Chapter Text
All Jiraiya can taste and see is blood. It coats the back of his throat, not enough air in his punctured lungs to push it out as it fills his airways, only managing weak, painful spasms as he feels every broken rib push inwards against his organs.
The ground beneath him isn't cold, it's warm, inviting him to sink into it, having soaked up the heat from the explosion only minutes before he ended up in a broken, crushed mess. Staring upwards, the oak leaf edged night sky swims, stars seeming to blink out when he closes then opens his eyes to correct his vision in vain.
That's it, is all he can think, this is it. Whatever luck he had left ran out right at twenty eight. Thirty wasn't some big milestone in his mind, but it would've been nice to make it. He closes his eyes, watching his entire squad be wiped out in hazy, messy memory. But they severed Root from Konoha, ripping straight through their main base like bats out of hell, and if that means depriving the so called tree of its nutrients so be it. Radical thinking, something something, bad influences, Sensei's pre lecture descriptors trickling into the forefront of his mind. And he blocks it out like clockwork until Sensei can tell Jiraiya isn't even trying to hide it, then Sensei’d turn to Orochimaru with a pensive look and-
Jiraiya's eyes fly open, sparks dancing across his vision now as he tried to sit up but just lets out a strangled cry, unable to move because of the intense pain but he has to. Orochimaru was next to him the entire time, watching them shove Kusanagi straight through Danzo's throat, saw their panicked face as the blast caught up with them despite being so close to the exit. He needs to find them, they can't be dead, they're stronger than this, stronger than him.
His mind swirls, almost unable to hear the ragged coughing nearby as his draining blood rushes through his ears.
Not nearby, closer than that. It takes so much effort to turn his head just a bit more to the right, every part of his body protesting any movement, but in doing so he sees them, illuminated by burning brush and bodies. Oro is half on their side, face looking heavenward as blood steadily runs down their cheek and leaks from their temple. Jiraiya watches their head jerk to the side to cough, spraying the earth with red and calming down after writhing in pain like a snake in death throes. Their right arm lays limp and odd over their waist, broken is all he can think.
Their left is singed, first and second degree burns from elbow to fingertip, and stretched out towards him, palm up.
He forces himself to move despite it all. They don't deserve to be alone, especially not now, not while death hovers over their life again. Jiraiya finally realizes there's shards of rock and glass embedded deep and deeper in his limbs from Crawling across the scorched ground, causing the horrific immobilizing pain, but he pushes it down along with the blood and the scream of agony he wants to let out. Long enough so that he can just get close enough.
Orochimaru's eyes open, one at a time at the feeling of something touching their fingertips, reacting by twitching in pain. Then they see him, covered in blood, deep gashes and dirt, fingers just barely curling around their own. Orochimaru tries to speak but only manages a cough like knives, baring their reddened teeth in a grimace before falling into watery gasps. Words are meaningless now, they know what comes after this and no amount of placating or pleading will stop it. Their eyes open again, with difficulty now, feeling so heavy and sees Jiraiya still there, now staring into the middle distance above their head before his focus adjusts to their eyes again, their right one bloomed red with burst vessels, making the gold color damn near glow.
They regard each other in stuttering breaths and fading sight, finding some strength to twine ones fingers tighter around the others despite the burns and open wounds. They both knew what the maybes of this self adopted mission were, certain death, bodily harm, overall success...but dying alone, without each other wasn't one of them.
He's fading, sinking into the warm earth, the sound of his struggling heart counting him down.The stars are long gone and Oro's face is becoming washed out, then fuzzy. He thinks of Tsunade, hoping she doesn't find them, try to breathe life into bodies long gone cold. Its selfish, almost cruel, but it's better than her thinking she's failed at what she does best. There's the sound of his blood rushing again, sounding much different on the edge of death, like feet thundering against the ground. It's too hard to rationalize and before he knows it, he lets go.
~~~~~
When Jiraiya opens his eyes again, he sees nothing but dark blotches slowly solidifying themselves into a shadowy ceiling. Initial confusion tries to grow into panic as the sound of machines beeping and whirring break through the head fog along with a dull yet noticeable ache coursing through his body. He coughs, thankfully able to breathe even as his chest stings with nerves coming to life, mouth cotton dry from medication and the tell tale ozone taste of healing chakra. Tsunade's chakra.
