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The first thing that Tsunade notices as she marches into the hospital room is that the Kakashi brat (as dubbed by Jiraiya) has a familiar shock of white hair. There's only one clan in Konoha with hair as white as lightning and the chakra to match: Sakumo, she thinks unbidden, the cold hand of grief gripping her throat. Returning to Konoha has been little but nostalgia and grief so far, just as she predicted. There is a glimmer of something else, though, like the glint of her necklace and the Uzumaki flame, a whisper of my village in the back of her mind. Perhaps the grief will never leave her, perhaps the pain will stay. But she returned to be the Hokage - she was hounded to be the Hokage by a fiesty, Uzumaki brat - and so the Hokage she will be.
The two men at Kakashi's bedside swivel around at her entrance. One looks like someone has painted him green and then gone to town with his eyebrows, but the other is more plain-looking - brown hair, dark eyes, and a head-guard that frames an average face. It's this man who jumps to attention. Green-man blinks slowly, failing to recognise her. Tsunade doesn't give a shit about recognition, but she almost smiles. What she does care about is the patient - a Hatake, god forbid - lying in the hospital bed. The tsukuyomi is a nasty technique. There’s only a few people she would wish it upon, and Sakumo's family aren’t any of them.
Tsunade introduces herself to the green man, waving the jumpy one back into his seat. Jōnin are all a bit odd, and these two are no exceptions. Maito Gai is very, well, green. Yamato’s refusal to divulge his surname - or perhaps his lack of one - is a point of interest, as is his appointment as a KSL interpreter. From what Tsunade knows of Konoha (and remembers of Sakumo), she imagines it’s a voluntary position. Unless there are more deaf shinobi in the village than there were twenty years ago, but she doubts that.
Kakashi here must be deaf, then, which Naruto failed to mention. He doesn’t stir as Tsunade’s chakra rolls into the room. He's facing away from the door, deathly still under the thin bedding. She would say he’s sleeping except for the crackle of chakra, a slice of lightning brimming across his skin. Touching him right now will earn her a zap, but she can’t say that she blames him. Three days of constant torture isn’t exactly a walk in the park. His back to the room makes communicating with him all the more difficult though: he can’t hear her, won’t look at her, and doesn’t want to be touched. One of those things will have to change, and it certainly isn’t going to be his ears.
Still. As for now, there are two other fine young men here who can answer some of her questions. Naruto did not stop talking all the way back to Konoha. It’s endearing, really, how much he worries about his teammates and allies, but there’s no stopping the kid once he’s started. Jiraiya seemed to find the whole thing hilarious, but joke’s on him once Tsunade becomes the Hokage. She’s going to sick Naruto on anyone she likes, and sick him on them she will.
“Is this the famed Kakashi-sensei that Naruto talked so much about?” Tsunade asks first, tapping a pen against the file in her hands.
Yamato nods sympathetically. “He's a handful.”
It’s unclear who he means.
She’s only met three Hatakes in her lifetime: Sakumo, his wife Mahiro, and their little ankle-biter Momo. Both Sakumo and his daughter had been profoundly deaf, so it’s hardly a surprise that this unknown Hatake is also deaf. He’s got the hair for it - and the chakra. Tsunade flips open the file she nabbed from the nurse to check: yep, he had the eyes for it too. Only his brown eye remains, the blue replaced by a sharingan: still mismatched, she thinks humorlessly, scanning further through the file.
The words Hatake Hatsumomo glare up from the page. Tsunade does a double take. There’s no mention of Kakashi anywhere in the file, in fact, but the report of his symptoms match the effects of tsukuyomi. She’s sure she’s in the right room: this has to be her patient. She flicks through the pages to his parentage - and there it is. Hatake Sakumo and Ikarashi Mahiro.
Drat, Tsunade thinks.
“Hatake… Hatsumomo?” she asks, remembering Sakumo’s little wild child running amok around the Hatake compound. Hatsumomo had been a fright. Even at three, she proved to be as driven as her mother and as brilliant as her father. There had been no doubt in Tsunade’s mind that she was going to grow up to outshine her parents. Konoha’s White Fang and ANBU Kingfisher were both exceptional shinobi in their own rights, but their daughter was going to be more.
