Sealed Moments
When they first became teammates, Orochimaru was nothing like the man he one day would grow up to be. In fact, if Jiraiya had had to pick a single word to describe the other boy on their team, he would have picked fragile. It wasn't meant as an insult, not at all, but Jiraiya had been both taller and wider than the other boy, standing a good head and shoulders above him.
He could also admit that at first he'd thought he had gotten two girl teammates because Orochimaru had been dressed up in a loose flowing robe that was closer to a dress than a kimono. It was a question of many years as to why the man, even when he was actually in charge of his own clothes, never actually switched over to wearing something more masculine. He'd known better than to ask however, as even if the gold eyed man had looked fragile, he could beat him down in a fight with depressing regularity.
Though that came later. In the very absolute beginning, Jiraiya had actually won their spars. He'd been the strongest, physically, before Tsunade had sprung up past him in height and started to dominate in hand to hand until they were ten. In the time between, Orochimaru had somehow snuck in and actually gotten the hang of the idea of dodging. There would be many many days when Jiraiya would wish he'd learned that lesson a bit less well. If Orochimaru had never learned to dodge instead of blocking, he might never have learned so completely to run away when a situation turned from his favor. But he had. He'd become an expert at fleeing.
Somehow, the act of running had turned into the skill of observation, and from there an intense ability to use everything. Jiraiya wasn't terribly bad with observation, but even he had to admit that Orochimaru, when not being absurdly shy, something most would never even believe possible now, had even as a small child had a way of charming the people around him, of convincing them that he had something that they wanted to know. As he'd gotten older, he'd gotten better, able to coax and trick with careful skill that rarely ever backfired on him.
Somehow, that skill failed him when it came to the Hokage seat, because he'd lingered too long in the wrong corner, or said the wrong thing to the wrong person, and his twisting and turning had tangled him up irreparably away from his goal. Though proud of the one who did become the Yondaime, there were days when the Toad Sage wondered if perhaps that wasn't the rejection that finally made Orochimaru break off from the rest of them. He'd wanted the position so badly, and it wasn't even in the way of Danzo, who was so determined to turn Konoha into a war machine.
No, Orochimaru had had the intense desire to learn then, before he'd let it carry him away into things better left alone. He'd wanted to do good things, once. Jiraiya remembered those days. He remembered what it was like to end up in a wrestling match with the smaller boy when they were twelve because of a stray insult that wasn't even remembered, only for them both to turn on Tsunade when she tried to break them up. He remembered as they hit their late teens when they'd teamed up for a few questionable but harmless exploits. He remembered when the three of them had all thrown in and learned sealing together. That one, most especially, he remembered, because it was the first time he really found himself shining in an area around his teammates, and they'd been happy with him for it.
That happened with increasing rarity as they'd grown older, that happiness over a simple discovery that would make one of them better. But then, they grew in a time of war, and sometimes when that knowledge made you a better killer, it wasn't something that would lift your spirits. At least, that was the case for him, it put him off learning, a bit, to know that it would be used for nothing but hurting people. The same could not be said of his pale teammate, the slender boy having thrown himself into his studies with absolute intensity from the end of the very first bad mission. Study became his solace, and there was no ripping the other boy away from it.
That was why he suspected that losing the position of Yondaime to Minato was the cause of his downfall, because he knew that as well as having the desire to learn, Orochimaru could be a horribly bitter and unforgiving creature. He was, among the three of them, the one who didn't have parents. He lived with an aunt, one who didn't particularly like him because of his father, and that made him slow to trust anyone who wasn't his teammates. Too many times had he been disappointed over the simplest things at home, so he never presumed that trust was unwavering. No, he tested those around him constantly, little pokes and prods to test that he was still valued, that he was still important to them.
But the Yondaime position... that was something else entirely. That was devastation to the man, and Jiraiya had seen it at the time. It was painful for him to hear about the lab incident two years later, to know that the situation had finally pushed his teammate too far into his studies to be fished out again. He wasn't, unfortunately, surprised. The war had shaped them, and somehow, he was sure that many of the things permitted in such a situation were deliberately forgotten when peace came to call.
Tsunade had learned her trade in the field among the dead and dying, because if she went to heal an enemy and failed horrifically, then it was no loss to Konoha. She'd been encouraged. Even Orochimaru's initial tampering in the field had been ignored so long as it was cast away from the line of Konoha's people. Unfortunately, the line was too blurred for the man, and by the time anyone realized he needed to be reeled in, it was far, far too late. He wanted to blame himself for that, and he was entirely certain that their sensei did, but the man had been far from perfect, and the various dysfunctions of his students in their later lives showed Jiraiya that even the Professor could make routine and catastrophic mistakes.
So many things came down to mistakes. People claim that looking back makes everything clear in retrospect. Jiraiya didn't believe this to be true. If anything, he was sure looking back on everything from the present was the worst practice possible, because memories were subjective things. People remembered what they wanted to remember. More than anything people wanted to believe that when bad things happen, that they had reasons. People didn't want to see when their own actions caused things to sour, or when good people did bad things without a reason that others might find acceptable.
People liked to look back and point to their memories, to tell all and sundry that they knew that someone was bad. They liked to say that they guessed something was 'off' about someone from day one. They wanted to be able to say there was never anything good in the bad people that they once knew well.
So no, looking back never made anything clear, because sometimes good people did turn into bad people for no good reason, or sometimes for reasons that nobody ever figured out. Sometimes good people stop caring because they think nobody cares. Sometimes good people break and fly away into a million pieces and nobody realizes they need to fix them.
That happened to Orochimaru, and Jiraiya will never be one of those people who looked back and said they knew anything.
That was his teammate, and he loved him, mistakes, horrors and all.
That didn't mean he wouldn't stop him if he had the chance, and that in turn didn't mean that he would ever look back at him as anything but the brilliant delicate boy he'd been when they met at age six. Those memories were sealed in different places in his mind, and that was how it should be.
Sometimes, the past and the present simply should not meet, and where Orochimaru was concerned, doing anything else would simply hurt.
That never, ever, meant that Jiraiya would forget though.
After all, that had caused the issue in the first place, ne?