Chapter 205: Flashback and Afterparty
November 16, 1:07pm
Mori Reo was bored.
Bored, bored, booorrreedd, Boredy McBoredpants.
The progress of time was slower than the progress of the chakra leech that was slowly wriggling its way across the lawn in a stealthy attempt to latch on to Reo's ankle and suck the life out of him through its inappropriately massive and ridiculously serrated gums. Seriously, what had the Sage been thinking when he created those things? They were only two inches long but fully half of that was the mouth hole. This particular one must be especially adventurous for its kind; it was far from water and had wriggled out of the waist-high hedge that separated the Mori estate's property line from the surrounding street. It had spent three hours crossing the twenty feet of grass between the hedge and the actual wall. It would have made better time if it had come up the slate pathway that led to the gate where Reo and Saburō stood guard, but staying in the grass offered better concealment. It was only six feet away by now, meaning that it would be ready to attack him about ten minutes after his shift ended and he had left for dinner.
His brain, so desperately bored that it was seeking any diversion in preference to clawing its way out of his skull and going to find anything more interesting to do than stand at ceremonial attention beside the gate, latched on to the puzzle of what to do with the leech. Should he kill it before he turned the watch over to his replacement, or should he let it be? Should he tell the replacement that it was there? On the one hand, it would be polite. On the other hand, the leech would give his replacement something to look at in order to alleviate the boredom. Eh, probably better to kill it.
Well, that was settled. And no longer worth anything as a distraction.
Bored, bored, bo— Ooh, someone was coming up the path!
"Halt! Who goes there?"
"Gōketsu Jiraiya, Hokage of Leaf," grunted the broad-shouldered man. "I'm here to see Mori Ami."
Reo swallowed nervously. He'd never seen Jiraiya and there were a number of descriptions circulated about him. Still, "fifty-ish + formal haori + red stripes on his cheeks + spikey white hair + built like a brick shithouse" was a pretty common one. And besides, how many people would claim to be Kage of a foreign nation if they weren't? Especially when that Kage was actually in town?
Reo glanced at his counterpart, Mori Saburō. The junior guard was barely old enough to need a razor; his eyes were wide in shock and there was clearly going to be no advice coming from that front. Not that Reo had expected any.
"Sir, Ms. Ami is not taking visitors at the moment," Reo said carefully. "I can pass you in to the house steward if you like, but he'll tell you the same. I apologize for not being able to help you...could I set something up for tomorrow?"
Jiraiya—if that was who this was—studied Reo for a long second, then smiled affably and clapped him on the shoulder with a strength that probably wouldn't have meant much to a ninja but nearly sent Reo to his knees.
"Look, son," the ninja said, "I realize that this sort of visit is usually set up in advance through intermediaries so as not to waste anyone's time, but there's been a scheduling slip. Rasa—you know, the Kazekage—sent someone to tell the rest of us that he's going to need an extra hour to deal with his latest batch of dispatches, so I'm currently at loose ends. There's a couple things I need to discuss with 'Ms. Ami', and they're fairly important to me. How about you take me inside and have someone fetch the house steward so that he can explain to a visiting head of state how Ami can't spend a few minutes having a cup of tea with her sister's stepfather. Sound good?"
Reo swallowed. "Yessir. Please come with me, sir." Protocol said that it was Saburō, the junior guard, who should carry the message inside, and that the visitor should only be brought in once a ninja escort had arrived. Still, if this really was Jiraiya then the consequences to the House of keeping him waiting could be severe. It was broad daylight with lots of traffic on the street, meaning an unlikely time for a thief or assassin to conduct an attack. All in all, the risk/reward analysis suggested that taking him right in would be the better option.
"Saburō, you have the watch," Reo said. Then he turned and led this man who might possibly be one of the most powerful ninja in the world into the heart of House Mori.
o-o-o-o
The house steward was a retired ninja in his sixties and a very sensible man; he had no problem breaking through Ami's request for privacy when the Hokage came knocking. Seven minutes after Jiraiya walked into the house, he was seated in a lounge with Ami, both of them having tea cups in hand.
"How may I help you, sir?" Ami asked, smiling in a completely friendly and welcoming way. She held the tea delicately, long fingers elegant and perfectly still.
Of course she did.
"Two things, actually," Jiraiya said. "On a personal note, the first round of the Fifth Event ends at sundown. I intend to take my kids out to celebrate their victory, and I had been meaning to invite you." He waited until Ami started to open her mouth to reply, then cut her off. "At least, I
had meant to, until I heard about this apparent separation between you and Keiko. I wanted to ask you what caused it." The last words were polite, but they were not a question.
Ami seemed puzzled. "I'm not sure what you mean, sir?"
Jiraiya studied her for a moment, then took a polite sip of tea and set the cup down gently.
"Ami," he said, using the familiar to drive home the 'elder and superior speaking to junior and inferior'. "I know there's a lot of stories about me, and you've probably heard some of them. What do you know about my parents, or my siblings?"
Ami blinked. "...Nothing?"