It all comes back to him in crashing waves and thin slivers, the infiltration of Root, watching Danzo be stricken down, their 'security system' made of forty thousand paper bombs plastered from wall to wall detonating at once, the charring and ripping of bodies, his entire team.
Orochimaru's singed hand reaching towards him.
It's so much effort to keep his heart rate under control, breathing training kicking in as best as he could to keep the EKG from going off and adding more stress. He hates the sounds of hospitals, so he'll do anything to keep it as quiet as possible. Stupid, he knows his teammates would say, that's why you're here in the first place. He lets his head loll to the left, facing a window with curtains drawn and heaps of plants and flowers stacked around its edges. Despite it, he can tell it's dark outside, not just the lights in the room being off. His eyes flirt around the dark spaces of the room, keeping his thoughts preoccupied with fuzzy shapes instead of trying to ground himself in the reality of right now.
Jiraiya lets out a deep, stinging sigh once his heart slowed down, thinking that maybe his luck hadn't run out just yet. He should be in the ground right now and yet here he is, listening to his own proof of life be reflected in annoyingly steady beeps. He follows the bandages wrapped neatly around his left shoulder down to his hand, lifting it up to inspect. He can feel the pull of stitches and IVs against his skin when he twists too far, the discomfort grounding him without permission, and does the same for his right hand. The mummy look definitely doesn't fit him, a sluggish thought drops in, letting his arms gently fall back to the sheets.
"You're awake again." Oro's voice is hushed and raspy under the background noise of machines but he hears them, body jerking to the right in shock and staring at their silhouette in the doorway. He pushes himself to sit up and feels pain shoot up his arms like lightning, immediately dulled by whatever cocktail of painkillers running through his veins,the effect hitting him with a heavy dose of vertigo. His voice is beyond a low, hoarse croak, practically scraping the sterilized floor and wheezing around his words.
“You're okay..” The ekg picks up on his speeding pulse, eyes flickering to it in tired contempt.
“As okay as I can be.” Is their quiet reply, stepping over the threshold and sliding the door he never heard open shut. Somehow they can still be unnaturally quiet even after near death. They shoulder the light switch, a very dim,fluorescent glow filling the room. White sparks of pain bloom over Jiraiya's eyes, rubbing them away with the heels of his hand and feeling the slight scratch of bandages on his face. When he looks up again, the word frazzled comes to mind at seeing the messy, days old braid draped over their blanket covered shoulder, wisps and large strands of hair framing their face from where it came undone. It doesn't suit them, but it's not like Oro has much of a choice with one arm bound in a cast and the other burned down to the nerves and wrapped in a lighter gauze. They do still appear to have just enough function of their left, their own IV and a bottle of water being held against their chest more so than holding it with their hand.
Jiraiya tries to say more, ask questions, but there's vertigo again, and the slow creep of becoming painfully aware of how much his body simply hurts just sitting up like this. His thoughts can't find their way to his mouth, some kind of disconnect occurring and hes trying to figure it out when he's yanked from his muddled thoughts by Oro sitting on the edge of his bed. Their IV is hanging right next to his now as they clumsily push the water into his lap. The pain recedes as he carefully, slowly, uncaps the bottle and downs half of it in one go, the water piecing him back together from the inside out.
Then it's silent, uncomfortably so. Oro stares at Jiraiya's heart rate, face unreadable at the steady crest and valleys.
"...I feel like shit." He says, trying to dispel the growing weight in the room.
"You look like it." They reply, looking over their shoulder. They can tell what little patience Tsunade had left after pulling Jiraiya out of death by the way she half yanked all his hair upwards and piled it upon his head. It would be funny if they couldn't see where every shard of glass and and splintered wood had been extracted from the skin of his face and neck.The worst of it, slowly healing open wounds , were covered by gauze padding and smaller bandages, the deep, dark blue and sickly yellow of old bruises blooming past the edges.
"Oh, Thanks." He snorts, his exhaustion giving way to a small smile. Beneath it all, another poorly hidden layer that refuses to budge for now, is confusion. A swirling mass of questions Oro isn't sure they have all the answers to. They shift in place, eventually pulling themselves onto the bed and closer to Jiraiya, much to his surprise.
"You woke up four days ago, though I don't think I would call you lucid. More like a panic response to Tsunade setting your ribs back in place." Jiraiya thumbs at the mouth of the bottle with bandaged fingers, expression unreadable and far off. Oro stares til everything but his hands grow fuzzy, blinking the haze away and continuing "Nine days. Including today. You died, you know. Not for long, just….five minutes, she said."
"Not too long huh?" He says, trying to joke but it rings hollow.
"Not long enough for permanent brain damage. Not enough for cell death." They try.
"I dunno, I think a good chunk of them slipped out the door with me, Tsunade can't even bring them back." He moves to run a hand through his hair, the tug of IVs and bandages stopping him, becoming aware of the gauze and smaller scars on his face as his covered fingertips just barely grazes them and sets the nerves alight. His fingers curl into his palm letting his arm fall back to his lap with a sigh.
"Thank you." They blurt out suddenly, pulling their tongue from between their teeth "After the fire…" they close their mouth, something in them trying to piece itself back together and failing in that moment, taking a breath to continue "I was...scared. But you were there. So thank you." Oro pauses, feeling that broken thing in them possessing them, feeling the urge to say more but Jiraiya snorts, snapping them out of it.
"Okay, okay dont kill yourself trying to be nice. I can see you fucking collapsing. I'm just glad you're okay." Oro bites the inside of their mouth at his words and wide grin. “Told you when we headed in there that we weren't gonna get separated, no matter what. Just...forget about the whole ‘over my dead body’ part…”
“I'll omit it.”
"You're so generous." He says, settling back into the much warmer bed. His eyes focus on the cast, brows furrowed. "You should've healed up by now. That snake thing you do." He hasn't commented on why Oro feels like a live wire beside him, watching their demeanor shift from barely contained….something to annoyed and tired.
"...Snake thing...Tsunade said she'll put me in a coma next if I used even an ounce of chakra. I prefer to be awake."
"Mh..maybe we should've told her we were making up our own mission."
"She would have stopped us. Or worse, tried to come with us." To Jiraiya's absolute shock, they lay down, carefully curling up half on their left side while being mindful of their right arm. "I explained that much to her, and she was still angry of course. But she understood, though she seemed concerned about the fallout of murdering a powerful daimyo….there will be a replacement, I'm sure. Hopefully someone that, at the bare minimum, isn't involved in genocide for science. Maybe that's too much to ask."
"What are you doing?"
Their eyes flicker up to his in a flash of gold and red, that strange energy and look blanketing over them again. "I'm tired."
"...don't you have your own room?" He doesn't mean for it to come out so perturbed, he's just confused at whatever they're doing right now.
"It's a long walk. Your bed is bigger." Their eyes are boring into him now, an edge of challenge even when they're both battered to hell and back, straddling a line of familiarly endearing and annoyingly stubborn. He sighs, conceding and making room for their smaller frame.
"I can't fit on the standard shit, and yet you won't even let me have this." He returns to laying on his back, not in the mood to find out which side is his objectively good one.
"If I crush you, don't complain." He speaks to the ceiling.
"Mh." Is all they say before absently counting his heartbeats until he falls asleep, staring at his arm the entire time it takes for two hundred and fifteen to come around. Their focus shifts to his right hand again, edges of their vision growing fuzzy until it's all they see. It feels like something is trying to claw their way out of them, making Oro's chest burn, finding it hard to breathe. So they reach for his hand, slow and crawling across the sheets to touch the tips of his fingers, ring and pinky curling around his. And that's the routine for the past seven days, slipping into a comatose man's room just to hold onto his fingers for a taste of whatever cocktail of emotional relief their brain supplied on the verge of death. It works for the most part but there's something else, something cracked or shifted some way in them, constantly urging to push, that this brief contact is just the edge of something more that they need.
Something closer.
It's maddening, they think, breathing easier as they fell asleep.
__________________________
There's a harsh spike of pain erupting across Oro's scalp, the feeling of someone yanking their hair. They turn sharply and open their mouth to let a viper spring forth, ripping themselves out of sleep in a blind fury to defend themself from whoever had the gall to touch them.
The gall, it turns out, belongs to Tsunade, stopping short of crushing the snakes skull in her fist. Oro regards her as dryly as they can with a snake coming out of their mouth, and then braces.
"I've had it up to here with you, you know that? Why do I keep finding you in his room, please don't be planning anything because I'll-" She watches them attempt to speak, releasing the poor viper from her grip and watching it slink back into Oro's throat with a hurt expression.
"Your bedside manners are god awful." They finally say and she regrets letting go. "I'm here because he woke up. Can't you tell? Maybe you're too busy bullying me."
"I was notified when you slithered in here at three in the morning." She glances over at Jiraiya, still looking worse for wear but much more alive even if he is out like a light, thankfully without the use of sedatives. His right hand is palm down on the bed, fingers curled under like he was holding something.
"That doesn't account you for the last seven days." Her eyes flicker back to Oro as they avoid hers.
"I already told you." Is their measured reply, carefully sliding off the bed with their left hand and retrieving their IV bag, already making their escape.
"Esoteric shit isn't an explanation and you know it." She shoots back but doesn't press further as they give a long suffering sigh. There's a lot Tsunade wants to say but there's a few priorities that come before trying to pick Oro's brain.
"I'll come check on you in a minute. Don't fight the nurses over eggs again." She hears their amused hum from the doorway as they exit, then turns her attention back to Jiraiya.
"I know you're awake."
"No I'm not." That earns him a flick to the forehead, scrunching his face up at the sting. Then he's being ushered to sit up before he can get out a hello, protesting and answering Tsunade's questions with yes, no, and confused looks. After pin pricks, reflex tests and a only slightly dizzying walk around the room, Tsunade pulls him into a hug tight enough to re-crack his ribs.
"Stupid..beyond stupid." Her words are hushed and worried, thoughts she meant to keep to herself slipping out her mouth.
A younger version of himself would have attempted to pull her right down, hell, a version of himself from three months ago would combust at this. But now, in the moment, he's tired, arms too heavy to even return the hug. She's warm, smelling hospital clean and the strength of her arms bringing him back to earth.
Not yours.
His own words make him flinch, Tsunade pulling away with a hurried apology and immediately sets about unwrapping and peeling back the gauze on his arms, removing IVs and sensors along the way. He watches old bruises and mostly healed stitches littering his skin come into view.
"You were crazy enough to take all the damage to your front despite running away from it...I'd expect nothing less from you. Did you think you could stop a blast that big?"
"No, I…" they were almost there, could see the treeline outside the bunker. Couldn't see there was a form, a body, one of their men before them still clinging to life along the edge of the path, clung to Oro in desperation and fear, unknowingly pulling them down in their final act. There was no time to pull them up and out to safety or regard the man's hand curled limply around Oro's ankle.
So he faced the inferno of his own death with no strength to fight, only to protect. But it wasn't enough. He's never enough, especially not when it counts.
"...I don't remember." He shrugs. "Probably spun me around.."
Tsunade sighs, gently pressing her thumbs into his skin at random intervals , cold bursts of chakra making his nerves jump. Her jaw shifts, remembers arriving at the blown out and flaming secret bunker to find only one of her teammates, her friends, still breathing. She doesn't want to remember how his eyes stared into nothing forever, the urge to collapse in defeat and mourn counters with the urge to open his chest, to plunge her hand in and force him back. There's equilibrium in still finding his body warm, in knowing she came in time. She wants to ask if they think killing one person would stop the war, would change the course of the future.
"Have they been acting weird towards you?" She asks in effort to distract her mind, holding onto her questions for another day. The 'they' goes unspoken but he knows, snorting softly.
"Define 'weird'." She rolls her eyes, pulling away to level him with a serious look.
"Just….they keep coming in your room at odd hours, talking to me about...hands. How nerves work, " She shakes her head "I think they smashed their skull harder than you…."
"Unless you find them trying to smuggle amputee parts out of this place, I don't think there's anything to worry about." He grins at his own morbid joke. "They just come in here to make sure I'm not dead….and because apparently my bed is bigger...Uh, that part...about being in my room? They were watching me?"
"Yes."
"Ah. Okay. Well, that figures. I haven't been smothered to death so it's not that bad right?"
"....I suppose not...I'm just worried that this incident might have pushed them farther over that edge." Her expression turns pensive, brows furrowed and dragging the corner of her lip between her teeth to worry. Tsunade briefly wonders if her tough love treatment of them might have exacerbated it, hoping they do know she still cares.
