Title: Vices
Rating: PG-13 for boy-love
Characters:The Sannin
Word Count: 1032
Summary: Jiraiya reflects on the only thing the Sannin have in common.
Author's Notes: Language notes: An onsen is a hot spring where you can relax and bathe. A ryoukan is a traditional Japanese inn. Jinbei and tanzen are the clothes Jiraiya wears (the green and red bits, respectively). This story is dedicated to my wig.
Only one thing really united the Sannin, one bitter secret best left unspoken. Jiraiya brooded on it while he relaxed in the onsen, sake cup in hand. A wooden tray floated next to him, holding an array of warm bottles, full and empty. His cheeks were already flushed red, but the stars shone out overhead. This late in the day, he could allow himself to be a bit drunk.
Tsunade had let it slip, once, that there was one uniting factor. She had been gambling, of course, and drunk, and it had spilled out of her mouth before she could think to stop it. Thankfully, thankfully, she hadn't actually divulged what that secret was. But word spread like wildfire nonetheless. Such was the fame of the Sannin: no one could resist the urge to gossip about the three most famous, the three most powerful, ninja of their generation. Still, Jiraiya had been forced to live under constant assault since then. Everyone wanted to know the secret. After all, the Sannin were ninjas, and secrets were power. To have a secret possessed only by the Legendary Sannin was not only a badge of honor, but a weapon.
That, the hounding, had really been what drove Jiraiya to become a hermit. He couldn't endure the constant badgering by every ninja he met. The reason Jiraiya loved hostess clubs and geisha houses wasn't actually because of the women (well, okay, it wasn't only because of the women), but simply because there, he didn't have to endure the constant questioning.
He'd heard many theories over the years. The most frequent was probably that there was a unifying factor in their skill as ninjas. But anyone with an ounce of intelligence could see that that wasn't the case. Aside from the fact that all three of them were massively powerful and well-nigh unkillable, the particular skills of the Sannin were as different as the three themselves.
Others made slightly better hypotheses, that perhaps the summoning techniques of the Sannin shared something in common. Certainly, Jiraiya doubted any other three-man cell had such accomplished summoning masters. But the uniting factor for the Sannin was as old as the team itself. And while Jiraiya and Orochimaru had learned their summoning techniques early, Tsunade's slug-summoning was... Well, the woman could be a bit petulant at times. While her teammates had a natural affinity for the technique, she had no talent at all. Really, no creature other than slugs had been willing to let her summon them. It was sad, really.
Some people pointed to physical traits. The Sannin all had long hair, didn't they? Well, yes, but Orochimaru wore a wig. He'd always worn a wig. The man was bald as a stone, though no one besides Jiraiya and Tsunade knew it. It had something to do with his snake affinity, though Jiraiya never really understood the technicalities as well as either of the other two, but he suspected the baldness had carried over to all the man's host bodies as well. The expense of buying all those wigs... Jiraiya shivered at the thought, thankful for his own glorious hair. Besides that, though, how was hair supposed to unite people?
Jiraiya had heard it proposed, once, that their unity came from one of their many undesirous traits, perversion. Getting closer to the truth, but still wrong. None of the Sannin were proud of what they had in common, but perversion was not it. Certainly, Orochimaru was as perverted as could be. The man would not stop collecting beautiful boys. Back when the three were chuunin, at least he had contented himself with more acceptable outlets, but now... Orochimaru literally collected them, kept them in cages like pets. The man was a freak. And, interestingly, Tsunade too. The fifth Hokage had her own penchant for pretty boys, though she kept it well-hidden. Shizune would know about it, certainly. But outside her and the other members of the Sannin, Jiraiya doubted anyone was aware of Tsunade's fanatic obsession with doujinshi.
No, the sad truth was that Jiraiya himself was the odd one out here. Oh, he liked women, sure enough. But the 'pervert' persona was mostly an affectation, something he had created to fit in with his teammembers. It served him in good stead now, for writing his novels. For research, as much as everyone scoffed when he called it that. Jiraiya's constant lack of a nosebleed attested to his own pure heart. (Orochimaru with his stark-white skin wasn't actually that pallid by nature, but rather by constant blood-loss).
The truth, as worrying as it was to admit, was that the three Sannin were all, all three of them, perpetually bankrupt. Everyone knew Tsunade, the Legendary Mark, couldn't hold onto money if her life depended on it. That was common knowledge.
Orochimaru, on the other hand... He wanted to rule the world, of course. By now, everyone was aware of this. But what was left unsaid, was that he would buy into any "Get Power Quick" scheme that came his way. He had once, shortly after becoming a jounin, sent away for a subliminal audio course on world domination ("Subjugate While You Sleep"). It had never occurred to Orochimaru that if the tapes worked, the man producing them would be a powerful world leader himself, and thus unlikely to want to share his secrets.
And Jiraiya himself... With the royalties off the Icha-Icha series, he should have been rich. Even with what he set aside for research expenses, travel, everything else. By all rights, Jiraiya should have been a very wealthy man. But if anyone ever looked at the tags on his clothing, they would see that the jinbei came from a summer resort in the Wave Country, and the tanzen vest was stolen from a ryoukan in Konoha itself. Jiraiya was constantly broke.
He raked his fingers back through his hair, already beginning to droop from the onsen's humidity, and sighed. He would never, in his life, be able to live it down if the world found out how much hair gel he had to use to create the magnificent, spiky white masterpiece that he wore every day of his life.