I'm out of sight, I'm out of mind
I'll do it all for you in time
And out of all these things I've done, I think I love you better now

- Ed Sheeran, 'Lego House'

Chapter IV: Shizune

The attack on Konoha begins at dawn. A scream severs the morning quiet like a mutilating scar, more a high-pitched, animal keening than any recognisable human sound; the shrill lilt of it is off kilter, somehow, speaking of something that has gone horribly wrong.

Konoha is sleeping and will be caught off-guard. The wind is strong and blows eastwards towards the village, sharply scented with pine and the coppery edge of blood.

It is already too late.

Raidou and Genma are loitering casually outside Tsunade's office when Shizune arrives in the early morning, the toxicology report tucked under her left arm. She catches a few lines of their conversation as she approaches. Raidou is gleefully ribbing Genma on the younger kunoichi he had been seen, ahem, socialising with last Saturday night.

"- should have seen the way she stared at you when you were getting drinks at the bar, seriously man you might as well have been a demi-god –"

Genma is discreet in the way he conducts his personal affairs, but he is handsome and aloof and notoriously apathetic when it comes to commitment - without being a psychopath, à la the Uchiha or Hyuuga - and so at age thirty-five, mature and accomplished (…the Hokage's personal guard! And good with his tongue, too … ) he is the subject of much interest amongst the kunoichi population in Konoha.

"- bit young, isn't she eh Shiranui, you absolute rogue –"

Shizune has heard that he's had a scattering of girlfriends here and there, none particularly serious or long-term.

" – best legs I've seen in a while though. Even longer than Yuugao's. Killer."

There had been a time when Shizune may have been made hurt and jealous by this banter, back when she and Genma had still been neighbours and teammates and she had harboured a well-concealed crush on the boy. But that time had come and gone two decades ago, and Shizune is far too pragmatic a kunoichi, too old, to feel sentimental over such things as the boy next door - even if the boy next door is (had been) Shiranui Genma, and even if Shiranui Genma is (had been) her oldest childhood friend, the boy she had grown up with and waged mock battles against in the streets outside their apartment complex, all those afternoons after class was over at the Academy.

She is, after all, hardly a girl anymore. He is no longer a boy, either. These days they have settled on a civil, tenuous, adult friendship, skirting carefully around each other.

They quieten down when she nears. Raidou offers her a slightly sheepish smile, his scar creasing across his cheek in a manner that is not unattractive.

"Morning, Shizune."

"Morning, Raidou, Genma." She nods at them both.

Genma nods back and twists the senbon between his teeth into the other corner of his mouth. He is calm and collected, completely unflustered by Raidou's teasing. "That about the pollen the Yamanaka girl sent over?" He glances meaningfully at the report.

"Yes. I just finished looking at the sample."

"And?"

"Better to let the Hokage know first," she declines politely, always mindful of protocol. Genma says nothing.

"She called us in for something," Raidou tells her, "but then she got a new report from the Kazekage's sister. Must've been important, because she suddenly shooed us out. We've been waiting out here for nearly an hour." He rubs the stubble on his chin ruefully. "I think she's waiting for you though, so just head in."

Shizune frowns. This will not be good. She knocks smartly on the door, tap tap tap, and waits for three seconds before she lets herself in, sliding between Raidou and Genma without looking at either of them.

"Tsunade-sama," she begins irritably when she sees the immense pile of unfinished paperwork on the desk, the sake flask perched precariously on a corner, "Tsunade-sama, you really need to –"

She breaks off abruptly at the almost pained look that Tsunade is giving her. She is leaning against the desk with a large photograph clutched in one hand, the other pressed lightly to her temple. Shizune turns immediately to close the door behind her, catching a glimpse of Genma's face before she swings the door shut. He had been watching her with an expression that appeared to vacillate between interest and apathy, perhaps even contempt. Shizune is too sensible these days to wonder why, and she pushes any curiosity or unease from her mind. There are more important things at hand.

"What is it?" she asks Tsunade. "What's wrong?"

