Sannin Monogatari

1

There's something to be said for truly knowing a person your whole life.

They met for the first time at only six years old; they were amongst the first class taught at the Ninja Academy in Konoha, taught by the students of the first and second Hokages themselves. The class was only twenty-strong, with ages between five and nine; arranged by age, the three sat next to each other from day one and promptly proceeded to ignore each other.

Day two was the first time any of them talked to each other. One had decided that another, as one of the only two girls in the class, probably had cooties. Apparently the prospect of finding out was far more interesting than what the teacher had to say, because the young boy quickly became fixated on poking her with his pencil eraser for much of the morning, long after her hisses of "stop it!" had snowballed into a steady growl and two pencils laying broken beneath the desk.

Somewhere around midday, when the teacher turned to draw out the basic hand seals on the chalk board, she made her move. It began with a wide arc of her arm and ended with the boy redfaced and crying in the aisle, a lump forming on the back of his head in the shape of her fist.

So it was the second day of Konoha's Academy's existence that two fateful events occured: detention was born, and Jiraiya and Tsunade were forced to talk to one another.

It wouldn't be until four years later, when Sarutobi-sensei received his first (and indeed, last) team of genin that they learned Orochimaru's name, even though he'd sat beside them that entire first year.

At ten, most girls don't know what they mean when they say a guy is hot; Tsunade was included on that, but within the first few hours of meeting her teammates, she was quite sure Orochimaru was hot and Jiraiya was anything but. She'd never know what it was that made her draw this conclusion, but it probably had something to do with the fact that Orochimaru had very unique eyes, and more importantly, with the fact that he didn't make fun of her lack of breasts. She also quickly decided that neither she nor he needed a loser jerk-face like Jiraiya on their team to drag them down, and so was more than happy when she found out that one of them would be sent back to the academy.

Her lunch that day went all but uneaten as she dangled the bell before Jiraiya. Tsunade had the distinct feeling that being tied to a stump while she gloated was the perfect reparations for all the times he'd dragged her to detention with him.

The inevitable decision that Orochimaru wasn't so hot after all came when he handed half his food to Jiraiya, going so far as to hand-feed their bound teammate.

That decision was only partially revoked when she found out he'd just saved them all from returning to the academy. So at the end of the day, Jiraiya was still a loser jerk-face, while Orochimaru had evened out to a cute loser.

The boys' opinion of her was passed around secretly that evening as they all walked home, as they really talked for the first time. Jiraiya was nursing another lump from the blonde's iron fist, whining about it enough that Orochimaru meekly offered, "I think she only hits you because you tease her so much."

"I know," he shrugged, much to his teammate's surprise. "But I've gotta give her a hard time."

"Why?" he asked, confused. There surely had to be some sort of logic behind the perpetual cycle.

"'Cause she's cute," he admitted with a grin. "But I deserve a woman with a much bigger rack than she's got, don't you think Oro-kun?"

Jiraiya never knew that the red tint that covered his pale teammate's face that evening wasn't from sharing his in his imaginings, but instead from realizing that for the first time in his life he had a nickname... and friends.