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Simplicity Rayemars Orochimaru had always hated hearing the same thing twice. Tsunade remembered that about him. He had loved new knowledge, inasmuch as he loved anything, and had always been willing to barter for information. When Tsunade had been younger, she'd thought it simple of him, to trade favors or take over a job for her so she could spend time with Dan, if she just talked about that day's medical training, or--when she'd been even younger--filched a scroll or two out of her grandfather's library. The work was just chakra usage, after all, and she'd always made him return the scrolls to her within a day so she wouldn't get caught. After Tsunade grew older, she wondered, as most adults do, how she ever could have been so stupid. Orochimaru had been addicted to newness, to the promise of fresh insight, to learning things that he didn't know. As their team hit puberty and then beyond, he had grown less and less tolerant of what was old and stale and repetitive. It had driven Sarutobi mad--Tsunade couldn't remember how many times she'd heard him threaten Orochimaru that he had to keep practicing jutsus after he'd memorized and perfected them, or there would always be the risk that he would forget a move right in the crisis moment and they'd have one more name to add to the already overburdened memorial stone. Given this, it wasn't surprising that Orochimaru and Jiraiya had never gotten along. Jiraiya had been a story-teller for as long as Tsunade could remember, even if his early stories had been only lies. He would take a story and constantly readjust little details, over and over again, creating a dozen variations on the same theme until he found one that he liked the best. It had frustrated Orochimaru to no end--not only the repetition, but also the fact that Jiraiya was so obsessed with fiction, useless fiction, rather than fact. He would always wind up telling Jiraiya to shut up if he couldn't say anything new, and Jiraiya would always tell him where to shove it, and it would always end up in a fight that Sarutobi would always lecture them for later. Tsunade always got cleanup duty; she generally ended their fights by punching Jiraiya, and then tracking down Orochimaru and spending some time around him without saying anything at all. He had made it clear several times as they got older that he didn't want her company either, but he always came back in the end. He then ignored Jiraiya as long as he was able, but always wound up snapping at him again and starting a new/old fight. That cycle of events had also been repetitive. Later, after the feeling of betrayal wore off, Tsunade found she wasn't surprised that Orochimaru had decided to quit coming back. After all, Konoha hadn't held anything new for him by that point, except the feeling of disappointment. Tsunade had not known much about Sasuke prior to his return, but she could tell that Orochimaru had trained him directly for an extended amount of time. He didn't repeat himself, and he grew irritated when forced to give the same information to several people over and over again. She had tested her suspicion, and then asked questions to confirm it. "He doesn't insult Naruto anymore," Sakura said once, when Tsunade visited her in the greenhouse off the hospital. She was stripping the leaves from a plant with a quick twist of the wrist that she had picked up from Tsunade. "He used to do that a lot, but now he just looks at him and doesn't say anything." "It's hard to say," Kakashi told her when she brought it up as he was turning in a report. "He was always a quiet kid." "Ha!" Naruto snorted when she'd mentioned it. He used his hands more often now when he talked, punctuating almost every sentence with a gesture, rather than saving them to emphasize a story like Jiraiya. "He was an uptight bastard before, and he's an uptight bastard now!" He paused, hands falling to his sides. Then he added: "But he glares more, now. I guess." "I've already given this information to Shizune-san and Kakashi-san," Sasuke said, back straight, when he was called into her office one morning. He had managed to keep most of the annoyance out of his voice, and the sarcasm was veiled with deference. "Should I write it down, to make it more convenient to access?" The three of us could have passed on worse traits, Tsunade reflected, as she said "Never mind" and sent him out of her office. Children should be seen, not heard. |