"The toxicology report first." Tsunade sits herself behind the desk, sighing.

"It's as I had first guessed – a hallucinogenic." Shizune hands over the thick stack of paper. "The species itself is not something I have come across, but it's similar to a few strains of desert flower I've studied before. Its psychoactive effect is far stronger than those breeds, however, and –"she crosses her arms thoughtfully, thinking, "-it's particularly interesting because not only does it trigger changes in the mind by itself, it also amplifies genjutsu. Only a tiny amount is sufficient to significantly increase the physical reach and psychological impact of a genjutsu."

"So the genjutsu can be cast over a greater distance and hold the victim in a stronger lock."

Shizune nods. "And for longer."

"This is how they got Tenten, then."

"It seems the likeliest explanation. Tenten is not a bad genjutsu user, even if it's not her speciality." Shizune frowns. "Will this help her in the Suna court? The fact that she was incapacitated and could not have broken out of the genjutsu with normal effort?"

Tsunade sighs again. "I don't know. It's the best defence she'll have, but this will not be enough. We can't just point to the pollen. We'll need Kurenai to actually research into the genjutsu used before we can say for sure that Tenten could not have helped doing…what she did." A pause. She rubs her temple, already tired at six in the morning. "It's not the only thing we have to worry about right now."

"What is it?" Shizune forces herself to sound calm for Tsunade's sake.

"This just came in." Tsunade hands her the photograph. "They found the rebel who had carried the pollen to Tenten."

Shizune looks down at the photograph and suddenly finds that she cannot breathe, the air stilling in her lungs. She grasps at the corner of the desk. "Oh."

Tsunade is wincing. "Look familiar?"

Shizune stares down at the picture of the corpse, at the bone slicing its way out of the man's shoulder. "Kurenai's little girl," she whispers. She looks up. "Do you think she knows –"

"I doubt it. I think she's always assumed that the father was just a regular Sand shinobi." Tsunade's face hardens. "But she will find out soon. Sabaku no Temari wrote to say that Kurenai and Hinata have been dispatched to the rebel territories to investigate."

Shizune looks down at the corpse again. She had never heard of there being a shinobi clan bearing this type of physical …trait, but then again the nomadic rebels currently clashing with the Sunagakurean government have always kept tightly to themselves, preferring to remain independent from any shinobi village in the wild, barren desert. She shivers involuntarily, feeling the apprehension roll down her spine, cold and taut. Perhaps this man is the father. Who knows?

Suddenly she snaps her head up, the photograph crumpling slightly in a tightened grip. "Kurenai brought Misao over to Sunagakure. What if the authorities there find out she had a baby by a rebel? Kurenai's research would be ruled out on the sheer basis of conflict of interest."

"Shikamaru managed to get convince Temari to take care of the child." Tsunade smiles dryly at Shizune's disbelieving expression. "I know. I found it hard to believe at first, too, but then you know Shikamaru … She's promised to keep Misao's anomaly a secret. We'll just have to trust her. Shikamaru does."

"And Kurenai?" Shizune asks softly. "What do you think she will do when she finds out that …"

"What can she do?" Tsunade shakes her head. "Kurenai is one of the strongest kunoichi of her generation. She will fulfil her obligations and investigate the rebel jutsu as best as she can, even if …even if it is hard for her. Don't look at me like that, Shizune. God knows I don't want this either, but she is the only one who has the genjutsu expertise for the job."

"I know." Shizune bites her lip. "It's just –"

"Hokage-sama!" A hoarse shout, followed by heavy, shuddering footsteps; Shizune spins around to find the door being slammed open.

"Hana!"

The young Inuzuka heiress stumbles into the room, supported by Genma and Raidou on each side. Her arms are slick with blood, and Shizune starts because Hana, fierce, beautiful Hana is sobbing. She kneels down immediately to examine her wounds, noting with relief that the blood stems mostly from shallow cuts criss-crossing her skin. She gathers chakra in one hand to begin healing the crying woman, rubbing the other against the back of her neck soothingly.

