Cherub [collection]
Title: Cherub
Characters: Jiraiya, Tsunade, Konan
Words: 1685
Summary: Jiraiya and his relationship with women. In general as well as in specific cases.
There had been Tsunade and there had been Konan.
This, he supposed, was the story cut short if you left out all those names he remembered with some leering kind of fondness if he did at all and all those that had in fact been parts of his own body advancing into something else by means of wishful thinking.
So what he possessed were memories of have-not and shall-not-have. A potpourris mixed with moments both bought and stolen.
His real women - his wives and courtesans - were all nothing but ink.
Konan
He described women as flowers, endless comparisons and images that came to life all too easily on paper. The roses that indeed had thorns, raking their nails along his spine in the act. Violets, virginal and shy.
He imagined her, being inside her, engulfed by those iron walls, so close to the steely round of her womb and flinched.
Would he write about her, she would be something white and aloof. A calla maybe. Something small and poisonous like a lily of the valley.
Her arms were girlishly rounded. A semblance that only at first sight took its origin in baby fat and was in fact born of muscle. It was strange to see this on her as if it didn’t truly belong to that body that still carried the shadow of long-gone emaciation. Just like rachitic bones growing straight once more under the influence of proper nutrition. You only saw what had once been, if you knew it had been there.
He knew for he had seen her then.
And it were those arms that encircle him, pushed her still-growing breasts flush against his chest.
Ultimately, he realized, she scared him, because he had been a fool when he had been her age and she was anything but a fool now. He looked into her eyes these days and all he saw was that kind of premature age otherwise only found in child brides. Some sense of having grown up too fast and having done so naturally.
Whatever had brought her to be what she was now, it had not been catalytic. She had grown into herself like into a cloth that now hung loose on fewer places than it previously had.
He could only say what she was not and silently he had to admit that she was as much as a mystery to him as any litotes. The way she adorned her eyes with a macabre, melancholic bluish shade told him she was not the optimist of the group, never the idealist.
She talked in a low voice, almost husky, looked at him through pupils that were ever-too-wide pits of silence. A kind of black, overfull absence of sound that was no man’s friend.
He still was not sure what that made her.
So they sat in the lightning-filled bosom of their last summer together, stood on the thunder-engulfed hill right in front of their hut and understood that they would be something else in the future than they were now.
The word the boy used was possibility.
He heared it all, those whispered promises that he was not sure she believed in for another reason than that was all she could do.
A cacophony of a many times repeated “I will follow you”.
Nagato never promised her anything. The silence between them was easy, a living, breathing thing that she greeted with respect. Something the other boy feared even though he cloaked himself in it, the very same silence that engulfed him as he left.
Going felt like reentering the world, like waking from a strange wet dream where he was too tall and broad and she too small and as cold and breakable as any porcelain doll.
Tsunade
It had started the day he noticed her chest was no longer flat. Or maybe not flat was not the right word. Her breasts - tits he wondered or rather boobs- already had had potential back then, the inherent to become what they became.
Tsunade had growled at him, asked what the devil he was looking at and he couldn’t help but suspect that he had been the first to admire her in that way.
He put it into words, stammering, unsure and strangely youthfully stupid. She was the pleonasm of a girl. Sensual, wonderfully rounded and well - womanly.
He didn’t say it, of course not.
So what he had of her for the next years were fleeting, forbidden images, bruised cheekbones and a very real teammate.
He sometimes wondered what he desired more.
Konan
Eventually he learned that Yahiko was dead and so he supposed she had to be and it was no coincidence that the next girl he visited had her heavy eyelids and hard-set mouth. The adolescent - just the age she would be now in, was now conserved in like Snow White in her crystal coffin - tried to smile with those thin, blueberry-red lips. The motion strangely crooked, whimsically cynical and all wrong.
He fled later that night, fled before that almost-woman that would never be her, feeling like he had touched something that had not been meant to be soiled, had made love to something as pristine as a cold winter’s night and even as he moved, he felt some silken-silde terror as her teeth remained firmly linked to her lips, worrying at the soft flesh, her eyes remaining unbearably open.
It was the revenant image of her, some twisted answer to “come and meet me when you’re ripe”, but he ran nevertheless.
When he had still been with them, he had had a dream. She smiled in those days, bright as any girl should and later with that sullen edge that most teenagers possessed, the small wrinkles around her eyes deepening while those grey orbs remained dark and knowing like those of a soothsayer.
“There is misery in the world” he told her.
She looked at him before the corners of her mouth turned up in just that way.
“Yes” she said her voice ringing bell-clear.
He woke, looked around in the small cabin he shared with them. The feeling at the back of his mind surprisingly sweaty and malicious.
It was a half-admitted truth that he might have left just in time.
Tsunade
He was sure there were worse ways to die than in a woman’s gamble.
She would have fortified his life one way or another for if she had loved him she might have given him the necklace.
It was a symbol that had gained meaning through coincidental experience, but as an author he recognized the value of those.
