Tsunade’s gaze lingered on Ryusei, but her thoughts weren’t in the present anymore.

They were far away, drawn back into memories she hadn’t let herself visit for years.

She remembered the whispers of her childhood, the clan talks she had once brushed off as boring adult business.

Only later had she learned the truth of them.

Before the Senju clan’s dissolution, right during their birth in the same year, the Great Elder, Takeshi’s father, had somehow managed to convince even her grandfather, Hashirama, to agree to something unthinkable at the time: a betrothal.

Hashirama had wanted peace between the two Senju factions, and for once, the Great Elder seemed to want it too.

A marriage, binding his son, Takeshi, to Tsunade, Hashirama’s granddaughter.

A way to put an end to the infighting and guarantee safety for both bloodlines inside the new environment.

Tobirama had opposed it, of course, but Hashirama’s word had been law.

And so the promise had been made right during their year of birth.

She had been too young to understand at first.

Too young to know what it meant.

Then the arrangement ended as suddenly as it began.

Hashirama’s death came not long after, in a few years, and with it, Tobirama had begun quietly burying the pact.

Eventually, no one mentioned it anymore.

It became a silence that grew heavier with every passing year, until it turned into taboo.

But the damage, or maybe the connection, had already been made.

She had already become aware of it somehow one day during their childhood, back when she was still in the Academy.

Tsunade had always hated the idea of being told who to marry.

With her pride, her temper, her refusal to be ‘chained’, it had been natural to despise the notion.

Yet the knowledge that it had once existed changed the way she looked at Takeshi.

That handsome boy, growing taller, sharper with every year, how could she not notice him once she knew she had been promised to him?

Even if she rejected the thought, she caught herself watching him.

Sometimes with irritation, sometimes with something else. Curiosity. What-if.

And Takeshi, for his part, had grown cold.

She hadn’t realized it back then, but she could see it now, his sharpness, his distance, had roots in that broken promise.

To him, her rejection of the idea hadn’t been just rebellion. It had been personal. An insult.

And she had never been the type to back down, to apologize.

They clashed, over pride, over clan politics, over ideals.

Arguments that flared too hot, misunderstandings that never had time to cool.

Still, she couldn’t deny it. Even in those days, there had been something between them.

A spark never fanned into flame.

She had daydreamed, sometimes against her will, about what might have been if that promise had gone through.

If Tobirama hadn’t erased it.

If she hadn’t been drawn deeper into Konoha’s structure, the Academy, Hiruzen’s tutelage, her team with Jiraiya and Orochimaru, while Takeshi stayed rooted in the compound, in the politics of the revivalist faction.

They had been pulled onto opposite tracks before they ever had a chance.

And maybe Tobirama had known it all along.

Maybe that was why he never spoke of the pact again, even before he disbanded the clan entirely.

He hadn’t dared discard his brother’s word outright, but he had suppressed it, smothered it, because he must have realized what she now felt in her bones: their lineages were destined to stand opposed.

Tsunade’s fists clenched at her side.

All those years, she had told herself she had no regrets about it.

That it was better that way.

But staring at Ryusei now, Takeshi’s son, with his face and bearing so familiar, the old knot twisted inside her chest again.

She remembered Takeshi’s pride. His refusal to bend.

His eyes that never flattered her, never worshipped her like others did.

She remembered how, sometimes, that very refusal had made her want to prove herself in front of him.

She remembered the anger, the shouting, the cold silence afterward.

And she remembered the moments, brief, fragile, when she had wondered what would have happened if one of them had simply reached out, without words, without politics, without pride.

Her throat tightened.

Now it was too late. Takeshi was gone.

But his son stood here, carrying that face, that spirit, and maybe even that same pride that refused to yield.

And for the first time in years, Tsunade felt her carefully buried past surge back to the surface, raw and uninvited.

Tsunade now also remembered the strangeness she had felt when she first learned Takeshi had married and later had a child.

She had even known the woman vaguely, Miyako, one of the quieter Senju daughters, from another elder lineage.

They had crossed paths in the hospital, and long before that, even on the clan playgrounds as children.

Miyako had grown into a high-ranking medical shinobi, not leaving the Hospital much, polite, quiet, and withdrawn, the complete opposite of Tsunade in every way.

And for some reason, that had made her feel even worse.

Something about it left her unsettled, downcast in a way she couldn’t name.

She had avoided Miyako in the hospital after that, deliberately taking different corridors, steering clear whenever there was a chance of their paths crossing. She couldn’t bear it.

The last time she heard Takeshi’s name was when news reached her that he had fallen in the Second Shinobi War.

By then, Nawaki was already gone, and she had been too devastated, too hollowed, to dwell on anything else.

She had accepted the report numbly. It was a war. People died. She told herself it was normal.

She never imagined, never allowed herself to imagine, that he had probably been killed by their own.

But now, recalling it all, the sequence was too clear.

Nawaki’s death first, then Takeshi’s.

One in the heart of her family, the other a knot she had never untangled, unfinished business that still lived like a stone in her chest.

Together, they had left her incapable of opening her heart to Dan Katō later, even as he stayed by her side around that time patiently, before his death, too.

She remembered those days with Dan, how often he spoke to her, how he tried to console her with gentle words, steady support, kindness, and help that never wavered once.

She had appreciated it. Leaned on it, even.

But when she compared it to what she had known with Takeshi, those jabs, those sharp competitions, the teasing, in their childhoods and adolescence, and the endless shouting matches that left her chest aching, in their young adulthood, the pangs when she almost ran into him after they stopped speaking, as they got even older, it was never the same.