Tsunade strides around the table, eyes blazing. "What happened?"

"The west gate," Hana chokes out, "we've been attacked. I was heading out for a training run with my team – could smell it drifting into the village, the air was too sweet, I knew there was something wrong but the sentries, and Ryuu – they started screaming – oh god, the screaming - " she suddenly clutches at Shizune's sleeve, bloodied fingers curling into the fabric and leaving dark, gleaming stains, "- they couldn't escape in time, they're still there, please help them please –"

"Hana." Tsunade kneels down in front of the Inuzuka and places her hands firmly on her shoulders, forcibly stilling the shudders wracking her body. "You need to calm down. Calm down. We can't help the others unless you tell us what happened."

Hana visibly swallows a whimper and squeezes her eyes shut. "We were a few minutes out of the west gate when I smelled something in the air. Pollen. Not native to this part of the country. My dogs smelled it too and they knew it was dangerous, started howling. It was being carried in our direction by the wind. I tried to warn the others but it was too late. They - they were captured by genjutsu. I could feel it, the foreign chakra wrapping around my mind, and I had forewarning so I was able to guard against it in time, I could break it, but even then for a moment I saw – I saw what they were seeing." Her eyes open, bloodshot and haunted, and Shizune can tell that whatever she had seen must have been truly terrible. "The sentries by the gate started attacking each other. My team was alright at first. Sayuri's kikaichu had found the pollen too and she knew a genjutsu had been cast, but then Ryuu –" Hana sobs, rocking back on her heels, "Ryuu attacked her. I couldn't help her, he was too strong."

Shizune feels her heart sinking. Tsunade is staring wide-eyed at Hana, her grip tightening around the Inuzuka's shoulders. Shizune reaches forwards and pulls lightly at her wrists.

"Tsunade-sama, you're hurting her," she says quietly. She is just as stunned as Tsunade but forces herself to push all panic aside, to be useful to her mentor. "Tsunade-sama." Genma is watching her intently. She ignores him.

"I should have known this would happen," Tsunade murmurs throatily. "I should have realised the rebels would want revenge against us for helping Suna –"

"Tsunade-sama, we need your orders," Shizune urges, her tone harsher now, and Tsunade shakes her head, letting go of Hana's shoulders abruptly.

"Raidou, go find Aburame Shino and Inuzuka Kiba. Anyone else with a natural advantage against genjutsu. Hunt down the attackers and bring them back here. Alive, if possible." She turns to Shizune, a hard glint in her eye. "You and Genma need to rescue those attacked by the gate. Save those you can and cordon off the area, make sure no one else is captured by the genjutsu. I'll send reinforcements after you. Hana, find Nara Shikamaru and tell him we need to evacuate the village immediately."

Raidou is already running halfway down the corridor by the time Shizune helps Hana stand shakily to her feet. Her arms are still bloody but the wounds have been healed over, pale scars lacerating the skin like barbed wire.

"Ready when you are, Shizune," Genma says quietly, and Shizune sees that there are suddenly twin knives in his hand, the curved blades pulsing with chakra.

She wipes the blood darkening her palms on her trousers and grabs the medic pack in the corner of the office. "Let's go."

Uncle Dan had died in the night a week ago, Shizune's last remaining family slipping away from the world with ragged breaths that were visible in the crisp winter cold. Shizune had been asleep.

It is evening now, and her uncle's body is lying in the morgue. The bleeding had finally stopped, but too late for him, and too late for Tsunade.

Tsunade is here in the apartment Shizune shares – had shared – with her uncle, hunched on top of the sofa. She is not crying. A mug of hot tea sits untouched on the coffee table. Tsunade stares blindly at the steam slowly drifting up, and Shizune is cradling her own heartbreak close to her chest, like she doesn't quite know what would happen if she were to let it go, but even then it is clear to her that Tsunade's heartbreak is so much worse, so much crueller, cutting deep ravines into her soul.

