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Tsunade wanted a drink, but she couldn't offer one to the man standing on the other side of her desk. Well, she could. She maybe even ought to. It was just too much like making a memorial offering.
Maboroshi couldn't touch a bowl of sake. He couldn't drink it the way a living person could, but maybe he wanted it anyway?
Tsunade didn't have a lot to give the sealbound ghost in exchange for his service and loyalty, but even the Hokage bowed to her honored dead. She offered rice and water for the hungry dead, too; she just did that privately.
Maboroshi wasn't in either category, and it wasn't Maboroshi's fault that Konoha had no precedents for the protocol and promises between between the Hokage and a ghost. Death normally released oaths of loyalty so that the dead wouldn't be tied to the corpse of their past life.
Tsunade had offered Maboroshi release from his oaths, and he'd declined. Maybe she could contract with him like a Summons? "I don't know what to do with you," Tsunade said for the thirtieth time since she first met Maboroshi. "I have ideas, but I don't know which ones are feasible."
Maboroshi shrugged. "I'm sorry, Hokage-sama. Experimentation in the Tower seems like a bad idea." He glanced over his shoulder at the door to her office.
Tsunade tapped her index finger on her desk and decided not to reveal her doubts. If he thought she meant uncertainty about what he could do, she should let him keep that misconception.
She said, "No, that should come much later in the process." It would have to happen eventually, but there was no point starting testing at the more lethal end of shinobi defenses. "Now that you have the option of invisibility, we can let you leave the Tower." She had a plan for how to let him out already. "I'll be having you work with Maito Gai for a while. The two of you can explore Konoha and get a better idea of your abilities."
Gai wasn't ANBU, but he was trustworthy, and no one-- ninja or civilian,would blink at him doing something odd. By Gai's standards, running a search pattern through the city while wearing a backpack filled with rocks wasn't even strange. Gai could stop at almost any training ground. Over the course of a few days, he could visit all of them.
Gai would understand the necessity of reorientation for a comrade. He also noticed and remembered far more than most people thought he did.
"See how far you can go from the seal. Try walking through things. See if packed earth is different from granite or if different kinds of wood change anything." Tsunade hesitated. "Watch for seals. Don't challenge them; I'm mostly curious which ones you can sense. We'll see about possible interactions under more... controlled circumstances."
"With the Nara sealmaster?" Maboroshi asked.
Tsunade suppressed a sigh because she didn't like that title attached to Nara Shikako, not because it wasn't true and deserved, but because the young woman wasn't strong enough to survive persistent and targeted assassination efforts. Tsunade hadn't briefed Maboroshi on Shikako because there were still things Tsunade didn't know about Maboroshi.
Tsunade might be willing to give Shikako levers to manipulate Maboroshi, but she wasn't going to give Maboroshi levers to manipulate Shikako. Tsunade was Shikako's Hokage more truly than she was Maboroshi's. Tsunade might work with the man for years without forming that sort of personal attachment.
The circumstances of Maboroshi's death made it unlikely that he worked for or with Tsunade's political enemies. He and his wife had been socially enmeshed in a way that other interfering and nameless agents hadn't seemed to be. Maboroshi was loyal to his friends and comrades and to Konoha, but Tsunade had never held his oath while he lived. Maboroshi had no reason to think well of Senju Tsunade, no experience to show him that she was worthy of her current office.
Tsunade still had no idea what to offer him, what levers might shift his loyalty. If it even needed shifting. She had no definite reason to think it did. "Shikako's young for her rank," she said, "and she'll never be Jiraiya's equal, but she's what we've got."
Maboroshi looked a little taken aback.
"She's careful," Tsunade amended. She was pretty sure that Maboroshi didn't have enough data on Shikako to know the dimensions of that lie.
And Shikako didn't have an emotional attachment to Maboroshi, so she probably wouldn't risk herself or any bystanders for his sake. Probably. The girl was also sharper about spotting patterns and anomalies than she thought she was.
Maboroshi nodded and seemed to accept Tsunade's statement. "She must be in order to make special jounin in sealing at her age."
Tsunade laughed. "Oh, no. That's not what earned her rank. She's a tracking specialist. Seals are more..." She shrugged. "The girl would still be a chunin if we were only looking at seals."
The fallout from the attempted kidnapping in Grass had distracted several people who really should have been paying attention from the careful calculation behind everything that Shikako had done during her fight with Gaara. By the time the match ended, she had used everything she wanted to show off.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Tsunade had emphasized the 'almost died' part of things a bit more heavily than she might have in other circumstances because she wanted to give the impression that there might be long term repercussions for Shikako's health. Nara Shikako was an ordinary chunin level shinobi who'd seen a chance to show off and wrecked herself.
Kids did that sometimes. Clan kids especially.
Now, Nara Shikako was a special jounin in something other than sealing because her seals were no longer worth boasting about. She'd burned herself out, and her current rank and assignment were meant to keep her from killing herself in an effort to repeat her chunin exams performance.
Tsunade figured that lie had just enough truth in it-- a lesser medic could not have saved Shikako-- to hold for a while and give Shikako time to grow. She felt vindicated by the fact that Sand had left Konoha's examinees out of their bingo book entirely, a pretty clear signal that the new Kazekage was concerned about them being targets.
Maboroshi didn't need to know any of that. Tsunade and Shikako might well need him not to know. Shikako the soon to be a sealmaster was much more of a threat to a seal bound ghost than Shikako the sensor, and Maboroshi probably wouldn't forget it.
Then again, Shikako was as easy to underestimate as Gai was because most people focused on just one facet of her abilities. Tsunade smiled at Maboroshi. "I hope you won't mind working with her. She could use a role model who isn't Hatake. She seems to think he's funny." Tsunade offered a frown that said that she disagreed.
Maboroshi nodded. "I owe her a great deal." He looked down at his hands. The right one moved as if he were trying to grip something. "I can't spar or teach her jutsu." His mouth twisted a little. "I'm still not used to it."
"I never asked--" Tsunade wasn't sure that she should, but she did anyway. "Can you smell things? Or-- Do you know what the dead get out of Obon offerings?"
"I don't know," he answered. "It hasn't been-- From my point of view, it's still less than a week since I died. I don't-- What would I do with downtime? I don't have--" He stretched his hands out in front of himself. "I used to make jewelry. Nothing really fancy or expensive but good enough for a craft fair in a small town or a third rate market in the city. We-- I-- had a cat."
Tsunade felt a little guilty. She ought to have thought. "I'm sorry," she told him. She softened her voice. "If you'd like, I'm sure that Gai would help you decorate a room or otherwise find somewhere that's pleasant to be. You're an S class secret, but nobody's looking for you. We don't have to bury you in a closet under the mountain."
He pursed his lips. "Nobody's looking for me yet. Me being impossible won't hide me forever. And there's no point in keeping me active when I'm not working."
"You're not a machine." She studied his face then shrugged. "No advantage lasts forever, and deep cover agents still get paid, still get provided for. I'm just not sure what we have that would work. If smelling food did something for you, I'd make sure you got it."
"Oh." He looked surprised, and Tsunade felt a momentary surge of anger at Sarutobi-sensei. The man in front of her still wanted to serve his village, but he didn't expect care in return. It wasn't selflessness, either, just a determination to make the most of the very little he still had.
No wonder he hadn't tried to bargain with her.
Tsunade would have to come up with more ways to make the very little become larger. "When you're out with Gai, see if you can smell anything and if it's... See if you enjoy it." She thought he might just find it a miserable reminder of all he'd lost, but maybe that would change. Some people found joy again, even with pieces missing.
Maboroshi had chosen to try. He hadn't wanted to give up what he still had. That was usually a good sign. Patients who thought that way tended to weather the bleak periods better, and everyone who'd lost parts of their lives-- people, physical function, pets, memories-- had bleak periods.
"Think about who you'd trust for teammates," she told him. "We'll make helping you part of the team mission. I can't spare anybody you've talked to since the kids found you, but people you knew before may still be around." She didn't say the word 'ANBU.' Maboroshi was an S class asset rather than an S class secret. Tsunade had a discretionary budget for maintaining S class assets.
Maboroshi was bright enough to hear it anyway. "Thank you, Hokage-sama." He bowed. "If you pour a little sake, we can find out if I can smell it."
A little experimentation showed that Maboroshi could smell the sake if he deliberately tried. Otherwise, he didn't notice it. "I'll need to practice that," he said. "I'll miss more if I'm not using all of my senses." The smile on his face was the first genuine pleasure Tsunade had seen from him since Ibiki had introduced them. "I think I'd be okay without, but it feels almost like drinking it."
Tsunade didn't feel nearly as bad as she usually did when the seal swallowed Maboroshi. The ghost might eventually realize how much Tsunade was hiding from him, but if he was who he said he was, he would understand. The Hokage never revealed everything to anyone.
And Tsunade had a better idea, now, what he might want. She'd been concerned about that because, as far as loyalty was concerned, she knew that Konoha got what it gave.