Jiraiya nodded. "That's right. I never had any blood family. I grew up alone, and after I signed the Toad Scroll I spent a lot of time on the Seventh Path with no other humans around." He smiled slightly, a brief hint of teeth showing. "A bit feral, if you will. When I was your age, my team and I were the best ninja in Leaf, which is to say that we were the best in the world. Sunny and Oro meant everything to me...and then they both decided to leave me. Hiruzen-Sensei was the closest I ever had to a father, and Minato the closest to a son.
"Now? Now I have an actual family. A wife. Two sons. A daughter. A batshit crazy cousin who is still a great ninja despite his somewhat tentative contact with reality."
He paused, looking down at his interlaced hands and chuckling. "Three kids. Never saw that one coming." He shrugged and looked back at Ami. "Given what I told you about how I grew up, I hope you will recognize that this sudden plethora of family bonds means a great deal to me, and that I care a lot about doing a good job at being a father. Yes?"
Ami nodded. Her face, friendly and open, might or might have been a mask over the awareness of where the conversation was going.
"Good. There are two particular fatherly duties that I'm given to understand are important. Do you know what those are?"
"Being a good role model and providing good training?"
Jiraiya snorted. "Good role model? Have you heard
any of the stories about me?" He shook his head. "No, the duties that I was speaking about are, first, to scare the crap out of any boy who comes sniffing around my daughter and, second, to take an active interest in anyone who hurts her. Keiko went directly from you to the second event; she did not know that I was there, but I was. I was displeased to discover that, when she arrived, she was wearing an expression that I have not seen since the war. I find myself very curious to know what happened."
Ami's expression was just as perfectly controlled as That Woman's. "I'm not sure, sir? I thought our conversation was quite pleasant. We talked about how much we'd missed each other, I asked if she would like a meal or a tour of the compound, she said no, and then she left."
Jiraiya studied her calmly. "You offered your sister, who grew up in this house, a tour of it?"
"She'd been away for a long time, sir."
Silence.
"Uh-huh. Fine. Did she talk to anyone else? Her parents, perhaps?"
Ami shook her head. "Unfortunately, no. Our parents were very keen to speak with her, to hear about all her adventures and her plans for the future, perhaps to offer some parental suggestions, but father was busy with paperwork and she left before he was available."
"I see."
Silence.
"All right. Moving on, let's talk politics...."
o-o-o-o
November 16, 7:12pm
"What's wrong, kid?" Jiraiya shouted, the words barely audible over the pounding of the music. What the band lacked in musical skill they made up for in sheer volume. Said volume was truly insane, given that they consisted of three drummers and someone playing a a bastardized nightmare of an instrument that looked like a xylophone tried to swallow a steel-stringed harp, choked, and puked it back up.
The youngest girl...Fukai, that was her name, gulped, wrenching her eyes away from the dancer gyrating on the stage. "Nothing, sir. Fit and ready, sir!"
Hana watched Jiraiya chuckle in a way that actually probably was mostly as natural and relaxed as it seemed. And, of course, he raised a cup of sake.
"Can't be having that, now can we? It's a party! Health!" cried the Toad Sage.
"Health!" the nine genin and one jōnin dutifully echoed before slamming back their sake in time with Jiraiya. He'd been very clear about the fact that it was rude not to answer a toast, insulting not to drink, and that only sissies failed to empty their cup. Keiko, the one with the lowest bodymass in the group, was starting to look a bit bleary around the edges. Noburi's rather more robust frame had thus far insulated him from any effects, and Hana could tell that Hazō was leaning hard on the Iron Nerve to keep his motions smooth. (Although it seemed like it was starting to require a bit of focus to do so.) Hana, of course, was having no issues; she had built up an embarrassing degree of tolerance over the last two years, and it was slow to fade. The cravings were still there, but she had refused to indulge them for months and they were getting quieter. Now that her cricket was back, the bottle held no appeal for her mind. Her mind commanded her will, and her will commanded her body. She would match Jiraiya drink for drink tonight but she would never again become what she had been.
Gomi, however, was definitely under the influence. He was leaning both elbows on the stage, chin on hands and goofy grin on face, staring up at the lingerie-clad woman who was currently spinning around the pole.
Hana, on the other hand, was less amused. "Lord Hokage, why did you bring us here?"
"What?"
"I said, why are we here?! It's loud, and lewd!"
"What?! I can't hear you over the music!"
Hana administered the Unamused Look of Doom.
Jiraiya chuckled and leaned closer to Hana so that he could speak at a reasonable volume. "Relax. Your son and his team just beat the shit out of everyone else in the Exam, and, based on how easily they did it, anyone with a brain is going to assume that they'll do it again next round. Then they'll go on to sweep the tournament and leave every other village looking like a bunch of slack-jawed wannabes. I'll eat my extremely ugly hat if there aren't at least half a dozen conversations going on right now about how to keep them out of the second half, and out of the tournament. A place like this, it's easy to spot a tail; anyone who isn't drinking or looking at the stage stands out, and we can have fairly private conversations."