Oh, Tsunade …

Shizune looks at Tsunade and thinks for the hundredth time how incomprehensibly beautiful the older woman is. She feels her heart constrict at the pain that thrums visibly through Tsunade's body, rendering her intensely fragile where strength once resided. It is taking everything Tsunade has not to scream, to push her body against something hard and sharp and shriek like an injured animal: every exhalation is deliberate and carefully controlled, as if something terrible would come out of her if she let herself breathe normally, a wild, unhinged grief that would destroy everything she knows, and so she embalms the sobs within herself until they crumple into her body, contorting her shoulders into stiff peaks.

"I'm coming with you," Shizune whispers. Her throat is dry. Tsunade is silent for a long while, though she does not appear surprised.

"What about your team?" Tsunade finally asks, looking at her with a closed expression on her face. Shizune thinks of Genma and Mitsuo, her boys. They had made chuunin only recently. Her uncle had been so proud of her …

"They'll be alright," she says, setting her mouth into a determined, childish frown, playing at being mature and grown up. She had always looked up to Tsunade. Tsunade needs her now, Tsunade needs to be taken care of now. "They'll live."

"They don't always." Tsunade shakes her head, voice cracking on the last word. For a brief moment, Shizune allows herself to imagine how she would feel if her teammates were killed. The fear is sudden, immense and painful, and she quickly packs away the feelings, smoothing the terror out of her mind as if it were a crease in her uniform.

"They'll live," she repeats herself calmly, disconcertingly level-headed for a fourteen year-old. "Genma's good at getting the two of them out of trouble. Mitsuo will stop being an ass eventually."

Tsunade accepts her judgement without further questioning. (There is something in Shizune's face that speaks to her quietly of Dan, and she cannot find it in herself to say no.) Later she will feel guilty for the responsibility she thereby placed on a child.

"Go pack and say your goodbyes," she says simply, uncurling herself from the sofa and moving already towards the door. "I'll meet you at mine before dusk."

Shizune never ended up saying goodbye to anyone. It wasn't that she hadn't wanted to. She had known Genma and Mitsuo would be furious with her for leaving without a word, but somehow the opportunity had never come up – there was just so much to pack, bills to pay in advance, the flat to seal up. Her uncle's grave to visit. Mitsuo was out when she passed by the Hyuuga compound. Genma hadn't been at home either when she stepped out of her apartment and locked the door – training with his older brother, probably. She hadn't waited to see if he would return, even though she had had an hour or so spare before she had to meet Tsunade.

Shizune wonders sometimes why she hadn't waited. Perhaps she could have told Genma she was leaving had she stayed a while longer, perhaps she could have said a proper goodbye instead of leaving Konoha wordlessly. Why hadn't she?

It wasn't that Genma hadn't been important to her, she reflects. Genma had been her best friend since they were toddlers, before they were drafted into a genin team with Mitsuo, and she had harboured a mild crush on him for years. It had simply been the case that Tsunade mattered more, Tsunade's grief mattered more. Tsunade had become her only link to her uncle, and she felt the absence of Dan sharply, a breathless pain slanting beneath her ribs. (The truth is that she had also been afraid; Genma wielded too much influence over her, she cared too much, and had he asked her to stay she may not have found it in herself to go.)

When she had finally returned to Konoha with Tsunade and Naruto, fifteen years after she left the village and the boy next door, she found that Genma had moved. His apartment had been sold to a jounin she did not know. A year later she moved too, switching to a small studio closer to the Hokage's offices.

Mitsuo had died as a chuunin. Genma had made jounin. She had never expected Genma to forgive her for leaving without a word, and had not been surprised when his reaction to her return had been cool and muted: not exactly unfriendly, but the closeness they had shared had dissipated, replaced by a carefully maintained distance and the faintest undercurrent of resentment. Too much time had passed. They had each grown into adults separately, had felt and thought and loved and lost too much separately. Their time had come and gone.

They find one of the sentries dead a short distance from the gate, slumped face down on the road. His partner is lying on the ground with a bloodied katana in his hand, staring unseeingly at the sky with his eyes rolled half back, screaming so loudly his back arches off the ground. Shizune takes one look at the man and knows that he is beyond help.

