, she couldn't think like that. Now was not the time for that type of attitude. He needed her.

She sighed and attempted to calm herself down. Step four was getting closer, she just knew it. She just didn't know how close, in her thoughts she had lost track of time. If she had to guess, it would have been about ten minutes. If she could just… just calm herself down and think rationally then she could avoid it! She couldn't be useless right now, not when Naruto was counting on her!

She made a hand seal and her hands glowed green. Immediately, she drew them over Naruto's torso and ran them over it, stopping over his heart and lungs, then his ribs, and finally his shoulder. The Kyuubi… must have healed that, too. It was… odd. It just didn't seem like that was something that could be healed in a mere two weeks.

She shook her head and cast the thought and those spawned from it away. After five more minutes, she had went over the status of his ribs and the area around his heart where the hole was. It was still there. Still there? How could the great fox heal a shoulder almost blown off but not a damn hole by the heart? What kind of useless-

A fiery pain erupted from the pit of her stomach and Shizune gasped. Her hands dragged there and quivered. It was almost as if… as if she was being drained. The green hue around her hands paled to a smoky white and dissipated. What was going on?

She blinked and lost her footing, falling on her behind again, but cushioned the fall with her hands. This feeling… her chakra felt like it was being sucked directly from her body…

Then as it would answer her thoughts, she looked up at the bed. The feeling was almost palpable, but she couldn't describe it. It was numbing and it felt… hungry, starving even. And it was aimed at her.

The hairs on the back of her neck stood up not a moment before the draining of her chakra continued. She couldn't move. It wouldn't let her. It had wrapped around her in a vice and kept her at bay, feeding on her energy like a greedy monster. On the bed, Naruto's almost lifeless body squirmed and his eyes snapped open; slit black and as golden as the sun.