Hana's Kurosawa façade cracked; for a moment she actually looked surprised. "Do we need to arrange protection for them?"
"Nah. The only viable windows of opportunity are tonight and tomorrow night, after the next round ends. No one is going to take a swing at them in broad daylight when there's a ton of witnesses around. We'll stick around here until closing time, drink a bit so as to blend in, and then you and I will walk them all back to my quarters. Chances are they'll be asleep in another half hour or so regardless of how loud it is."
Hana glanced at her son, her bloodline effortlessly suppressing the desire to show how concerned she was about the threat that the Hokage described.
Hazō's current appearance was a reminder of how many threats he had already faced down, and how much they had changed him. She had hardly spent any time with him as yet—she'd forced herself to keep her distance so as not to distract him from the Exams, although she'd been almost literally beating status reports out of the proctors multiple times a day—but now that they were finally together and relaxing, she could see the signs. He would be smiling and animated one moment, but then something would move in his peripheral vision and his eyes would flick towards it. His body would tense just slightly, the Iron Nerve responding to his heightened alertness by reaching for combat patterns.
And then he would see that it was just a waiter, or a drunk being escorted out, or a plant swaying in the breeze, and he would relax. Relax, and go back to being the far-too-tall young man that her little boy had turned into. The one who was so much more serious than she remembered. The wide-eyed and innocent wonder that he had had in his early childhood had been beaten out of him by that Sage-damned Academy, replaced with inquisitiveness and cunning, but the time that he'd been gone from her side had sunk the final nails in that coffin. Her little boy was gone for good.
He'd developed in other ways too; his voice was now exactly like his father's, although she had been careful not to tell him. If she closed her eyes and just listened, she could imagine that it was Shinji talking to her. All it would have needed was for him to call her 'waterlily' and the illusion would have been complete.
She reached deep into the Iron Nerve to keep the smile on her face even as the scars on her heart tore themselves open a little more. Fortunately, she had an entire library of carefully-practiced motions to conceal the act of wiping tears from her eyes.
Right now, Hazō was leaning close to Noburi so that the two of them could discuss something in low voices and many excited hand gestures. The possibilities for what that conversation might be covering both boggled and terrified her. An apprentice medic-nin and a sealmaster-in-training who, in their adopted father's words, was 'frighteningly creative'. Both of them teenage boys with eyes that had too much of the wilderness in them. From anyone else she would have been worrying about existential threats, but she knew that Hazō's nature was fundamentally good, and she was fairly confident that Noburi's was as well. They would only destroy the world by accident.
"Sounds like a good plan," she said to the Hokage. "You will not object if I stay as well."
The Hokage's eyes crinkled up. "Object to an attractive widow sleeping in my rooms? Of course not!"
Hana's gaze hardened.
He raised both hands, palms out in apology. "Sorry." He let his hands drop, then studied her for a moment, assessing what had been behind the sudden mood shift. "I'm guessing that he looks like his father?"
She nodded. "More every day. And he sounds just like him."
The Toad Sage glanced around to be sure no one was paying attention, then leaned in close so that he was speaking almost directly into her ear. "I know that I cannot replace Shinji, but I will do my best to be a good father-figure for Hazō, and I definitely want you to be there too. You guys raised a great kid, and I consider myself lucky to have him in my clan." He started to pull away, his words finished, but then thought of something else. "By the way: If you want to become a Gōketsu, it can be arranged."
Hana raised an eyebrow, leaning back enough so that she could see his expression. He seemed serious. How could he possibly be serious about that? Changing villages wasn't a casual thing that could be offered on a whim. Bloodline theft had literally started wars in the past.
Still.
This was the man who had brought missing-nin in from the cold and rehabilitated them. Something that had never been done before, something utterly unthinkable, was suddenly thinkable. It would change the face of the Elemental Nations; once the word got out, missing-nin would be discreetly contacting Leaf, probing to find the possibility of acceptance. There weren't a huge number of missing-nin in the Nations, but there were enough to notice. No one would want the strongest village to suddenly grow even stronger; they would either need to go to war immediately so as to very visibly punish Leaf's transgression against the natural order...or they would need to start doing it themselves. And, of course, if you were willing to accept missing-nin then that meant that moving from one village to another was but a polite fiction away.
Mist was the village that pulled grieving mothers into dark rooms to be interrogated. Mist was the village of secret police and whisper campaigns intended to clear the next spot up the rank ladder in one's career. Suppose ninja could simply...leave? Suppose they could decide they didn't want to be interrogated, threatened, killed, and that they would rather go to Leaf instead? Or Cloud, or Sand? If villages had to compete for ninja like tradesmen for wheat contracts, would the world break? Any political system would allow only so much change, and only so fast. To go too far, or too fast, would be disastrous.
Less so with Ren in charge, though; she lacked Yagura's power, and his psychosis.
"I'll think about it," Hana said, smiling.
XP AWARD: 1
This was effectively just an interlude and so wouldn't normally get XP, but I'm in a good mood.
FP AWARD: 0
There will be no voting. There's still one afterparty and half a plan to do.