Gai winces at the question. Yamato’s reply is a careful, “That’s the name on his medical record.”
Of course, Tsunade realises, cursing her short-sightedness. Well then. She scribbles out Kakashi's incorrect pronouns. Judging from the wincing, the hospital aren't in the habit of abiding to pronoun requirements. Vowing to change that, she then crosses out Kakashi’s deadname and jots down his real one just above. This is her hospital now.
“Hatake Kakashi,” she corrects, closing the file. She's seen enough. “Does he usually get his ass handed to him by two opponents? Budge over.”
Yamato scoots out of her way. Gai does not.
“I would advise against touching him,” he says admirably, holding up a hand as though he could really halt her. Arguing with her seems to cause him some distress, but he is firm; noble, Tsunade thinks, trying not to laugh in his face. Konoha shinobi really are something. “He's -”
“Deaf, I know,” says Tsunade, reaching past Gai to yank the duvet from the bed. She chucks it onto the floor, ignoring Gai’s wounded sound. It’s unhygienic to throw the bedding around, but it does the trick. Kakashi won't be an in-patient here much longer anyway, and she smiles as he peeks at her with a flat look, sharingan swirling like the eye of a storm.
“Roll over so your nice friend can tell you off for me,” she says, jabbing a thumb at Yamato. Her KSL is beyond rusty. About twenty years have passed since she last used it. She picked up bits and pieces of other sign languages over the years, but they'll be no use to her here. That’s something else she’ll have to brush up on - for practicality and Sakumo’s son.
Kakashi’s sharingan is almost as dark as the shadows under his eyes. He squints at her but it’s half-hearted, heavy, and then he glances at Yamato. Immediately, there’s a flurry of sign in the corner of Tsunade’s vision. She crosses her arms over her chest, almost swatting Gai with the file.
“You’re here to help him?” Gai asks. “And my student - Lee?”
Rock Lee. Tsunade’s other patient today. It sounds like the boy went up against a beast in the chūnin exams, but that’s Suna for you, she supposes.
“I’ll have to examine your student before making any promises, but yes, I am here to help,” she says, already turning her attention to the one-sided conversation between Yamato and Kakashi. “Provided he allows me to. I’ll manhandle him.”
Yamato remains straight-faced, but she feels the disapproval in his chakra like a bush of thorns. There’s something strangely familiar about his chakra, too, but Tsunade decides to investigate another time.
“That’s… not a good idea,” he says.
“Tough shit. Tell him I’ll count to five.”
Kakashi rolls over at the count of four. Tsunade sucks in a breath that he doesn’t hear, but Yamato glances to her, his expression blank. Kakashi’s eyes follow Yamato’s until they rest on her, but there is no recognition there; just a dog-tired stare and shadows as deep as bruises on his skin. He looks frighteningly like Sakumo. Remorse punches the air from Tsunade’s lungs: even with the mask, he could be her friend reanimated from the dead. Sakumo was about Kakashi’s age now when she left, the last time she’d seen him, the last time she ever would, and Tsunade feels dizzy at all that’s transpired since then. This hollowed young man is the ankle-biter that used to roll around with the Hatake wolves. Maybe he still does: maybe he’s still the little shit she remembers. Tsunade feels a smile rise unbidden on her face. It hurts to think of those she’s lost, but Kakashi is a Hatake, and Hatakes she knows how to deal with.
“Sit up, kid, let me get a look at you.”
The tsukuyomi genjutsu messes with the perception of time. As far as she knows, it renders victims unconscious upon completion - or even comatose. The report claims that Kakashi was in a comatose state for three weeks - and that was a week ago. Patients don’t simply snap awake from something like that, so that would explain his general lethargy and slow, unfocused blinking. Confusion is a common side-effect. His body will be re-adjusting to a sleep-wake cycle too, but given that the cause of his coma was traumatic, Tsunade doubts he’s been getting much sleep at all.