Throwing Shikako and Maito Gai at Maboroshi would give Tsunade two different and unique angles on the man.
Tsunade had Ibiki's read on Maboroshi. She had the man's file and his wife's. She had opinions from people he'd worked with in ANBU, opinions Ibiki had gathered while giving those people the impression that new intelligence implied that Maboroshi had been blackmailed before his death.
Given blackmail presented as a fact, most people offered fascinating speculations as to what another person might have done to leave themselves so vulnerable. The discussion usually became a gossip session on soldier pills, fast, brutal, and full of things none of the participants would have dared say under other circumstances.
The general consensus in this case was that, if Maboroshi had been blackmailed, it would have been a threat to harm his wife.
Crow-taicho had told Ibiki that there were two options for that threat. The first was that it had been brief, minutes or hours rather than days or weeks. The second was that it had come from inside ANBU, somewhere very high up. Otherwise, Maboroshi would have very quietly gotten help. He had reliable friends, masks on and masks off.
Crow-taicho was old as ANBU went, and he saw everything, so Tsunade assumed that his assessment was accurate. She wished he'd be as open with her about other things he knew or even guessed.
Tsunade had really been hoping to hear that Maboroshi had three secret bastard children, or that he had a weakness for tilpa weed or that-- Well, none of what she'd heard gave her a reason to stop wondering if Maboroshi was lying.
But, really, the wife thing only became a problem if she somehow wasn't really dead. Tsunade didn't put that as high as twenty five percent because that was a stupidly long time to keep a hostage for game piece that probably wouldn't enter play again. Maboroshi might have remained imprisoned for decades or centuries. The river would shift eventually, but probably not before everyone now alive was dust.
Tsunade didn't doubt either Nara Shikako or Uchiha Sasuke, so she accepted their having found the seal as an accident. Tsunade had visited the location herself. The damned thing hadn't been left in their path deliberately.
She'd had people searching the waters around Konoha for signs of other hidden seals. Sabiru couldn't have made that seal himself, and there was no reason to think he'd only had one or that other spies and saboteurs hadn't had any.
There were a lot of things that could have been missed during the invasion, a lot of collateral damage deaths that could have hidden a stolen soul. Tsunade had a list now. The fact that she didn't have any ideas as to why Orochimaru might steal souls didn't mean that Orochimaru had no use for stolen souls.
A missing soul didn't show on a tox screen. It didn't leave any marks on the body.
Tsunade poured herself another bowl of sake and contemplated it.
Absence of evidence was not evidence of absence, but the speculation was a lot like Kakashi's suggestion to burn all the crops. She could spin out enough threads of might-bes to smother everyone she loved. Spiraling into paranoia-- Tsunade had people to do that for her. Her job was to take their theories and fragments and use them to make the best decisions she could, to weigh the potential truths of the paranoid against the definite costs of dividing the world into the completely trustworthy and the definitely dead.
If Tsunade started killing everyone who might be or might become a traitor-- Well, she couldn’t even count Shizune as absolutely trustworthy. It would either end with Tsunade alone in the world with a pile of corpses or with her corpse as part of a slightly smaller pile of corpses while some other poor bastard tried to fix her mess.
Konoha had protocols for a Hokage gone mad. Minato had written them. Sensei had 'lost' them. Tsunade had given them to Inuzuka Hana-- utterly trustworthy and low profile but very well connected-- and told her to decide who should watch the Hokage. ANBU was loyal to the Hokage above all else. It was part of their oath. The Inuzuka held their loyalty to Konoha as a community.
Hana might have handed the job off to Tsume, but she'd probably given it to someone Tsunade hadn't even met, possibly even a council consisting entirely of dogs. The point was that Tsunade didn't know and that her successors wouldn't even know that Hana-- or any Inuzuka-- had been involved.
That would work once. Part of fixing the mess would be trying to figure out how to deal with the next tyrant so that they didn't simply murder the Inuzuka first.
Tsunade had no intention of making her village a charnel house, and Maboroshi was too potentially useful to discard because he might be lying about something. He wasn't lying about being a shinobi of Konoha. Tsunade had made an oath to protect Konoha.
And Ibiki and Crow-taicho both thought Maboroshi more likely to have been betrayed than betrayer.
In spite of all past history, Tsunade's village trusted her to be Hokage and to wager wisely. Maboroshi was another chip on the table. The stakes were lives and livelihoods, shinobi and civilians.
She raised her sake toward the mountain. "I've learned how to count cards, Sensei, and I don't use the house's dice. I still lose sometimes, but I don't bet it all on one throw."