"I don't think so. Maybe they're just...I dunno, processing it. Like y'know, categorizing it in their head. Whatever edge there is, they're far from it. Just need time..someone to talk to." When he speaks of Oro like this, his voice is steady, determined, despite his words seeming lax. He's dragged Oro from the edge of their own self destruction more than once so his conviction is a given.
She huffs, smiling and feeling reassured that neither of them have given up on Oro yet. "Seeing the good in everyone is gonna keep landing you in deep shit, you know."
"I'll keep it up till it kills me, I guess!" He laughs, Tsunade's smile twisting.
"Not if I put you back into a coma." Her eyes narrow as he stops laughing and clamps his mouth shut, but not before saying "Your bedside manners really are bad."
Tsunade accidentally misses his veins when replacing the IVs four times in a row.
______________________
The smell of citrus wakes Jiraiya up, easily lifting his arms now devoid of bandages to rub at his eyes. It's much later, the sky outside the flower edged window filled with the pinks and golds of the setting sun. He must have slept the whole day, evidenced by his groggy state and the hollow feeling in his stomach. He'd had to have eaten his weight in rice alone earlier, and yet he was already thinking of ways to charm his way into at least three actual bowls of ramen from the charge nurse.
He turns to the right, almost swallowing his tongue at the sight of Oro quietly sitting next to him, peeling what looks like their second tangerine with bandage-less fingers, a book balanced in their lap along with more tangerines and a few persimmons. They regard his gawking after a moment, hair and clothes looking much neater than yesterday, but the red still eclipsing their right eye.
"You're awake again." They say as if it's a hello. Jiraiya's eyes are wide, and there goes the sound of his heart again, speeding up from being scared shitless.
"How long-"
"Thirty minutes. You've been asleep for ten hours." Oro peels a segment of the fruit off, slipping it into their mouth. Then it's quiet save for the sound of his heart returning to normal in steadily declining beeps. That strange look comes over their face again as Jiraiya watches them, takes Oro apart in his head and figures them out in real time. He does it so often it shouldn't bother or even affect Oro but there it is, that shifting thing rearing its head, their fingers feel cold and uncoordinated, clumsily peeling another section of tangerine and bringing it up to-
He blinks first. "You don't have to watch over me anymore, yknow."
-bite it clean in half. Their head ducks, covering their mouth and catching any juice that falls, giving Jiraiya a half hearted glare and seeing how his expression softened.
"Dont gotta worry about me dying,for now, at least." They watch him sink back into the bed, gently scratching at his temple and minding the fading bruise. He's relieved that even after losing a few too many neurons he can still figure Oro out.
"I wasn't…..I'm not." Oro sits up straighter, shaking their hand off. "It's quieter here."
"Uh huh. So you can read…?" Unconvinced, Jiraiya glances over into their lap to peek at the book they're currently into, seeing intricate diagrams of the nervous system surrounded by dense paragraphs of text. He swallows thickly, remembering Tsunade's words.
"Skin is the largest and arguably the most sensitive organ on the body. " Oro starts, like they were waiting for Jiraiya to notice, gathering up the whole fruit and peelings into a small towel, save for the peeled tangerine, wrapping them up and pushing it to the side along with the dog eared book. "But sensitivity is not equally dispersed. Mechanoreceptors live under your fingertips, able to feel texture changes you can't even see." Their fingers dance across the flesh of the exposed fruit before peeling a segment of it away. Then Oro is sliding down to lay next to Jiraiya, holding the slice up high enough in their left hand so that the dimming sun can hit it, illuminating the inside like an amber jewel.
"I can tell the pith from the flesh just from the texture with my eyes closed. I can feel every single ridge of its formation." They turn to face him, their right arm still held close to their body by a sling, carefully holding the rest of the fruit. Jiraiya is feeling very confused, staring right back at Oro and trying to decipher what this is now, and getting nothing. Oro is unflinching now and the relief from earlier is yanked right from under his feet.
"The fingers are better for tactile sensations. Touching, feeling...experiencing your surroundings." They hold the tangerine between them and then reach out, placing it directly on his lips.
"Lips, however, are better at temperature and touch, with over a million nerve endings beneath thin skin."
