#peepingtoad

“Did you hear me?” Orochimaru snaps his fingers to regain her attention as he lays his cards on the table. “I’m about to rob you blind, Hime.”

“What?” She sets her saucer down, peering and blinking bleary-eyed at her own hand. Perhaps he might be fooled into believing she can even read the suits and values at the moment.

“You’re not nearly drunk enough to be losing on purpose. What’s the matter?” he asks, head tilting to the side as he studies her. 

He already knows her scent has been radiating discontent and her pulse has been erratic from the moment she crossed his threshold, but like him, Tsunade has never liked thunderstorms. Since her arrival, the skies opened up, and have poured forth pure wrath, barreling down upon the building with heavy force. The silence amplifies the sound, and it’s simple enough to blame her nerves on the environment, yet there is more. Because even he feels the edge of it.

Once they had comfort on nights like these. Too-warm, sun bright comfort, with laughter like booming thunder and the name to match, his arms big enough to fit them both in his embrace. Jiraiya.

Now there’s only an empty space where he should be, and the only thunder present is that which crashes amongst the clouds.

“Don’t you go crazy here like this?” she demands.

“Don’t I? Hime, I think the village established long ago that I am ‘crazy’, what a question,” he smirks, shuffling the cards.

“Stop that, you know what I mean. Alone in the silence, thinking about things.”

“What good is it to think about such things? I find my distractions. And I find them well,” he sighs. “I don’t know what the point in playing is anyway, it’s not as if I can win your money and use it… Not for anything I truly want.”

“Ugh, Oro - behave.”

“Hime, you know very well I have been the model of perfect decorum and plan to be exactly that for the extent of my time as such an honored guest of my homeland.” His words drip with honeyed venom, and his golden eyes flash with a bit of understated discontent, but she knows him well enough to know he means what he says.

“You only say so because you know good behavior will get you the privilege of the equipment and requisitions you desire.”

“Just so, Hime-dear. A reciprocal balance.” Orochimaru rises to walk towards a small cabinet, where he withdraws a dark bottle.

Tsunade’s eyes sharpen. “You old snake! I didn’t know you were hiding alcohol here.”

“I wasn’t. Suigetsu-kun pilfered it and left it here. It’s a decent quality umeshu - not your drink of choice, but one I find more palatable than your choice of sake. Who made the ordering decision for the ceremony, anyway? The quality was dreadful. You don’t care because you drink like a fish.”

“Shizune - cutting costs as usual. But that doesn’t matter - open the bottle and get over here.” Tsunade  waves him over, just as a particularly close peal of thunder rolls and lightning flashes through the high-slitted excuses for windows. She practically jumps in the air.

“Hime…” Orochimaru approaches, abandoning their usual distance to sit a bit closer beside her as he works the bottle open.

By his movements, Tsunade realizes just how formal this aspect of their interactions has become. Not their words, no, those have never been formal - could never be formal at this point in their lives. But when was the last time they touched with true intention, let alone affection?

She supposes the avoidance was a safety measure at first, to appease the council and prying eyes. It’s not as if she couldn’t subdue him on her own if he really were a threat. Even so, feeling him closer, so close that the silk of his haori brushes her arm as he moves, makes her aware of an emptiness she thought she’d reigned in long ago.

Despite movements that are as graceful as a geisha serving a favorite customer, Orochimaru’s pour is generous and he pushes the cup into her hand. “Drink.”

As she takes the cup and quaffs the overly-sweet liquor, all she can think about is how his biting, corrosive chakra should have always been accompanied by the solar warmth of another.

That absence is eating away at her, has been eating away at her with every toast to each accomplishment, each success of her rule as Hokage, the Allied Shinobi Forces’ victory at war… 

Her gambles always have a way of fucking her over in the end. All the idiot had to do was come home.

Orochimaru takes a sip of his own drink and turns golden eyes on her, dark lashes dipping low. “I miss him too, Hime.”

“How did you even…”

“Do you remember what we used to do when it would storm like this during monsoon season?” he swirls the small amount of umeshu in his cup, contemplating the amber hue of the liquid in the dim light.

“It didn’t matter because we were together.” Tsunade shifts back and pulls her knees to her chest just as a deafening thunderclap echoes through their hearing.

With the flash of accompanying lightning, the room is plunged into darkness as the power to the building goes out.

Perhaps it’s the reminiscence, perhaps it’s the proximity, but Orochimaru finds himself caught around the waist by arms stronger than iron as he blinks into the encroaching darkness. It should feel startling and foreign, but he’s always known Tsunade better than anyone else ever could. That includes the feel of her against his form, whether in joy, or sorrow, or fear.

