SPEEDOMETER: a countdown from a place before time

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circuit

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Disclaimer: We all know who Naruto really belongs to. I'm just putting together some of the pieces left out.

Warnings: Language, death and murder and other things kickass ninja do.

Author's Notes: From the SPEEDOMETER universe: what Jiraiya should've done with his life.

Had Jiraiya never been a ninja, he would have been a writer. His sensei, Sarutobi, told him off for daydreaming and said that if he wanted to be poet, he should never have volunteered to kill people and while Tsunade clucked her tongue disparagingly and Orochimaru smirked self-satisfactorily, Jiraiya should have said, fine, fine then. I'll be a writer and quit just there, sparing himself all this heartbreak But he was too goddamn stubborn so he toughed it out, shoved everything beautiful about the world to the back burner in his mind and concentrated on enhancing his techniques so that he could finally stand up to Orochimaru in a fight, finally beat the crap out of him like he'd always wanted.

The day he first killed a child, a beautiful boy much much younger than he, the barrage broke and Jiraiya found himself writing poetry in the sand with a finger dripping blood. His sensei slapped his face until he stopped and his teammates watched in horror as he vomited all over the words buried in dirt so that only the edges of what was written were left, but it was no matter. He never told anyone, but Jiraiya had nightmares about those words for a lifetime after that, even if it got easier to kill every time, even if that wasn't the last kid he killed.

There is no forgiveness here, there is no meaning in words already slanted. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry...

Jiraiya wakes up one day and he is thirty-seven, old for a ninja, but not that old--old enough to know that when he chases after Orochimaru, that stupid fuck who ran off to gain immortality and endless power and ways to kill people without ever touching them, without ever knowing their names, that he is going to die. He knows this the same way that he knows that if Orochimaru hadn't been stronger than Jiraiya before, he sure was now.

Tsunade also knows he won't come back. She kissed his palms before he went and drew little spirals on them saying this is where you--we--belong. Bring him back for us. And the us is what kills him, she's counting on him, and if he hadn't locked up his mind so tightly he would have thought that this would be perfect inspiration for bitter love songs and ballads. The stuff that gets published in a nin-village, at least.

She doesn't believe he'll come back, but for a moment they pretend. Her lips on his palms and Jiraiya thinks if only we had always been this close we could have held him here but they didn't, they never were, he's already given up. They gave up when they could have celebrated after that first mission together but instead split up, went home, and grew up into three fucking lonely people.

His student is different--Namikaze looks at him with pretty blue eyes that are too old, has seen his teammates and friends die and he says they asked me to be Hokage in a lilting, beautiful voice but Jiraiya can't chose his student over his old teammate, and he hopes the boy will understand as he always has. Gold hair flashes as it shadows broken eyes and a few seconds later a plastic grin is plastered over the boy's face. Namikaze's always been fragile. Jiraiya wonders what he did to deserve him--the best kid anyone could ask for and Namikaze ended up with Jiraiya, with the screw-up, with the shinobi who couldn't keep his fucking team together even after everything, and, maybe, in the end, didn't even want to. He feels bad for the brat, and kind of knows he won't see him again. He's right, of course. He always has to be right about these sorts of things.

And he didn't even mean it that way.

Jiraiya doesn't really come back from fighting Orochimaru. The black haired man said just a few words and then they were sparring, Orochimaru with the intent to kill, Jiraiya only half there, half fighting, unsure what it was he wanted to preserve any longer, lost lost lost so even when he was pressing the other man back and the toads screamed to kill him, kill the man before he comes back more powerful and kills you first JIRAIYA he runs away, cowardly muttering soft, soft words to himself, hoping this is okay, hoping starting again all over again would be okay.

He knows it isn't. He knows all the words in the world couldn't bring his team back together, could bring his life back together, and, looking at it rationally, he knows that it's all been falling apart from the start, and the three of them just nev er stopped lying to themselves.

(And Sarutobi-sensei had told him to get his head out of the clouds.)

So he gave up, officially. He figured the hero of a novel wouldn't give up for him and pressed his hopes into stupid trash that sold and sold and sold and, sure, it was porn, but well written porn--beauty with smut and it didn't surprise him when, returning to Konohagakure, he found Kakashi reading his book. Broken brat, he thought, amazed that maybe he could save something, not break it, cradle it in his hands and breathe fire into it slowly and make sure it didn't die, not like the three murderers the Sannin once were, not like the ninja Jiraiya once was.

Then, like the cosmic joke his life seems to have been, the gods granted him that second chance and gave him Naruto--the kid who was even more of a screw up, even more broken, nothing like Namikaze but everything like him and Jiraiya threw his makeshift world to the wind and figured, for once, he could nurture a hero who wasn't stupid enough to die, but was smart enough to save a world and more, and maybe, maybe like poetry. The kid broke him down from the inside out, did the same to Tsunade, and reminded them of how much they'd fucked up, how much they'd gave up on before it was time, how much less of a heart they had then this blonde brat who looked and sounded more like the Yondaime every day and didn't even know it.

(Jiraiya refused to teach Naruto anything more than the Rasengan because he finally figured out where he'd always gone wrong--where Kakashi went wrong: you teach a kid to love the world to keep him in it, not jutsu to fight it.)

When the newly instated Rokudaime killed Orochimaru, no one was surprised. Jiraiya didn't blink, took the news softly, and realized there was something wrong with his team when the two remaining Sannin didn't even mourn for the black haired, handsome smirking fucker that Jiraiya had always known, had always mooched meals off of, had loved like a brother even if he did have the creepiest tongue in the world, all pointy at the ends. When the Rokudaime brought his best friend back after beating the world back into him, everyone smiled fondly and said he can't help it, our Hokage never gives up.

Jiraiya knew, then, that he'd never have to watch another student die. He wasn't ever a real ninja, never lived by a certain code, and always wanted to just sit back and watch the world happen and when it did he couldn't even cry. Tsunade dies before him, but Naruto is alive, gorgeously like Namikaze, like Namikaze Minato, the only son Jiraiya ever had, so when it's his own turn to go Naruto holds his hand and Jiraiya mouths I will say hello to your father for you because it is the only thing he can do for the brat.

He isn't sure, but it looks like Naruto says thank you. And Jiraiya sees Kazama and Orochimaru and Tsunade and Sarutobi-sensei and knows he should have been a poet, should have listened to his gut when it mattered--the only time it did.

Jiraiya never protected anything and his friends all died first, but he's sure that his convictions, at least, were correct, and that he might regret his life but never his friends, never the advice he gave to Naruto. He knows the brat, knows Naruto's not meant to be fighting against everything eating him up, and also knows that unlike him, Naruto won't regret anything anyway.

(It is a long time before Naruto joins them, still smiling, and confirms his postulations. By then he's found peace with everything, just about.)