"We need to kill him," she says, trying to keep her voice steady. Genma stills.

"There is no way to help him?"

"No. Not even Tsunade can do anything for him now."

Genma nods, steps forwards and slashes the man's throat cleanly. The screaming abruptly stops but she can still hear a shrill keening in the air, or is it in her head? They move on, moving out of the village and into the forest, taking care to reroute their chakra every few seconds to prevent any genjustsu from taking hold.

It takes a full minute for Shizune to realise that Genma still trusts her, utterly and completely, and she finds that the revelation surprises and comforts her even as she smells blood reeking from the trees before them.

Aburame Sayuri is collapsed in between the thick roots of a scorched oak. The left side of her body has been burned raw and she is barely conscious. She gazes deliriously at Shizune's face when she hurries near, swinging her medic pack to the ground.

"Shizune-san …"

"Shh. Relax. You'll be fine," Shizune soothes the younger woman, holding down her juddering body when she cleans the burns with antiseptic. Sayuri gasps in agony, her kikaichu swarming up uneasily behind her head.

"Shizune-san … be careful …"

Suddenly there is a flash of colour in the periphery of her vision, and Shizune springs up instinctively into a defensive stance, eyes widening when she sees Tachibana Ryuu leaping down from the branches toward her. His features are contorted with terror and his fingers are moving impossibly fast, forming sign after sign. Flame flickers in the air before him; she can feel the heat prickling her skin from a few feet away. "Stop, Ryuu!" she cries, knowing that it is futile and that he cannot hear anything the genjutsu does not let him hear.

"Shizune!" Suddenly she finds Genma standing in front of her, shielding her from Ryuu. He is tall enough for his shoulders to block her view but she can see his wrists spinning, his elbows arcing up – the quiet hiss of metal lacerates the air, and she steps from behind Genma to see Ryuu doubled on the ground, senbon stabbed into each finger, his jutsu stillborn.

"Genma," she breathes, and he turns to look down at her, his eyes meeting hers steadily.

"Focus on healing Sayuri. I'll protect you both."

Ryuu is pulling the senbon from his fingers, seemingly oblivious to the pain. Shizune turns back to Sayuri and concentrates on controlling her chakra. She trusts Genma, too.

There is no way she can keep rerouting her chakra around her body if she is to heal Sayuri, meaning she will be exposed to genjutsu, but she has no choice: Sayuri will die if she does not close her wounds soon. Pale blue light crackles around her fingertips as Shizune focuses on shaping her chakra, sliding it under Sayuri's skin like a scalpel. It is immensely difficult and risky, operating on such a large wound in the open, but Shizune had not been chosen as Tsunade's first apprentice for nothing. She slides her palm over singed flesh, threading her chakra into ruptured arteries and veins, guiding Sayuri's body to rebuild tissue.

Sayuri's breathing is faltering. Her skin is becoming damp and clammy to the touch. Shizune frowns; she is going into shock. She sheds her jacket, covering the injured woman with it to keep her warm, and deftly strokes her throat with a thumb, opening up her airways with gentle pulses of chakra.

"Shizune." Genma is calling her, but there is no urgency in his voice and Sayuri's condition is fragile, so she keeps working, pumping chakra into her broken body.

"Yes?"

"Shizune." There is a strange hoarseness to his voice and the smell of burning is suddenly thick in the air. She looks up then. Genma is gone. In his place there is a corpse, or rather there is Genma's body, dying; it stands there looking down at her with horror and disappointment twisting what used to be Genma's face, except half the muscle has been burned away and she can see the gleaming white bone of his jaw: clean ivory. His body is smouldering even as she stares up at him; blackened, putrid flesh peels off slowly and drops to the ground, his intestines glistening sickeningly from his burnt-out abdominal cavity, slipping and sliding and falling out in slick, creamy strings. Ryuu is crouched a few feet away, smoke billowing softly from his bleeding fingertips, his gaze clouded with ash.

"Genma?" she asks faintly, falling back onto her heels.

