Orochimaru walks in on Tsunade, hugging his sobbing student while awkwardly cradling her head against her thighs.
It's amusing to see his former teammate mouth 'help' to him. Of course, voicing her discomfort (even silently) is enough to make Honōka disengage. Tsunade is still underestimating his student's sensitivity.
She hands her a tissue.
"Don't scrub, kid; dab, gently."
She follows Tsunade's advice and finishes by loudly blowing her nose. Her eyes are still tear stained, but she stands firm again, his precocious student.
Tsunade glances at him, and he nods.
"Right… Honōka, you might want to take a seat."
His student blinks at each of them, eyebrows puckering as she reads the change in mood. She hoists herself into Tsunade's leather desk chair and begins swinging her legs.
Tsunade gathers herself with a deep breath and crosses her arms.
"I'm going to come out and say it—you are not going back to your parent's house."
Honōka does not protest, but her legs do stop swinging for a beat. She nods and resumes.
"Do you know why you are not going back to your parent's house, Honōka-kun?" he asks. Tsunade gives him a dirty look.
"…"
She's staring through the wall behind his head. She's either already zoned out or deliberately evading the question.
"You are not going back because someone in your household took this to your dominant hand." He slaps down a nut cracker, of all things. Rusty, well used, and misused.
Tsunade pales, rounding on him.
"Orochimaru!—"
"Someone in your household intentionally disfigured your hand. Do you know why they would do such a thing?"
"…"
"They did this to cripple you. A shinobi who cannot use hand seals in battle is as a duck carrying a leek on its back to a potluck is."
"…"
"Orochimaru—"
"You are lucky Tsunade is exceptionally skilled at reattaching fingers and undoing nerve damage. Nod if you understand the severity of your injury."
"…"
She nods. Good.
"Do you understand you were not so lucky in regards to your left eye?"
Another slow nod.
"Let me ask you this—" and this is the part that he can't make sense of at all, "why did you allow yourself to come to such harm?"
Tsunade grabs him by the shoulder and bears down with her considerable strength. He does not allow himself to be turned away or cowed, even as his collar bone protests.
"At any point, you could have easily subdued your attacker. Instead, you allowed yourself to be subjected to what I can only imagine was excruciating pain—such that there came a point when you could no longer bear it and stabbed your attacker three times."
The foot swinging stops.
"We have already established you are an emotional sensor—that years of hypervigilance, during your formative years no less, resulted in you developing an uncannily specific chakra sensitivity. You cannot tell me you did not know—well in advance!—that your father planned on attacking you."
She's sits still for a long moment, not a single breath or twitch. Then she sucks in a stuttering breath and says, "I'm sorry."
His stomach drops through the floor, and an icy burn rushes through his veins. For a second, he thinks it's anger that he is feeling. It is not. He does not know what it is. And when he speaks, his voice is a bare whisper.
"Do not apologize to me, Honōka."
"…"
"Tell me what your father felt when he attacked you. How did you not know?" He has to understand what went wrong.
He won't let it happen a second time.
Tsunade turns on him, eyes blazing.
"Orochimaru, do you have an ounce of fucking tact?!" she whispers, furious. "Are you even considering Honōka's feelings here? Everything's always about you, isn't it? You—"
"Annoyance."
Tsunade breaks off, shocked that Honōka could find it in herself to answer, emotionally strained as she is. He has news for Tsunade; his student is, evidently, always emotionally strained—and it's never stopped her from carrying on with her life before.
"Annoyance?" he asks.
"Really, really, not nice annoyance. Unfocused, though."
He freezes. She's used that word to describe him before—when they were testing her sensory range and he would aim killing intent at her. She never failed to detect him when he did.
He suspects now that the rabid boar with the 'weird' feeling had the animal equivalent of either killing intent or blood lust.
More importantly, she equates killing intent with something as mundane as annoyance.
"I didn't know… if he wanted to hit me, or was only thinking about it. Sometimes, he just yells. Sometimes he… wants me to cry. Sometimes he wants me gone. I… froze. I couldn't figure out what he wanted fast enough. I'm sorry…"
He is shocked. Somehow, a child of scarcely seven years is so desensitized to killing intent that it apparently registers as annoyance to her. From the most seasoned jōnin to the most inexperienced genin, every shinobi knows killing intent for what it is. And when they feel it, they don't attempt to determine the subtle nuance of it. That would be foolish!
He hopes she doesn't think he's aiming his annoyance at her. That's reserved strictly for her father.
"I've waited long enough," he informs her, "would you be terribly against your father getting permanently lost on the road of life?"
Tsunade palms her forehead and Honōka's eyes widen.
"No."
"Perfect—"
"No."
He frowns. No. He feels irritation frothing at the back of his throat and hopes irritation is not annoyance. Surely she doesn't mean to just let the incident go?
Then she says something unexpected—profound, even.
"Death is not punishment—it's not justice… and it is not closure. It's a vengeance that never heals."
Moments like these are what make Orochimaru question his student's sudden appearance in his life—her very existence, even. If gods exist, he thinks, they're determined for Honōka to chastise him. But he does not believe in gods, precisely, so he settles for wondering where a seven-year-old child pulls this wisdom from. Tsunade is equally flummoxed.
"Very well." He decides to bite her hook and see where it leads. "What is punishment? I somehow doubt doing to him as he did to you is what you have in mind." That's the route he would take. He'd be sure to make it not nice.
"…punishment is the complete arrest of… his lifestyle. Incarceration. Being held accountable for the crimes committed by his peers and the community is justice. Closure is him never being free to act again in the way that he did…"
"It would be much easier to kill him," he says.
She surprises him yet again when she meets his gaze and does not look away. He thinks this is the first time he's seen Honōka look genuinely upset.
"I don't want vengeance for a single crime committed by one man. I want justice for every person who has ever been hurt by another person's abuse." Unwavering conviction. "And, if I let the issue go—or make it disappear—what does it mean for the next person this happens to? Who fights for them if I don't fight for myself now?"
Eye contact has never made him feel as Honōka's does now. He feels vulnerable, like a single thought will bring it all to the surface. Every wrong he's ever committed, ever hurt he's ever caused.
Every moral he's ever abandoned.
"I don't want to live in a world where crime goes undetected and criminals are unremarked upon."
He looks away first. Even Tsunade is refusing to look up from the floor.
"Very well."
They have a daimyō to petition. He will see what the Uchiha and the Konoha Keimu Butai can do about a civilian child abuser in the meantime.