With Takeshi, there had been fire, uncertainty, the ache of wondering what he thought, whether and why he had changed, the hesitation of wanting to speak first but never being able to lower her pride.

Sometimes she thought, though she never admitted it, that if he had been the one to break the silence in those last, long years… she might have lowered her pride at last.

Maybe it would have been different.

Maybe it wouldn’t have ended in ashes.

But he never came. And now, it was far too late.

Her throat clenched.

She blinked hard, but couldn’t stop it anymore.

A few tears slipped down her cheeks, breaking free despite all the walls she had built around them.

Ryusei noticed the shimmer in her eyes before the tears fell.

He looked away quickly, pretending not to see, his expression set in that same mask of cold relief, shame, and resentment.

Inside, though, he smirked.

‘Perfect. She’s cracking exactly where I need her to.’

Tsunade’s hand rose halfway to her face, then stopped.

She didn’t bother wiping the tears.

Instead, she clenched it into a fist and let her voice spill, low and raw.

“…What Konoha, no, what the Third Hokage, my teacher, did… it was too much.”

Ryusei tilted his head, silent, letting her continue.

“They weren’t traitors. All that faction wanted was more political representation. More say in the village that their blood had built. That wasn’t against the village law. Not even close.”

Her jaw tightened. “And yet they were cut down, in the middle of a war, stabbed in the back when we could least afford it. Root’s work… it has to have been.”

Her voice dripped with hatred at the word.

Ryusei let a faint, reluctant laugh slip, but it was hollow, mocking himself.

“You say that now. But back then? To you, they were just stubborn old men clinging to the past. Too proud to bend, too blind to see what the Will of Fire demanded.”

Her shoulders flinched. She looked down. “…I did think that,” she admitted bitterly.

“I even thought they were ‘fools’ during my youth back then. ‘Ignorant oldtimers.’ That disbanding was… democratic. The clan majority clearly decided… And the ones who refused… I thought they were the ‘problem’, instead.”

She shook her head slowly, the green necklace at her chest swaying.

“But now… now I see. They weren’t fools. I was the fool.”

Ryusei’s eyes stayed on her, unreadable, though inside he almost laughed at how easily she was saying what he wanted to hear.

He spoke with just the right amount of bitterness, each word heavy, reluctant, as if pulled from him against his will. “The only way to protect themselves, to protect the Senju name, was to group together and look out for each other. To build strength in numbers. They weren’t wrong about that. The pity is they overestimated themselves… underestimated Konoha. And they paid the price.”

Ryusei lowered his gaze, his tone sharp but quiet.

“And now? Look around. Excluding me, who should have died today, or really even countless times before, too many to count. The only Senju left are you, because of your heritage, your title… and the ones who willingly threw away their surname. Everyone else…”

He let the sentence trail, as if the words themselves were too bitter to finish.

Her teeth ground together, in realisation of his point, fury and grief twisting in her gut.

The fire in her chest burned hotter, not only at Konoha’s betrayal, not only at Danzo and Root’s poison, but at her own blindness.

‘How could I not see it? How could I swallow their words so easily?’

Her mind screamed with questions she could no longer suppress.

‘All they wanted was to revive their clan, to have a voice. Does that justify death? Was it so unforgivable to want the Senju to live on, like every other clan in this village? The Nara, the Akimichi, the Yamanaka, they’ve always fought for influence, and no one ever cut them down for it. But the Senju… my clan… were slaughtered for less. For nothing but pride and politics. At best, they just went against the internal clan decision to disband, but did it truly warrant massacre, and how could Konoha even enforce that?’

Her eyes darkened, the shadow of realization finally pressing down on her. “This wasn’t just policy,” she muttered bitterly. “This was betrayal.”

Ryusei let silence hang for a beat, then added just enough weight to nudge her further. “By your own comrades. By your own village.”

Her breath grew ragged. She could no longer separate it in her mind: Root, Danzo, Hiruzen. All of them were part of it.

All of them had known, had allowed it, had kept it buried. Hiruzen, especially, her teacher, the man she had once trusted most.

He hadn’t protected them. He hadn’t protected Takeshi – he greenlighted his death even.

He had let Root have its way, hiding it under the mask of the ‘Will of Fire’.

Her fists trembled. “And I followed him. I defended him. I even—”

She cut herself off, biting down on her lip hard enough to taste blood.

Ryusei tilted his head, feigning hesitation, as though he shouldn’t say more.

“…You were never cruel. Never dumb. But you were taught a certain, flawed system since the Academy, if I might guess. They shaped you to think loyalty meant obedience, that Konoha’s survival meant Senju’s erasure. And you believed it.”

The words struck like hammer blows.

She couldn’t deny them, not now, not with Ryusei standing in front of her as living proof of what she had ignored.

Her voice cracked. “They… they really destroyed us, didn’t they? Just to keep control.”

Ryusei looked away, his expression tight, bitter, as if the admission itself cost him. “…Yes.”

Tsunade’s chest heaved, her eyes burning.

‘Takeshi was right. And I was too blind to stand with him. I left him all alone for so long, facing all that real-world pressure… Instead, I blamed him, and lived inside an illusion.’ 

That was one of the things that hurt her the most, too.

A silence stretched between them, heavy and raw.

Ryusei stood quietly, playing his role perfectly, the boy who looked pained to speak such truths, who seemed resigned, almost broken.

Tsunade only clenched her fists tighter, her nails digging into her palms as the weight of it all bore down.

‘I failed him. I failed them all. And I failed myself.’

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep