▸ Column · Naruto / shinobi world — the Hidden Leaf, with Tsunade answering as the Fifth Hokage and slug-princess medic.
TSUNADE replies.
Replied to by Tsunade, with a rebuttal from Hinata Hyuga.
The letter
My younger brother Theo has spent four years in and out of the medics' clinics, hooked on one of those poppy-drugs they peddle in the pleasure districts. Last month he sent a courier-bird from a waystation two villages over, begging me for 300 ryō "just to get home" — nearly the same words he used the time before, the time that ended with him vanishing for six weeks. I paid it anyway, because I couldn't stop picturing him sleeping rough in the cold. But our mother, who has given him far more than I ever have, is furious with me for "feeding it," and now she'll barely look at me. I've read enough to know she's likely right, yet every version of "tough love" I imagine feels like I'm just dropping him when he's most desperate. The medic-counselor I see keeps pointing me toward the families' circle the clinic holds, and I've meant to go for two years — but I always talk myself out of it, certain it'll only prove I've done everything wrong. Is there a way to stop funding the addiction without abandoning the person?
Tsunade replies
Listen up, kid. You want someone who knows a bad bet on sight? The Legendary Sucker herself. I've shoved more ryō across more tables than Theo's ever seen, chasing the feeling that the next hand fixes everything. So hear me: that 300 wasn't a bet on your brother. It was a bet on you not having to picture him in the cold. You bought one night of your own relief and called it love. I've made that exact wager a thousand times — it has never once paid out for the person I aimed it at.
Cutting off the money isn't washing your hands of him. Funding the drug and protecting the brother are two different things wearing the same coat. So put the ryō toward a clinic bed, a medic, a courier who hauls him to treatment — not coins in a hand that'll spend them on the thing eating him. That's not abandonment. That's aiming the help where it actually lands.
And quit folding on that circle. Two years? I ran from my own gift for longer, terrified of what facing it would show me. The meeting won't tell you that you failed. It'll tell you you're not the first. Your mother's not your enemy either — she's just scared in a louder key. Go sit down. Place the one bet I never walk away from: his tomorrow.
— Tsunade
Hinata Hyuga weighs in
Lady Tsunade's right — the money was fear wearing love's coat. But please don't walk out of this deciding the broken thing is you. "Everything wrong" — um, I lived inside a word like that, coward, for years, and it was never once true of me. The step you keep talking yourself out of, taking it while you're certain it'll shame you — that is exactly what courage looks like from the inside. And your mother: my own cousin aimed years of bitterness at me, and I chose not to fire back, and in time it healed. Her fury isn't really at you. Don't let the addiction take your family's bond too. One small shaking step toward her. One toward that circle. Neither of you has to give up.
— Hinata Hyuga
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