After all these years, her skin still smells of vanilla bath oil, even if it’s laced with rice powder, cosmetics, and the tang of old sake rising from her pores. She’s been drinking more than usual at night, it seems. Anything to chase the memories away. 

It’s not as if he can blame her. 

The distant hum of a motor indicates the activation of a generator, and the eerie green of emergency lights flicker along the floor as mechanical bolts lock into place at all doorways. Emergency protocols - no one wants their pet prisoner escaping during the raucous chaos of a blackout.  The sensor Jounin know exactly where he is and exactly where he won’t be going.

As if he would while here with Tsunade anyway. The sound however, startles her enough to make her utter a sound, her arms clamping around him even harder. It’s out of character for her, especially at their age.

Out of character or not - how could he deny her? His arms slip around her in turn, and she feels smaller against him that he remembers. Deceptively fragile.

This woman is anything but, at least not physically. 

“Remember how we’d used to spend those days at his flat? He’d make that spiced hot chocolate his mother used to fix when we were kids, then try to make us laugh when the storms picked up?”

“If the power went out, he’d get lanterns and a flashlight and make dumb faces…” Her voice is tentative, as if afraid of the words it speaks, the images it conjures. “We’d have to get him to stop.”

“I was never cold when we were together like that.” Orochimaru settles his chin upon her shoulder, solidifying the embrace. It goes unsaid that he’s been cold for decades since.

Neither Jiraiya nor Tsunade ever knew the depth of who and what they'd always been to him, nor why their abandonment of Konoha destroyed an already fraying mind in the end. It took an age for Orochimaru to admit it to himself. 

It was why he found his purpose in his work. It was why every attempt at a bond made elsewhere was an ephemeral thing, even when attempted with another who chased immortality.

For his clan, a mating bond, once established, was near impossible to break.

In another life, they might have been a family twined out of three matched souls. But he failed her when it mattered most, and the life lost also cost him any dream of a future. And so he paid a life for a life as he handed Tsunade her brother’s necklace. Eventually Jiraiya paid his own price in turn. 

Now she's here in his arms, trembling in the dark with the ghosts of lost loves so near and all Orochimaru wants to do is chase that pain away. Isn't it too late?

It's never too late until you're dead. A jovial baritone echoes in his memory, so close that he could reach out and touch the heat of Jiraiya's presence. 

Her lips taste like plum wine and sake, smeared lipstick and leftover spices from her shared meal at the ceremony. Kissing her may be a mistake, and certainly against many rules, but all pretense of good sense is out the window and melted away in the rain. 

Good sense is a trifle he will leave the young to pursue; they’ve had their fill. The Densetsu no Sannin are relics of the past, forgotten and stricken from history, but the two that remain now stand reunited in the one place they have left to call their own. 

That place has never had walls or a stone foundation. It lies between breaths and heartbeats, in the echoing desperation of Tsunade’s voice in his ear, pleading in nonsensical tongues. It is in the heat of her skin, scarred and soft and perfect as he kisses away the salt of her tears. 

He can only see her in shadow and the second subtle glow that his senses lend him, of her chakra, her heat signature, both things that he would know anywhere no matter the surroundings. Her lacquered nails tear at clothing, eager to get to the flesh beneath, and they fall together, side by side on a makeshift bed consisting of her kimono and his discarded haori. 

The raucous drumbeat of rain and crashing thunder accompany the rising hunger, the echo of the aching emptiness both seek to fill. What rises between them is not gentle, could never be; much like the storm outside, holding the potential for creation or destruction. 

Lightning flashes, illuminating her in all her splendor as Tsunade meets him pleasure for pleasure, and Orochimaru is wholly overcome. Self control gives way to the long lost years of denial, of cravings locked behind steel bars of heartbreak and vengeance.

Decades have passed and she still has the power to render him undone. 

He loses himself within the clutch of her body and too quickly, euphoria finds them with a furious violence that borders on pain. It’s nowhere near enough to quell the ache of old wounds torn asunder, the need awakened anew. Hardly a breath is caught between them before they are set to chasing the same high yet again as the storm rages outside, and Jiraiya’s spectre lingers in their hearts, their collective sense memory.

Peace may never be fully within their grasp, but a tenuous comfort is found in the afterglow, where Tsunade drinks down Orochimaru’s every gasping breath. The heat of his touch radiates over her flesh as if he’s marked her for keeps, their bodies still united. 

The electricity kicks on and the dim lights flicker to full brightness, revealing the beauty of his form just as she pins him down to rest beneath her. What’s been lost is found again, however inconvenient it may be. 

All she knows is that she refuses to let it go. They’ve earned this.