Friends, Gamakichi had always thought, didn't need to use words so very much. He'd made friends with his family before he could speak, and with his baby brother before the other could even manage to croak. Voices didn't matter. If you understood each other, then nothing else mattered. So TonTon could be his friend without either of them knowing what the other every talked about. They could read each other, tell what they were thinking, and that meant real friends. When first they'd met, it had been another story entirely. His current master didn't seem to get along very well with TonTon's current caretaker, and so he thought they might not either. Later, his dad would say that Jiraiya and Tsunade really were good friends, but they didn't act like, and he would understand when he was older. But he understood now, too – it didn't matter what they shouted at each other, because that wasn't what they heard. Their hearts were one, and all of those scary sounding words were no more important than Tonton's squeals. They'd gotten to be friends in the same way that he and Tonton had – by getting into lots of trouble together. When they were younger, Dad said, and then he laughed at two of the best known ninja in the land the same way he laughed at his little son. And Gamakichi didn't see anything different in the way they acted, either. The frog and pig had gotten into situations just as dangerous as the two humans, even if people said they were only playing. So was Jiraiya, he knew, almost always. Life was a game, and if you didn't play you didn't have any fun. Those two were smart for grown ups. They looked at things with all the sense of little kids.
