I've always had a certain fascination with the Sannin, and that fascination has been renewed now that Boruto has given us the new Team 7 of Boruto/Sarada/Mitsuki, which I think may bear even more resemblance to Jiraiya/Tsunade/Orochimaru than to the Naruto/Sakura/Sasuke trio. I wanted to write something that would examine the Sannin's old team dynamic—I think they had a strong bond, even if it ended tragically on a number of levels—and this oneshot is what emerged.

This fic takes place after their original genin team had officially disbanded but before Orochimaru's defection and Dan's death, back when the three still did missions together (and also before Tsunade got the Strength of a Hundred Seal, I think? I'm a little confused about when she obtained that in canon, but anyway, in this fic she doesn't have it yet). No pairings were really intended, but there are probably hints of pretty much every possible combination of these three, so feel free to run with whichever one (or more) you like if you're in a shippy mood.

Note that I have no medical training and I know very little about giving birth. I did some light online research, but I didn't have time to go super in-depth, so I apologize if anything is inaccurate! Also, warning: some graphic, potentially disturbing images of traumatic childbirth are involved.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything from Naruto.

Emergency Response

Tsunade rolled over in bed, nearly ripping the threadbare sheets with the force of her frustrated movement, so restless she was seriously tempted to give up on sleeping entirely and just get up and train. The only thing stopping her was the knowledge that Jiraiya and Orochimaru would never let her wander what was potentially enemy territory in the middle of the night on her own if they could help it, so she'd be disturbing their hard-earned rest as well. Not that she thought they really needed to treat this tiny, poverty-stricken town as "enemy territory"—there was no way any citizen here would last a minute against any of them, and they had travelled far enough from the site of their recently completed mission to be reasonably safe from pursuers—but in the ninja world, there was no such thing as being too cautious, and watching each other's backs like hawks was how they'd made it this far.

And they had come quite far. People had been calling Orochimaru a genius for years, but Jiraiya was also now recognized as a force to be reckoned with, and Tsunade knew that her own name was gaining a certain fame thanks to her incredible strength and medical expertise. And yet, these days she spent more time feeling afraid for their future than proud of their past accomplishments. Some nights, like tonight, she lay awake wondering if this was as good as they would ever get, if maybe it was all downhill from here. If there was something broken in all of them that even her powers of healing couldn't mend.

She lifted her head slightly from the pillow so she could more easily make out the lumpy forms of her teammates in the other bed. Although they'd done it so often by now that there was no awkwardness to it anymore, it still amused her to see Orochimaru and Jiraiya share a bed when they booked a room at an inn. (She had long ago vowed never again to share close sleeping quarters with Jiraiya, at least not until he learned to keep his hands to himself, which everyone knew would be never.) Even tonight, with her thoughts on a dark downward spiral, she smiled to herself at the sight of them huddled next to each other, their deep breathing synchronized. Jiraiya was as wild in sleep as in wakefulness, his limbs splayed out all over the place and all the blankets tangled around him, leaving Orochimaru without much cover as the dark-haired man slept curled up, shoulders hunched in, arms held tight to his chest. Orochimaru slept like he was bracing himself for a bomb to go off beside him, and the bomb was Jiraiya.

Sudden rapid knocking at the door made her shoot to her feet, ninja reflexes kicking in as she whipped out a kunai. Her teammates reacted with similar speed, jerking awake and leaping out of bed as one, falling into ready positions next to her in the three-part line of defense that came as naturally to them as breathing.

Jiraiya growled, annoyed at having his beauty sleep interrupted. With his hair a messy explosion of white swirling around his head, he looked rather crazed. "What the hell? What kind of enemy knocks at the door in the middle of the night?!"

"The kind that is either extremely stupid or quite cunning." Although there were lines of fatigue on Orochimaru's thin face, his eyes gleamed in the dark, alert and ready for blood.

"Or the kind that's not an enemy at all," Tsunade commented. She raised her voice, calling out, "Who is it?"

"Please!" The high, breathless voice belonged to a child. "M-my mom! She needs help!"

It could very well be a trap, although Tsunade's instincts were telling her it wasn't. Still, the three ninja exchanged wary nods, and Jiraiya stepped forward to fling open the door, the other two close at his heels, ready to pounce if it turned out to be an enemy.

What it actually turned out to be was a little girl, no older than seven or eight, panting as if she'd run a marathon, her cheeks tear-streaked. She looked vaguely familiar; Tsunade thought she remembered seeing the child quietly sweeping the lobby when they'd first entered the inn.