She runs a diagnostic-blue medical jutsu over him, checking his vital signs and reflexes. Lightning-bright chakra fizzles over him. She backs away with each zap, doubtful that he’s usually this tetchy. The worried looks from Yamato and Gai confirm her suspicions. Agitation goes hand-in-hand with the confusion, Tsunade knows, so she tries to put up with it until a bolt of his chakra snaps her hands.
She smacks his forehead with the clipboard. He startles as ungracefully as his father but slowly, as though it takes seconds for his mind to register the tap. The effect is rather comical, like a dopey, old dog waking from a morning-long nap.
“Zap me again and I’ll punch you.”
Yamato hardly needs to translate that.
If it's possible, Kakashi is even less cooperative after that. The sparkles die down, which is nice, but the smack seems to have startled his personality awake. He starts to huff and fidget like a pup, offering glares when Tsunade leans in too close and rolling his eyes at Yamato's signing. Gai's signing is enthusiastic enough for everyone in the room tenfold and Kakashi's brow pinches at the sight. He doesn't sign back, though, but rather continues to blink somewhat dozily even as his sharingan works to remember it all. Tsunade's tempted to smack him again, for medical purposes of course, but she doesn't want to risk scrambling his brains even more than what they've been scrambled.
“Good news is, I can heal this,” she says, and Gai's sigh of relief is enough to sway Kakashi's hair. “Bad news is, you're probably still going to be a little shit afterwards, but I can't fix everything.”
Gai opens his mouth to protest but then Kakashi - laughs.
Tsunade tries to maintain her air of annoyance by not smiling, but it’s difficult. Kakashi’s eyes close into little half-moons just like his mother, and even through his mask, she can see his father’s canines filling up his mouth. Mahiro had despaired Kakashi’s teething. You’ve married a wolf, Sakumo would remind her, slow-dancing in the courtyard. They had most of their arguments out in the Hatake courtyard, where the koi pond sparkled and the edge of the Nara forest loomed. Mahiro would pace around the engawa until Sakumo chased her down. Kakashi probably doesn’t remember his parents’ love for that place: he probably doesn’t remember much about them at all.
Get a grip, Tsunade thinks, shaking those thoughts away. The day is only going to get worse from here, so she can’t afford to succumb to all of her memories now. It would be ironic, too, if she lost her mind while trying to heal Kakashi’s, but she doubts that sort of humour will sit well with Gai. Yamato, maybe; he seems the cynical type. Kakashi might even appreciate it - if he wasn’t half out of his mind.
“All right brat, this might take a while, so get comfy,” Tsunade says, sliding her chair closer. Kakashi doesn’t quite meet her eye. “You - Gai - you might want to grab a coffee or something. No reason to hang around.”
“My rival’s recovery is every reason to hang around,” Gai replies.
Tsunade could kick him out, but she supposes she should at least try and make a good first impression. This is her hospital now; this is her village now. These jōnin are her men. So she rolls her eyes and lets him stay, willing to bet that he wouldn’t have moved, even if asked.
“You might as well sit,” Tsunade says to Yamato, pulling chakra into her hands. The lack of chairs doesn’t seem to bother him: he simply clambers onto the end of Kakashi’s bed like a cat and plants himself there: it strikes Tsunade as something he’s done many times before. Somehow sitting cross-legged on the bed seems to shave ten years from his face; he could be a teenager gossiping to his friend.
Kakashi stares at Yamato without really seeing, slogging through the depression that the tsukuyomi has left in his mind. But after a moment, he lifts a hand and makes a snipping motion by his ear; Tsunade doesn’t understand, but Yamato smiles.
“Yes, senpai,” he says, signing along. “It’s me. You’re going to give me a headache from all this worrying.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Tsunade says, lighting Kakashi’s forehead in a mint-green glow. “He’s the one who’s going to have a killer headache after this. But what can you do, hmm? That’s the price you pay for stupidity.”
Yamato hums his agreement. Gai opens his mouth to argue - but then shuts it again at Tsunade’s smile.
“He can be reckless,” Gai concedes, sounding pained by this feeble defence of Kakashi’s honour. “But he is a good man.”
Tsunade thinks of Sakumo, the best man she’d known. “I know,” she says, and as her chakra slips into the tangle of Kakashi’s mind, she says no more.