Climax, Second
Summary: The Sannin face each other again. And no, she will not return. Drabble- Tsunade.
Warning: Language. I apologize.
Set: story-verse, Tsunade-retrieval arc (Please do not ask me for specific chapters…)
Disclaimer: Standards apply.
A/N: Inspired by a pic I saw – all three Sannin on their summons, and hell if it wasn't a good fight. Ah, the good old times. (Should I feel old?)
She shouldn't have thought it wouldn't hurt.
Because it does – Jiraiya's and Orochimaru's faces, older and so much more lined, and she is the only one who still looks like twenty-five. She is the oldest among them. Fuck off. They are not that old, not by far, but time has not been kind. Little wonder that, among the three of them, they have even managed to piss of fate.
It hurts like nothing she ever experienced before. She loved them once – perhaps that is the reason.
Jiraiya brought that kid. It's nothing but obvious that he wants to remind her of Dan, or, even more, of Nawaki. Orochimaru brought his own one, dark and twisted, Shizune hovers behind her, calm and tense and far older than her age, and Tsunade wonders if that is what is going to happen to that brat. Because everything they touch is poisoned. It's just the way their fucked-up life turned out to be.
She does not love them anymore.
She does not. She stopped around the time she woke every morning and did not see any reason – any reason at all – to get up. Around that time she left, not saying good bye to anyone, not even to their teacher. Tsunade hates them so much she could scream. She hates Orochimaru and his obsession with science and mankind, and Jiraiya who started lying through his teeth sometime around their sixteenth year. She hates the Third who took the place vacated by the Fourth back far too easily, not that she cares. She hates the village and its people and its houses and streets and cats. She fucking hates the shit that spills from her memory whenever she is not inebriated enough, just barely manages to blend out the recollection, and she spends weeks searching for just the right amount of distraction. Of whatever form. She sacrificed her grandparents and her parents and her brother and her lover and her best friends and she is so fed up with everything she could not care less. She does not love them anymore, and that is why she won't be returning to Hidden Leaf.
Jiraiya summons Gamabunta, and Orochimaru his ugly snake. Katsuyu is already waiting for Tsunade.
She does not love them.
If she tells herself often enough, she might be able to believe it one day.