"Please!" the girl repeated, not even seeming to notice their weapons or menacing poses in her panic. "My mom, she's having a baby, but she says it's too soon! She was…she was s-screaming, and I couldn't find the doctor, and she said maybe the ninja visitors would help!"

For a moment they all stared down at her, frozen in surprise. This wasn't exactly the wake-up call they'd expected, although perhaps it wasn't as it odd as it appeared at first glance. It wasn't that uncommon for very small villages that didn't get much exposure to the outside world to view ninja passing through as not just fierce fighters but also all-knowing sages who could do just about anything. And the assumption that they had medical knowledge in particular wasn't hugely unreasonable, considering that a lot of ninja knew at least some basic medical jutsu.

Jiraiya, who had always been good with kids, was the first to recover. He crouched down to the girl's level, exclaiming confidently, "Well, you're in luck, little missy, because my friend Tsunade here is the best medical-nin you'll ever find, and she can definitely help your mom!"

Tsunade shot Jiraiya a sharp look—without seeing the mother there was no way of knowing if she could be saved, and the kunoichi had learned the hard way not to make promises of healing she wasn't sure she could keep—but there was no time to waste if she wanted to make his words true. While he let the little girl clamber onto his broad back, she took thirty seconds to throw on a thicker shirt over the tank top she'd worn to bed and grab her medical pouch, then ordered kindly, "Show us where your mom is. We'll see what we can do to help."

They took off at top speed, letting the child tearfully tell them what little she understood of the state of the pregnancy along the way.

Drawing in close to Tsunade as they ran, Orochimaru asked in a quiet murmur, "Have you ever delivered a baby before?"

"No. I specialize in combat medicine; most of my training is in gluing back together sliced-up internal organs," she admitted at the same low volume, even as she made a mental note to make sure she did a round in obstetrics when she got back to Konoha. "But I know the principle."

Orochimaru nodded, unaffected by the offhand mention of "sliced-up internal organs." Unlike Jiraiya, he never cringed at her descriptions of some of her messier surgeries. (Ninja didn't have the luxury of being squeamish, but the graphic details of Tsunade's intricately gory medical adventures were in a league of their own.) In fact sometimes she got the impression that he rather enjoyed them. But then that was part of Orochimaru's (undeniably somewhat twisted) brilliance; what other people found disturbing enough to turn away from, he found fascinating enough to pursue until he mastered the subject.

The girl, who eventually told them that her name was Miyabi and that she did some cleaning around the inn for a bit of money, finally led them into a small, ramshackle home in which a woman lay panting and moaning on a pile of sweat-stained blankets, clutching at her swollen belly. In the dim light of a single lamp, she looked startlingly young considering that her daughter seemed to be around seven; she must have had the girl in her early teens. Hopefully at least the strength of youth might be a bonus during what would no doubt be a tough birth, Tsunade reflected grimly.

Channelling chakra to her hands as she strode toward the woman, she barked out brisk commands. "Orochimaru, take Miyabi and go find some clean water and towels. Jiraiya, talk to the mother, give her something to focus on besides the pain."

Of her two teammates, Jiraiya was definitely the better bedside companion. He had spent many an hour next to her in the hospital after a mission gone wrong, cracking dumb jokes and letting her squeeze the life out of his hands. Once, holding his hand while enduring an excruciating bone realignment procedure, she'd broken all his fingers without realizing it, and he'd barely flinched (even though on a normal day he whined like a toddler when she so much as slapped his wrist).

Accustomed to obeying Tsunade's orders without question when it came to medical issues, both men promptly did as told, while she took a moment to meet the frightened, exhausted eyes of her patient.

"Nice to meet you, I'm Tsunade," she said with a small, self-assured smile, as her hands, glowing a promising green, hovered expertly over the bulging stomach. "Let's bring this baby into the world, shall we?"

Keeping up a steady babble of nonsense that he hoped might be interpreted as slightly comforting, Jiraiya didn't try to hide his awe as he watched Tsunade do her thing. Although he would bet on Orochimaru's odds in almost any battle, and he himself was no slouch in the badass department, at times like these he thought that Tsunade might be the strongest of them all. To be able to destroy and kill one moment, and rebuild and save the next—that was a double-edged gift he would never truly understand, but it was the code his female teammate lived by every day.

It wasn't that she necessarily made it look easy. Her hazel eyes were steely with determination, her face tight with pure concentration, her shoulders tense. But she wasn't letting up for a second, and that was the awe-inspiring part. He could do chakra control exercises for a hundred years and never develop that level of perfect precision, never get a feel for those tiny fluctuations of power that meant the difference between life and death.