"Shizune," the corpse whispers, taking a stumbling step towards her, a long strip of scorched flesh falling from his elbow and swinging against the charred bone at his thigh. She can smell the overwhelming stench of decomposition emanating from the body, of singed human flesh. "Why did you have to leave?"

(They don't always live, Tsunade had told her. They don't always live.)

Shizune opens her mouth and screams.

She wakes to find Sayuri sleeping on the bed next to hers, the left side of the Aburame's small body swaddled in bandages. She herself is in a clean hospital shift a few sizes too large, her skin slippery with ointment. They are not in a hospital. She blinks up groggily, squinting into a lone light bulb dangling from what appears to be a rock ceiling.

"Shizune?"

She turns her head, wincing at the pain that shoots up her neck. Genma is sitting by her bed, his back against the wall, a half-eaten apple on the small table next to him. Overnight stubble shadows his jaw. When she lifts her head slowly she can see that they are in a small room somewhere underground, or perhaps dug into a mountain. Three more patients lie unconscious around the makeshift ward.

"What happened?" she asks softly. She cannot help but stare at his face, at the unbroken skin, the even, unmarred features.

"Tsunade ordered the entire village to evacuate," he explains quietly. "We're in the emergency shelter underneath the Hokage monuments."

"Are we still under attack?"

"We don't know yet." Genma frowns, biting down on a senbon so that it sticks upwards. "No enemy shinobi have actually been located. The Inuzuka hounds are still howling like it's the end of the world, though, so the pollen is still probably in the air."

"I was caught by genjutsu?" she guesses, disappointed in herself. Secretly she thinks that spending the end of the world with Genma may not be such a bad thing.

"Yes." A pause. Genma stares at the door, then back at her face. He leans forwards, brushes sweat-soaked hair from her forehead. "You really scared me there, 'zune."

She's startled by his use of her childhood nickname. Suddenly she is reminded of a time when they were ten, mock-fighting on a familiar street. The apartment complex they shared looms to the right. Genma is late for dinner; his mother will be angry at him, but he doesn't seem to mind. He is smiling openly at her, still breathing heavily from physical exertion, and his milky brown hair flops into his eyes as he says: "I'm really glad you'll be on my team, 'zune-chan. I know we'll be great together. You and me. And Mitsuo. We'll be great!"

"What happened?" she asks now, shaking herself out of impending nostalgia. No use getting sentimental, Shizune. Be rational. Be useful. And yet a gentle ache is already settling along the bottom of her chest, heavy and sweet.

"You started screaming at me," he says. He keeps his voice casual, calm, but his expression is serious and it tells her that he had been worried. "You started screaming and you wouldn't stop. Something about how you had no choice but to leave. You said that Tsunade needed you." He chuckles wryly, a low rumbling in his throat. "Even caught in a genjutsu, all you think about is supporting the Hokage."

Shizune bites her lip, embarrassed. "And then?"

"And then I took out Ryuu and dragged all of you back here. Well, reinforcements arrived and they helped drag you back." He brushes the back of her neck softly with his fingers. "I had to take you out, too. Sorry about that."

She winces as she prods at the inflamed muscle with a fingertip. "Must have been a pretty hard blow, Genma. What, you holding a grudge against me?" she jokes, only to flush immediately at the inappropriateness of her comment. Stupid, stupid –

"Maybe," he says simply, grinning a little.

She looks away, not knowing what to say. "When will I be allowed to go? I don't feel that bad. Tsunade will be wanting my help."

"That keen to leave me again, huh?"

She turns back to stare at him. He's smiling at her good-naturedly, a hint of wistfulness in the gentle tilt of his mouth.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she says stiffly.

"Yes, you do." He leans forwards, resting his elbow on the bed and prodding her in the cheek with a calloused finger. "….. Just don't make a habit of it, 'zune."