Sometimes he wondered what would have happened if they would have had all of this - love and caring and monogamy. And maybe, because people never learn, she would have doomed him as irrevocably as any human is.
She hadn’t gambled the jewel when he met her again, no. Some keepsake of secureness and death. A constant reminder of the very thing she hated.
But in the end they were nothing but drinking buddies. People with each their respective glasses and lives that might as well fill those little porcelain bowls.
She told him to return and therefore foretold his doom. After all her having luck gambling was unheard of.
“Come back alive” he heard her say. “Please, come back.” But he was too old for the boyish grin that should have accompanied any sign of her caring for him and she too harsh to sound truly begging. A woman that had signed her death warrant as she took on the job of Hokage and knew it, someone who would never be a mother.
He looked at her, saw through that fake appearance of hers.
It made her unattractive in a twisted kind of way and he thought it strange that he applied this term to the woman he had spend his youth peeking at through keyholes. An unlucky person whose soul was impregnated with death and therefore seemed as infertile as a tree that would never bear fruit.
He told her she would not cry for him as much as for Dan. It was tactless, he knew. Some painfully jovial comment reeking of cynism.
They interacted like people who had known each other for too long, like a married couple that had long since grown apart. The heady haze of alcohol lulled them, made them become familiar in a distant kind of way again, while he sat beside her heaving bile on the pavement. He patted her back, telling her not to keep doing this knowing that she would not stop and that he would neither.
Later she contemplated that she would not be lying if she said something as melodramatic as “my heart betrayed me”, because she had genuinely wished he would come back and maybe that had been her true wager irrespective of what he had suggested.
Konan
He outplayed the shock of seeing her again. Instead of standing and gaping he told her she had become beautiful and meant it.
He didn’t tell her though she seemed as drenched in sacrifice and guilt as he was at his much older age, didn’t say that everything that used to be soft in her appeared to have become part of that brittle, harsh shell of hers.
“You have no idea what happened to us after you left.” And maybe he imagined it, but her voice sounded almost mournful.
Probably she meant: You have no idea what happened to me.
The question of why hung heavy and accusing between them.
She didn’t answer, pushed him away as his feelings mixed toxically between fatherly and lusty and silently he was happy to end this conversation in the same way he had ended everything that had ever been between them. Joining other wars was the only way he knew to escape.
Tsunade
She was still clear enough to see the frog even if she later told herself otherwise. The thing croaked, looked at her with golden-grey toad eyes and disappeared downstream into the great river and the seas beyond.
She took another sip.
Characters: Jiraiya, Tsunade, Konan
Words: 1685
Summary: Jiraiya and his relationship with women. In general as well as in specific cases.
There had been Tsunade and there had been Konan.
This, he supposed, was the story cut short if you left out all those names he remembered with some leering kind of fondness if he did at all and all those that had in fact been parts of his own body advancing into something else by means of wishful thinking.
So what he possessed were memories of have-not and shall-not-have. A potpourris mixed with moments both bought and stolen.
His real women - his wives and courtesans - were all nothing but ink.
Konan
He described women as flowers, endless comparisons and images that came to life all too easily on paper. The roses that indeed had thorns, raking their nails along his spine in the act. Violets, virginal and shy.
He imagined her, being inside her, engulfed by those iron walls, so close to the steely round of her womb and flinched.
Would he write about her, she would be something white and aloof. A calla maybe. Something small and poisonous like a lily of the valley.
Her arms were girlishly rounded. A semblance that only at first sight took its origin in baby fat and was in fact born of muscle. It was strange to see this on her as if it didn’t truly belong to that body that still carried the shadow of long-gone emaciation. Just like rachitic bones growing straight once more under the influence of proper nutrition. You only saw what had once been, if you knew it had been there.
He knew for he had seen her then.
And it were those arms that encircle him, pushed her still-growing breasts flush against his chest.
Ultimately, he realized, she scared him, because he had been a fool when he had been her age and she was anything but a fool now. He looked into her eyes these days and all he saw was that kind of premature age otherwise only found in child brides. Some sense of having grown up too fast and having done so naturally.
Whatever had brought her to be what she was now, it had not been catalytic. She had grown into herself like into a cloth that now hung loose on fewer places than it previously had.
He could only say what she was not and silently he had to admit that she was as much as a mystery to him as any litotes. The way she adorned her eyes with a macabre, melancholic bluish shade told him she was not the optimist of the group, never the idealist.
She talked in a low voice, almost husky, looked at him through pupils that were ever-too-wide pits of silence. A kind of black, overfull absence of sound that was no man’s friend.
He still was not sure what that made her.
So they sat in the lightning-filled bosom of their last summer together, stood on the thunder-engulfed hill right in front of their hut and understood that they would be something else in the future than they were now.
The word the boy used was possibility.
He heared it all, those whispered promises that he was not sure she believed in for another reason than that was all she could do.
A cacophony of a many times repeated “I will follow you”.