Finally the green outline around her hands faded and she sat back on her heels, exhaling deeply. "The baby was slightly out of position; I've done everything I can from the outside to fix that," she told the woman. "Now it's really up to you. You need to push."

At that moment Miyabi and Orochimaru returned, the girl carrying a pile of towels and their teammate lugging a bucket of water. He set it down next to Tsunade, and she promptly dropped a few water purification tablets from her medical pouch into it. In places like these, it was best to take precautions even with water the locals called "clean."

After instructing Jiraiya to use one of the towels to dab away the sweat on the pregnant woman's face, Tsunade gently spread the patient's legs open and took up position there, preparing to support the baby as it came out. She darted a warning look at her notoriously lecherous teammate as she did so. "I swear, if you make so much as one perverted comment about this, I'll shatter every bone in your body when this is over."

Jiraiya gulped and nodded earnestly. "You wound me, Tsunade. I would never taint the precious experience of the miracle of life with impure thoughts!"

She snorted. "As if you have any other kind of thoughts."

Still, the characteristic exchange seemed to relax all of them as they settled in for the process of pushing. Crouching next to the woman, Jiraiya held her hand and kept up a stream of soothing commentary, while Tsunade offered her own firm encouragements as she leaned over the stomach. Orochimaru stood slightly off to the side with Miyabi, watching intently as he let the frightened girl cling to his pant leg for comfort.

What seemed like ages later, Jiraiya shifted his aching, cramped legs on the dirty floor, as the woman in distress let out what had to have been her millionth cry of agony, her throat so torn from screaming that it came out raspy. Ninja learned early on to develop a certain degree of insensitivity to pain, both their own and that of others, but it was never something he'd been very good at, and it was especially hard to quash those compassionate instincts when civilians were involved. "Can't you do something for the pain?" he couldn't help but ask with a sympathetic wince, even though he knew Tsunade would never let someone suffer unnecessarily.

She shook her head grimly, pressing her lips together. "Anything I could do for her at this stage would dull her awareness, and she needs to be as sharp and alert as possible to maximize her own and her baby's chances of survival." Tsunade never lost her cool during a medical crisis no matter how dismal the prognosis was, but he knew her well enough to be able to detect her anxiety. Clearly things weren't going as smoothly as she wanted. The baby still wasn't showing.

Finally Tsunade let out a frustrated, almost anguished sigh. "I was hoping we could still do this naturally, but it's obviously not going to happen. Orochimaru, get over here and let her hold onto you as well—this is going to hurt like hell."

Their teammate moved to obey, but not before quickly bending down to face Miyabi. "You don't have to look," he told the child in a low voice, not unkindly. "This will most likely be messy." She nodded, wide-eyed, but promptly followed him when he came over to kneel at her mother's side, dutifully taking the woman's other hand. Jiraiya saw the young girl curl a small fist in the fabric of Orochimaru's shirt, and had to bite back a smile despite the dire circumstances. Hardly the nurturing type, Orochimaru normally kept his distance from children when their team occasionally encountered some on missions, but this one seemed to have taken a shine to him. Jiraiya would make sure to tease him about it later.

Tsunade, meanwhile, was refocusing, one slender hand busy rubbing the skin of the stomach with a disinfectant cloth from her medical pouch while her other hand was once again engulfed in a cloud of glowing chakra. Jiraiya recognized the shape of the aura and the sharp, tingling feeling emanating from it—a chakra scalpel. He'd had both the misfortune of being on the receiving end of the technique's offensive blows during spars and the privilege of watching Tsunade use it to patch up injured comrades. Now, she took a deep breath and ran her palm smoothly over the pregnant belly, blood bubbling up through a neatly sliced line as she went.

The patient screamed so loudly and crushed the two men's hands so tightly in her grip that even the usually imperturbable Orochimaru grimaced. Tsunade took no notice, but snapped, "Hold her still!" as the woman writhed on the blankets. Jiraiya and Orochimaru hastened to lean in, pinning her down with their weight as carefully as they could.

Efficiently peeling aside the flaps of skin on either side of her incision, Tsunade made another quick cut in the uterus and then wasted no time in plunging her hands into the mess of organs, blood, and baby, easing the tiny body towards the exit hole with tremendous care. Jiraiya honestly probably would have gagged if he hadn't been so personally involved in the process (and if Tsunade wasn't so likely to break his jaw for giving in to such a base reflex when he was supposed to be offering the patient support), but as it was he could only gape at the sticky, red-drenched form emerging so miraculously from the gory chaos.

