If you thought about it, none of them had really aged well. But then, they had never let anyone or anything else get the better of them, why should they let time? When they were together it never seemed important, but after they all found their own separate paths to tread, they all seemed to have difficulty dealing with their own mortality. The years to come seemed to stretch before Tsunade endlessly and she found herself wondering how she could possibly last that long before she collapsed from the weight that had found its way onto her shoulders. She felt empty and tired and she didn't want to live anymore. Was she really only twenty? She felt ancient, but she would never ever look it. Jiraiya knew that life had never given him what he wanted most and neither had time. He owed nothing to either. So he went about creating his own world where nobody ran out of time and everything happened the way it was supposed to. Brothers and friends and lovers didn't die, friends didn't throw each other away in search of something better, and the guy always got the girl. Orochimaru never could get enough, he always needed more than the little bit he was given. Not enough strength, not enough power, not enough knowledge, not enough love. Not enough, not enough, not enough. It tore him up thinking of…ending, finishing his life before he had learned everything. He needed more time.
Tsunade hadn't always wanted to be a ninja; the honored granddaughter was always just expected to follow in the grand family tradition of the shinobi arts. When she was younger she wanted to be a veterinarian, she wanted to help creatures in pain, and make them healthy again. She wanted to live in a pretty house, and marry a handsome husband. She had her wedding colors picked out at age six. She wanted true love and someone to live out her life with, to grow old and die with. None of those things happened to ninja. Ninja died young.
And so she coasted through the Academy, not too good and not too bad. Painfully average in her family's eyes. And Tsunade was just fine with that. Until her mother got the disease, until she changed. Her father tried to explain it to her, telling her that her mother had something in her brain that was triggered as she got older. Her mother screamed and threw things at her father because he put the rice bowl on the wrong side of the plate. She cried all the time, and didn't recognize her daughter anymore; yelling at her father for bringing brats she didn't know to look at her like she was in a zoo. She aged twenty years in ten months. The girl who attended her mother's funeral could have been the woman in the coffin's grandchild for the apparent age gap between them. It was there, beside the dark hole in the earth that had swallowed the lady-who-used-to-be-her-mother's body, that she promised herself that no one would ever see her that way. She would be young until the day she died.
Clocks were everywhere in his house. He had thirteen in his bedroom, nine in the kitchen, five in the bathroom, eighteen in his living room, and seven on his person at all times. They were all perfectly synchronized down to the millisecond. Orochimaru had a set schedule every day, sleep until 5:00 a.m. wake up, make and finish his breakfast in 3.52 minutes, take a shower, brush his teeth and hair, and get dressed in 6.34 minutes. Study general knowledge until 6:30 a.m., train alone until 8:00 a.m., train with Sarutobi Sensei until 10:30a.m., take an enforced break for 15 minutes (which was used to study) and then train with his teammates until 12:00 p.m.. Eat lunch with his team until 12:30 p.m., go home and work on experimental jutsu until 4:00 p.m., check the mission board in less than 5.56 minutes, study experimental samples and forbidden scrolls until 7:00 p.m., make and eat diner in 10.4 minutes, study jutsu until 10:00 p.m., read ancient history until 12:00a.m. Go to sleep until 5:00 a.m.
This schedule made optimum use of his waking hours. If he hadn't required at least five hours of sleep to perform at his preferable level he would have forgone that as well. This routine was repeated everyday without deviation when he wasn't on a mission or in the hospital. Or at least it was until that damned Tsunade started dragging him and the fool around Konoha for "bonding" time. It was utterly ridiculous and a waste of his valuable time, he should just tell her no point blank next time. Why was it so hard to say no to her anyway? Well, it was important to build teamwork, he supposed he could spare a little time for her. Or he could make Time spare some time, but only because it was her.
Jiraiya was so tired of not being good enough. So tired of being in the grey with everything and everyone else who wasn't worth a second glance. He tried, he tried damn it! But it never got any better. The pain of being looked down on by those whose opinions mattered most, of not being worth the patience and time to really be someone's friend, not being loved quite as much as a more worthy individual, the pain made it too hard to care. It was better not to expect anything from anyone, then he couldn't be disappointed when they let him down. So he stopped trying to impress anyone, and went about everything he did in a strictly independent manner. It was easier that way, with no one pulling at the strings of his heart, and he didn't drag anyone else down. He didn't care about what anyone else thought or did. His strings had been cut.
But if that was true, then why did it still feel as if his heart was being jerked down through broken glass when they all left him behind? He searched for ways to distance himself from the bitterness, the endless ache of being left behind again. But sake couldn't make him forget, if anything it made the pain worse, and training did help a bit but too much of it only reminded him of the weakness that had made him useless to his team. Reading helped. He could go somewhere else for while and sometimes it would be hours before he would remember. Then Jiraiya discovered that writing was even better, because he could make a perfect life and let his mind live in that world where everything went right. His own personal drug, generated by his very own brain, couldn't get better than that could it?
He believed that for a quite a while, until he saw his teammates again. How strange, it didn't seem like it should have been quite that long ago that he had seen them. His face was beginning to crease by that time, though his old friends didn't look a day older than when they had all gone their separate ways. When the Saanin rendezvoused again after so many years, Jiraiya was able to appreciate the irony. For once in his life he had left them both far behind, and he didn't really enjoy it like he thought he would.