She swallows. When she speaks all the words come out in a rush, as if they had been there inside her all along, lingering at the back of her throat: "I had to do it, you know. My uncle – and Tsunade, she was the only one who knew how I – she really needed me, Genma, she …" She breaks off unsteadily, failing to find the words to explain herself. It's a bit late for explanations, anyway, and in any case she has a feeling that he's grown to understand her reasons on his own.

"I know." He sighs. "You're right. Tsunade does need you. I can tell by the way you act around each other."

"I'm not sorry," she says, tilting her face up obstinately even as a quaver quietly fractures each word.

"I know." There is no bitterness in his voice. He hand comes up to hold her chin gently. "I know, Shizune."

Silence.

"I missed you," he tells her mildly, brushing his thumb across her cheek. "Well, I was mostly angry at first, but then I realised you weren't going to come back anytime soon, and I ended up just missing you instead."

"I missed you too," she says truthfully.

"When you came back I became angry again, because I didn't know how else to react after not seeing you for fifteen years. I didn't really understand how you could simply decide to walk back in my life, just like that, as if nothing had happened and you hadn't abandoned me without a word."

"I didn't aband-" she tries, but the attempt dies in her mouth because the truth is she had abandoned him, deliberately and consciously.

"It's alright." He senses her discomfort. "I understand why you had to choose Tsunade." A pause. He flicks the senbon around his mouth lazily. " I would probably have done the same. She has a spectacular rack."

"You can't say things like that about the Hokage!" she laughs, sitting up and blushing furiously. Genma only grins. Something is mending between them, something that had lain broken for more than two decades; she reaches for his hand on the bed, and they are both in their early thirties - well into adulthood – but it still feels utterly natural when she smiles at him and says: "Friends?"

He laughs loudly, and she wants to lay her hand on his chest to feel the vibration. "Friends."

She beams at him and gingerly shifts to the far side of the bed. Raising an eyebrow, he clambers on, careful not to lean his weight against her body.

"You missed a lot, you know," he tells her when they are comfortably sitting side by side. "Like my jounin exam. I was brilliant."

"I'm sure you were."

"You missed Mitsuo's funeral, too," he says softly. Shizune does not reply, only settling her head against the wall. "He never stopped being an ass," Genma continues, and she lets out a soft exhalation, half-laugh, half-sigh.

"You missed my first near-death experience," she offers a little weakly. "I was experimenting with poisons when I was fifteen. Messed up badly on an antidote." She grimaces. "I threw up for a week. You would have been vastly entertained."

He laughs again. "Sounds like my first date. You missed that too. Well, you were supposed to be my first date, you know." He glances at her wryly, a little cheekily. "I had it all planned out when I was thirteen. But since you decided to vacate the premises while I was hitting the peak of puberty, that particular honour fell to Yamanaka Kumiko. I took her out to the fanciest restaurant I could afford and she got food poisoning. There was no second date."

Shizune chuckles a little reluctantly. Yamanaka Kumiko is still stunning despite having hit thirty-seven last month. "You missed my twenties," she pouts a little. "I was much better looking in my twenties."

"You're still good looking, 'zune," he says honestly.

She brightens up despite herself. "I am?" She reaches a hand to her hair, touching the short, roughly cut strands self-consciously. "I'm not blonde. Or blue-eyed." Unlike Yamanaka Kumiko, who is both, and leggy to boot.

Genma appears torn between bemusement and seriousness. He refrains from telling her that his preference had been securely settled in favour of black hair and large, dark eyes a long, long time ago, by the girl who had grown into the kunoichi sitting by his side. Blondes are attractive and all, but there is something about Shizune's quieter beauty that has always appeared timeless and untouchable to him, something about her self-control that sets him at ease.

Suddenly he slips the senbon from his mouth, embedding it with a flick of his wrist an inch into the wall, and he leans down fluidly to kiss her on the cheek, his lips briefly grazing the corner of her mouth. His body is warm next to hers, broad and reassuring and strong. "You're as beautiful as you used to be," he murmurs in a low voice, not moving his face from hers. "God, I missed you, 'zune."

Shizune takes his hand in hers. "I know," she says, leaning her cheek against his. "I know."