Arms dripping blood almost up to her elbows, Tsunade sliced the umbilical cord and held the smushed little face of the baby close to hers for a moment, closing her eyes in momentary relief as she detected the sounds of its breathing. She very gently wiped excess mucous from its nose and mouth, then looked up and said sharply, "Orochimaru, come here and take him!"

Startled, Orochimaru dropped the mother's hand and moved toward her, and his teammate unceremoniously transferred the baby to his arms. She paused only to make sure that its head was properly supported in the crook of his elbow before returning her attention to the mother, underneath whom a disturbingly large of pool of blood was beginning to form.

Jiraiya's heart skipped a beat as he noticed that the woman's hold on his hand had gone limp and her eyes were closed, her exhausted face paler than the whitish blankets she was lying on. "Tsunade…!" he exclaimed, alarmed.

The medic was already well aware of the danger. Steadying her hands, which were starting to shake with fatigue, by sheer force of will, she threw all her energy into clotting the blood and mending the tears in the flesh it was weeping out of.

"You've got a baby boy, DAMMIT!" Tsunade shouted, startling everyone in the room. Even the nearly unconscious mother jerked a little, promisingly. "Don't you dare give up on me now!"

An eventful hour later, Orochimaru sat cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the wall with the baby cradled gingerly in his lap, now cleaned and swathed in towels. He shot an irritated look at Jiraiya, who was crowding him as the bigger man pressed up against him and craned his neck to peer eagerly at the new arrival, making exaggerated funny faces at the baby.

"Get away from me and stop that," Orochimaru hissed quietly. "Your ugly face is probably scaring the infant enough without distorting it like that."

"Shut the hell up," Jiraiya retorted, but he seemed too excited by the newborn to take serious offense. "Besides, don't you know anything about babies? They love this kind of thing!" Shoving even further into his teammate's personal space, he crossed his eyes and stretched his mouth wide with two fingers, sticking his tongue out at the child. Miyabi, also eyeing her baby brother with amazement from Orochimaru's other side, giggled timidly.

Tsunade rolled her eyes fondly. "In a competition over who knows the most about babies, I don't think either of you would give a very impressive showing."

She was seated a little ways away next to the sleeping mother, keeping one eye on the exhausted woman, thankfully out of life-threatening danger now but in need of rest to replenish her energy, and the other on the newborn. The still unnamed baby had cried for a little while (forcing Orochimaru to embarrass himself by cluelessly trying to rock him and make hushing sounds), then napped for a while, and was now awake again and blinking curiously up at the ninja, flailing his little hands and brushing the long curtain of dark hair that hung next to his head.

"Active little one, isn't he," Jiraiya murmured affectionately. "He's healthy, right, Tsunade?"

"A little underweight, maybe, but nothing serious," the blonde confirmed, sounding satisfied. "Both mother and child should be fine with a little rest and care."

"In that case, we should be on our way," Orochimaru spoke up. "At this rate, we'll be late returning from our mission." Dawn had already broken, and thin rays of early sunlight were peeking through the windows.

"Come on, this definitely counts as a justifiable delay," Jiraiya protested. Orochimaru would have been more contemptuous of the man's illogical attachment to a child they'd only known for an hour if he himself hadn't felt a strange reluctance even just talking about departing.

"It would be irresponsible to leave without making sure they have some kind of continued care in place," Tsunade put in. "Miyabi, you said there was a village doctor, right? Could you go with Jiraiya and see if you can find him now? Bring him back here and I'll brief him, and then we can move on."

"Aw, why do I have to go?" Jiraiya whined obnoxiously. "I wanted to stay here and play with the little guy!"

Orochimaru wondered when his teammate would finally get it through his thick head that it was never a good idea to challenge Tsunade when she was both tired and in an authoritative frame of mind. "You have to go," she snapped fiercely at him, "because I just spent half the night saving two lives, Orochimaru has somehow become the designated baby-carrier, and we are not letting a child go wandering around the village by herself. Now get a move on!"

Shutting up, Jiraiya meekly took Miyabi's hand and let her lead him out the door. Even pushed to the limits of her stamina, Tsunade was still an expert at kicking ass.

In the newfound peace and quiet, Orochimaru gently readjusted the child in his arms, stiffening slightly when the boy made a little gurgling noise in response. He ran his gaze up and down the small body with careful focus, but saw no evidence of discomfort.

He looked up to see Tsunade smirking faintly at him. "Looking nice and domestic there, Orochimaru," she observed. "Have you ever thought about having kids?"

He narrowed his eyes at her. Tsunade didn't revel in endlessly needling him like Jiraiya did, but she certainly wasn't above having a laugh at his expense. "Not really," he answered neutrally, not wanting to give her any more ammunition.