Jiraiya's eyes are wide, the smell of citrus hitting him in an instant, the sensation of the soft, cold fruit against his chapped lips flooding his head with Oro's voice. He moves to speak, to ask what in the whole hell is happening but the moment he opens his mouth, the tangerine is pushed in. Their fingers brush his lips, catching the heat of his mouth and they pull back as if burned. Oro's eyes fill with that odd charged look again, electrifying all the way to their twitching fingertips. The EKG is going to short out with the way it's trying to keep up with his heart rate in a frenzied mantra of beeps.
"An exposed erroneous zone, but the only pleasure isn't food."
Oro is close enough to his face that Jiraiya can pinpoint the exact second their eyes just barely shift down to stare at his lips, an unbelievable mixture of fear, anticipation, need and pure hunger blooming across their face.
Jiraiya bites the tangerine in half, mouth flooded with the juice, and his stomach growls, loudly, at the first introduction to food in hours. He freezes, and then scrambles to half sit up, coughing out a laugh as he swallows down the fruit quick enough to choke.
"S-sorry uh...sounds interesting." He nods mostly to himself, trying to speak above his heart rate. Jiraiya is used to Oro messing with him, using their words or even stealing their food. This…..was too different, too much to decipher at once. He can't….pull anything from them, maybe Tsunade was right, maybe that edge is closer than he thought. But it's not the same jagged precipice of chaos like before the mission. "I should go get something to eat, you can-"
"What do you want?"
They're sitting up, a surprisingly fluid motion, and Jiraiya freezes again.
"What?" That earns him an eye roll.
"You shouldn't be moving around too much. So what do you want?" Jiraiya feels like he's in a fever dream, like the last two minutes didn't even happen. He stares at Oro for a solid minute, long enough to make them squirm, before answering.
"....ramen."
"Seriously?"
"You asked! I know they can make some fucking tonkotsu, I could smell it earlier when they were trying to shove a pound of miso in me. So if you bribe the charge nurse a lil…." He smiles wide as Oro slides off the bed with an annoyed expression.
"I'll see what I can do..." Jiraiya has to bite back a laugh, knowing that's their code for 'I'm going to get what I want'. He feels an odd chill up his spine after replaying the last few minutes with their words.
He can still feel and taste tangerine on his lips when Oro leaves the room, frowning and running his palm over his mouth.
___________
It's hard to tell who beats who to the thick of it once Jiraiya finishes slurping down his second bowl of ramen, quietly singing the praises of Oro's persuasiveness. Between the few quiet moments of remembering how they nearly shed their skin when their hands brushed earlier and Oro slicing open a persimmon with unnerving accuracy, they both decided now was the time to speak.
"So what the hell was that about, with the tangerine?"
"It felt better holding your hand."
Jiraiya's the first to react, though his face is a portrait of confusion, head cocked to the side.
"Huh?" Oro's face becomes pinched, agonized that they have to repeat themself.
"On the field. After everything, when you took my hand despite dying, it felt better. I didn't feel alone or scared of...what else could happen, even after…" They pause, the exact moment the light left Jiraiya's eyes replaying and they give the persimmon a gentle squeeze. "It was comforting."
"Oh...oh that...Well why didn't you just say so?" He huffs out, grumbling about Oro being so difficult and secretive sometimes as he took their hand with no warning, pushing the dull hospital knife from their hand to replace it with his much larger and arguably more calloused hand. And for the second time that day Oro wants to jump out of their own skin from the shock of contact. He's warm, so much warmer than they are, than the air around them is, and it all slides into place, still shifted oddly inside them but clear.
Jiraiya inclines his head again, his expression soft and searching. "Okay?"
"That's not it." They breathe out.
"Alright, now you've really got me stumped. First the fruit thing, now this." He doesn't let go of their hand as he talks, moving his empty bowls to the side table before turning to face Oro. They stare down at the open persimmon on their right hand. "Tsunade's not the only one who's noticed how weird you've been lately. And if there's something you wanna talk about, I'm all ears. The world's falling apart, and I don't think I can fix that and everything that might be screwing with you but I'll be damned if I don't try." He pauses, seeing if they'll react, heat and color rising to his face as he continues. "I just...don't want you to bottle everything up and slip away again. I don't want to lose you. A-and neither does Tsunade. Neither of us do."