Nagato never promised her anything. The silence between them was easy, a living, breathing thing that she greeted with respect. Something the other boy feared even though he cloaked himself in it, the very same silence that engulfed him as he left.
Going felt like reentering the world, like waking from a strange wet dream where he was too tall and broad and she too small and as cold and breakable as any porcelain doll.
Tsunade
It had started the day he noticed her chest was no longer flat. Or maybe not flat was not the right word. Her breasts - tits he wondered or rather boobs- already had had potential back then, the inherent to become what they became.
Tsunade had growled at him, asked what the devil he was looking at and he couldn’t help but suspect that he had been the first to admire her in that way.
He put it into words, stammering, unsure and strangely youthfully stupid. She was the pleonasm of a girl. Sensual, wonderfully rounded and well - womanly.
He didn’t say it, of course not.
So what he had of her for the next years were fleeting, forbidden images, bruised cheekbones and a very real teammate.
He sometimes wondered what he desired more.
Konan
Eventually he learned that Yahiko was dead and so he supposed she had to be and it was no coincidence that the next girl he visited had her heavy eyelids and hard-set mouth. The adolescent - just the age she would be now in, was now conserved in like Snow White in her crystal coffin - tried to smile with those thin, blueberry-red lips. The motion strangely crooked, whimsically cynical and all wrong.
He fled later that night, fled before that almost-woman that would never be her, feeling like he had touched something that had not been meant to be soiled, had made love to something as pristine as a cold winter’s night and even as he moved, he felt some silken-silde terror as her teeth remained firmly linked to her lips, worrying at the soft flesh, her eyes remaining unbearably open.
It was the revenant image of her, some twisted answer to “come and meet me when you’re ripe”, but he ran nevertheless.
When he had still been with them, he had had a dream. She smiled in those days, bright as any girl should and later with that sullen edge that most teenagers possessed, the small wrinkles around her eyes deepening while those grey orbs remained dark and knowing like those of a soothsayer.
“There is misery in the world” he told her.
She looked at him before the corners of her mouth turned up in just that way.
“Yes” she said her voice ringing bell-clear.
He woke, looked around in the small cabin he shared with them. The feeling at the back of his mind surprisingly sweaty and malicious.
It was a half-admitted truth that he might have left just in time.
Tsunade
He was sure there were worse ways to die than in a woman’s gamble.
She would have fortified his life one way or another for if she had loved him she might have given him the necklace.
It was a symbol that had gained meaning through coincidental experience, but as an author he recognized the value of those.
Sometimes he wondered what would have happened if they would have had all of this - love and caring and monogamy. And maybe, because people never learn, she would have doomed him as irrevocably as any human is.
She hadn’t gambled the jewel when he met her again, no. Some keepsake of secureness and death. A constant reminder of the very thing she hated.
But in the end they were nothing but drinking buddies. People with each their respective glasses and lives that might as well fill those little porcelain bowls.
She told him to return and therefore foretold his doom. After all her having luck gambling was unheard of.
“Come back alive” he heard her say. “Please, come back.” But he was too old for the boyish grin that should have accompanied any sign of her caring for him and she too harsh to sound truly begging. A woman that had signed her death warrant as she took on the job of Hokage and knew it, someone who would never be a mother.
He looked at her, saw through that fake appearance of hers.
It made her unattractive in a twisted kind of way and he thought it strange that he applied this term to the woman he had spend his youth peeking at through keyholes. An unlucky person whose soul was impregnated with death and therefore seemed as infertile as a tree that would never bear fruit.
He told her she would not cry for him as much as for Dan. It was tactless, he knew. Some painfully jovial comment reeking of cynism.
They interacted like people who had known each other for too long, like a married couple that had long since grown apart. The heady haze of alcohol lulled them, made them become familiar in a distant kind of way again, while he sat beside her heaving bile on the pavement. He patted her back, telling her not to keep doing this knowing that she would not stop and that he would neither.
Later she contemplated that she would not be lying if she said something as melodramatic as “my heart betrayed me”, because she had genuinely wished he would come back and maybe that had been her true wager irrespective of what he had suggested.
Konan
He outplayed the shock of seeing her again. Instead of standing and gaping he told her she had become beautiful and meant it.
He didn’t tell her though she seemed as drenched in sacrifice and guilt as he was at his much older age, didn’t say that everything that used to be soft in her appeared to have become part of that brittle, harsh shell of hers.
“You have no idea what happened to us after you left.” And maybe he imagined it, but her voice sounded almost mournful.
Probably she meant: You have no idea what happened to me.
The question of why hung heavy and accusing between them.
She didn’t answer, pushed him away as his feelings mixed toxically between fatherly and lusty and silently he was happy to end this conversation in the same way he had ended everything that had ever been between them. Joining other wars was the only way he knew to escape.
Tsunade
She was still clear enough to see the frog even if she later told herself otherwise. The thing croaked, looked at her with golden-grey toad eyes and disappeared downstream into the great river and the seas beyond.
She took another sip.