"Well, I have," she replied, with that startling bluntness she exhibited sometimes. "I've decided I'm definitely not ready. Maybe I never will be. Some people say I'm one of the strongest kunoichi out there, but having a kid takes a different kind of strength, and a whole lot more of it than I've got."

Orochimaru simply made a noncommittal sound in response, but he glanced at the sleeping mother and then met Tsunade's eyes, a mutual understanding passing between them. He didn't give out his respect or esteem easily, but one thing he did respect was strength, and looking at the blood stains crusted on his teammate's shirt and the pile of soiled blankets in the corner, he couldn't deny that this helpless civilian woman had shown a strength last night that many ninja would never match. For that matter, so had Tsunade.

He felt a sudden wave of appreciation for his female teammate's powerful, delicate touch. He had a respectable amount of anatomical knowledge himself, but it was geared toward lab experiments, not treating live patients without anesthesia. He shuddered to think what this night would have been like if it had been just him and Jiraiya. Even their old sensei, whose calm demeanour and vast experience made him an asset in almost every situation, probably wouldn't have been able to help much. But Tsunade had taken charge and done what needed to be done.

"Would you like to hold him?" he asked suddenly. He'd given Jiraiya a short turn earlier, but he just now realized that besides initially pulling the child out during the operation and then briefly handling him to examine him as a professional, Tsunade hadn't had a chance to really hold the baby.

But she simply smiled at him. "No, thanks." Her tired brown eyes sparkled. "You're doing just fine."

When they finally returned to their room at the inn, intending to wash up and take a quick rest before they left for Konoha, Tsunade plopped down on her bed with a sigh, worn-out but content. The doctor Miyabi had brought back had seemed to have around the same level of knowledge as an entry-level nurse at a Konoha hospital, but he'd appeared fairly intelligent and had listened carefully to her instructions, so she felt comfortable assuming that the mother and baby were taken care of.

Arching her back and rolling her stiff shoulders, she leaned back only to straighten abruptly again a few moments later. She was pretty sure she wouldn't have a problem sleeping now, but there was one more thing she needed to do first.

"Come here, you two," she said, patting the covers on either side of her.

Still operating in the vestiges of do-whatever-Tsunade-says mode even though the medical emergency was over, Orochimaru and Jiraiya each obligingly took a seat on the edge of the bed next to her. She reached out to either side, picking up Jiraiya's left hand in her right and Orochimaru's right hand in her left, and holding them both in her lap as she channelled her dwindling chakra to her fingers.

Guessing what she was about to do, Orochimaru tensed and said, "Are you sure you have enough chakra remaining for this?"

Normally few things were more likely to spark her temper than her teammates questioning her abilities, but the night's events had mellowed her sufficiently for her to hear the subtle concern in Orochimaru's tone. "This is nothing," she replied calmly, giving him a smile when he eyed her doubtfully. "Really."

Neither of the men had any actual broken bones from letting the mother squeeze their hands—even in the agonizing throes of childbirth, the average woman had nothing on Tsunade's limb-crushing strength—but she used her healing chakra to warm the abused joints and wash away the soreness. Orochimaru and Jiraiya let out almost identical quiet sighs of relief as she removed their pain, making her chuckle.

"Good as new," she announced, but although the green glow faded from her skin, she didn't release their hands, and they made no move to pull away. She'd never really appreciated before the differences between her teammates' hands, or the similarities. Jiraiya's was larger, thicker, and naturally warmer; Orochimaru's was cooler, with leaner fingers and bonier knuckles. But they were both rough and calloused from years of hard training, and they both returned her grip gently and firmly.

She finally let them go reluctantly, despite a sudden urge to interlace her fingers with theirs and simply hold on, as long and tight as she could.

Jiraiya waved his hand around experimentally, then turned to her with a grin. "You know, Tsunade, I think what you did tonight might be the coolest thing I've ever seen you do."

"It was certainly a fascinating experience," Orochimaru noted, his lips curling upwards. Although she hadn't had time to properly appreciate it in the moment, she remembered the unique expression on his face when she'd given him the baby to hold. It was always hard to tell with Orochimaru, but she thought he'd been...moved.

She grinned back, feeling a rush of affection for her boys. "You guys weren't too bad yourselves," she told them generously. "You make surprisingly decent nurses."

When she fell asleep not long after, much more easily this time, she dreamed about Orochimaru gracefully rocking a bundle in his arms, with Jiraiya leaning over his shoulder making silly faces, wild white hair brushing against sleek, straight black tresses.

It was a good dream.