"...You're so sentimental, it would drive a regular person insane." They finally look at Jiraiya, watching his face catch fire. "Im grateful. But that's not all of it." Oro lets the persimmon go, moving to face Jiraiya in turn and their voice becomes such a low whisper that he's convinced these words aren't meant for him but for snakes.
"Ever since, something in me has been…" they pause, searching for the words, a rare moment for Oro that worries Jiraiya.
"....restless. I tried to ease it by visiting you."
"You mean watching me while I sleep."
"Not just watching." Their voice somehow gets quieter but they do not shrink, even as Jiraiya's eyes grow wide. "It was holding two of your fingers at first, then three, you woke up before I could get to your palm. I don't know why it kept escalating, like something was saying….more. That it wasn't enough, whatever' it' is. I asked Tsunade about it, to borrow her anatomy reference books but I don't think she understood either. Nothing was explained in any of the texts about why I have this urge to do more. So I experimented."
"The tangerine." Oro nods once. "Thats a real fucking weird experiment if you ask me."
"I initially just wanted to mess with you. But it still didn't confirm or explain anything so I at least left it with the satisfaction of making you flinch."
"What is wrong with you??"
"That's why I'm asking you now. I don't know." Stunned at them verbally admitting this and evading that minefield of a question, he watches Oro take a deep breath, feeling their hand go lax in his.
"I don't know. And I don't like not knowing. Why do I want you to hold my hand? Why does it feel like that in and of itself is not enough? Why...what is more?"
"Well...if I'm allowed to take a wild guess now, I can tell you it isn't ever gonna be in those thick books. It's not some scientific phenomenon or medical mystery or any stuff like that either."
"Then what?"
"Just sounds like you need a hug." Jiraiya shrugs. Oro's face, previously tight with confusion goes flat, just a few seconds shy of a violent eye roll.
"Jiraiya-"
"I'm serious. You kept going for my hand while I was in a goddamn coma, so it seems like you're looking for that comfort you felt in that shitty moment. And a little comfort can go a long way. So do you want a hug or do you wanna keep being a miserable little snake?"
That really makes Oro's face screw up, but despite the insult, they tentatively nod once. It seems silly, that a hug could really be the answer but at this point, they have nothing else to lose. There's hesitation, unsure of who should move first, then Jiraiya is pulling Oro closer by the hand with a loud 'tsk'. In turn, they half fall into him, off balance without the use of either hands. It's embarrassing and clumsy, Oro feeling sick from it until Jiraiya's arms wrap around them, pulling Oro closer and pressing their face to his chest.
It happens so quickly they forget to breathe, a quiet shaky exhale leaving them and ghosting along Jiraiya's shoulder. It's...warm, the steady sound of his heart drowning out the mimicked beeping until its all Oro can hear.
"Told you so." The amount of smugness in his voice almost warrants a punch to his ribs. But the cons of doing that far outweigh the pros, so they instead mutter out 'please shut up.' and close their eyes. Oro quickly loses track of how long they stay like this, fixated on Jiraiya's heart and his breathing. It becomes apparent they've been together like this too long from the way Oro's left hand starts to prickle at being pressed between them for so long. They start to shift in discomfort and Jiraiya takes that as cue to pull away, helping Oro regain their balance with a hand on their shoulder.
"Maybe I should start hugging you when you're angry. You relaxed faster than anything I've ever seen." He teases, fingers slipping away from their shoulder, leaving a chill in their wake.
"Thank you, but I'd rather you didn't, unless you enjoy being full of venom." They bite back, their words nowhere near as harsh as they want them to be, making Jiraiya grin. "And...I….apologize if I made you feel uncomfortable while you were nearly brain dead."
"Oh, you're so gracious." He replies dryly, watching them collect their fruits and book before slipping off the bed. "You're leaving?"
That makes them pause, looking over their shoulder with a coy expression. "You want me to stay?"
"...I dont trust you and fruit in the same room anymore, so no." And there's the eyeroll, watching them slide open the door.
"This war is hell. But hug every now and then makes getting through it a little more bearable. Won't change how it plays out, but it feels good. Sometimes feeling good is just what we need."
Oro pauses in the doorway, unable to tell if that's just Jiraiya musing or an invitation, the line between the two thin and blurred.
"I'll keep that in mind." They reply, sliding the door closed behind them.