Most of the time, Naruto didn't understand Jiraiya. It was strange because Naruto knew that he and Jiraiya were a lot alike. They were both loud, both powerful, and both perverts. It's the lack of dedication that Naruto couldn't understand (though since he was very simple in some ways, Naruto phrased it as: Why is the old man so lazy?).
As far as Naruto could see, Jiraiya spent most of his time peeping, an activity Naruto somewhat hypocritically joined him in, or writing his porn. While Jiraiya thought of this as a perfectly valid use of his time, Naruto simply can't understand not training. Orochimaru wass out there, constantly fighting and building up his army, moving ever closer towards a final confrontation with Leaf Village. Naruto's skin burned just thinking about it.
Most of the time they simply moved from village to village; the two thought the same way and made good traveling partners. They were content in their similarities, happy to find another who wanted to stop at the same point they want to, and got bored with any given town at the same time. They didn't argue about the little things, where to stop, how long to stay, where to go, what to eat. Their companionship was easy in this way.
Where they got bogged down was in the bigger things, the things that were harder to talk about because there were so many sore points. Sasuke took up a good deal of Naruto's hate and love and frustration and deep thoughts. What occupied Jiraiya when he can't sleep, Naruto didn't know.
Where the similarity between the two broke down is at the level of the intellect. Jiraiya was capable of thinking in poetry, even if what he wrote down is crappy porn, and Naruto was unable to relate on this level. When Naruto talked about Sasuke, or the fox, he spoke simply, with raw emotion and he stumbled over his words. Mostly, he didn't like to talk about it at all; usually, training worked well enough to supress everything.
When Jiraiya talked about his demons, Naruto didn't understand anything he said. One day, after a long day of chakra control, and they were sitting by the fire together, each staring into it and brooding on their individual demons, Jiraiya contemplatively said, "It feels like my entire life has been flashes of instances. Like one minute I understand everything, and then I blink, and then new things are happening. But I've lost everything in between." Naruto could do nothing but stare blankly; all he could think to respond is "Wha?" but that's not a very good response so he said nothing, which was probably the best thing to say anyway.
Naruto knew there were parallels between Orochimaru and Sasuke, just like there were parallels between him and his teacher. Why else, after all, would things work out this way, so neatly? He and Jiraiya and Sasuke and Orochimaru and even Sakura and Tsunade and wasn't that just so weird? It was like fate or something.
Naruto still didn't understand seven months later, when they arrived in a small town in Water country. They were "incognito," meaning that they tried not to be too loud or noticeable, which they both failed at miserably, as usual. Even so, they managed to make it to the dingy hotel without incident, moving down the single road through the rain.
There was only one room, so they bedded down together. Jiraiya had cold feet, so when Naruto woke up in the middle of the night with an ice block against his calf, he wasn't particularly surprised. Resignedly, he got up, knowning that he wouldn't be able to escape the feet now that Jiraiya had migrated over. Stupid old man. Naruto was not at all subtle, but even he was able to understand that the cold feet could be a horrible ploy by the old man to get the entire bed all to himself. That was because he understands Jiraiya was a sneaky old bastard, much like what Naruto will become.
It is cold and clammy outside, probably because this is, after all, Water Country, so Naruto pulled on his not-subtle-at-all sweater and went out to train. Sitting on the front porch of the hotel was a small kid, dirty and dark haired. Naruto was reminded with a chill of Haku, and his miserable childhood. He wondered, for a minute, just how many children were ignored and dirty orphans here. He also wondered if Fire Country would look like this if Orochimaru won. Naruto completely ignored the fact that he was once an orphan exactly like this kid, because he obviously didn't count.
The entire town kind of looked dirty and run-down though, not just the kid. Like almost everybody had left, or was dead. It looked like the Uchiha compound. Ugh. Uchiha and Haku in one day. Plus cold feet! It really had not been his morning.
He went towards the nearest empty clearing, feeling around for any kind of chakra signature. There was nothing, so he started running up trees, a comforting routine that started off most of his days now. He spiced it up by only putting chakra in the tips of his toes, of course, but it was still easy.
An hour later, he finally noticed the feeling of disquiet that had been trickling down his neck for the past hour, slowly increasing in magnitude. Looking down out of the corner of his eye he saw... the orphan boy. The child was incredibly skinny, and had a slim pale face. When the kid made eye contact, he ran away. It was then, from the way it moved, that Naruto finally realized it was a girl. He almost saw red for a minute; something in him had always hated the idea of girl orphans, even though Sakura would kick his ass if he ever said anything like that out loud.
After she ran off in fear, he started training again. Going after her wouldn't do anything but make her more scared, he knew, but maybe her curiosity would bring her back.
The sun rose completely, burning off the morning haze, and Naruto came out of his trance to a completely different forest, one which was bright and shining and somehow looked a lot bigger. Mist had a way of shrinking things, Naruto reasoned to himself. It seemed reasonable that everything became closed in when you couldn't see fifty feet beyond you. Jiraiya was back in the village, and Naruto decided to take a break, just to see if Jiraiya actually had anything relevant to training to say.
Which, of course, he didn't. Sometime Naruto really wondered about the pervert, where all his drive went. On the other hand, maybe there was nowhere to go once you reach Sannin status. But Orochimaru! It was an endless cycle that Naruto kept turning over in his mind, one he couldn't quite wrap his mind around.
Jiraiya was sitting at the bar right next to their lodging, well into his fifth cup, which wasn't much until you factored in the size of the cup. He was also sulking, which in a town like this could only mean one thing. "Get shot down again, old man? You should stop hitting on girls younger than you, maybe then you'd get some." Naruto paused for effect, Jiraiya eyeing him sourly. "Oh, yeah, that's right! Only Granny is your age, and she's way too attractive for your wrinkled ass. Oh well!"
"You're funny kid. For your information, the girl came on to me. A figure like Venus, but with youthful litheness. So young! Such wicked knowledge! A dark-haired, mysterious beauty with eyes like fire." Naruto eyed his teacher with amusement as he went on about the girl for another five minutes, waxing poetic.
"I'm telling you boy, if I have a feminine ideal, she's as close as I've come." "Not," Jiraiya took another gulp, "that I settle for one archetype of beauty of course, I'm a man of varied tastes."
Naruto settled in on a barstool and ordered a cup of his own. "Whatever, pervert. Whenever I think about your taste in women I feel a little sick."
"Ah yes, I do like them young sometimes, don't I?"
"Eh, yeah, that's what I mean. Shut up about it, I don't want to know." Naruto looked around the bar then, only now fully examining his surroundings. His first glance coming inside had revealed nothing dangerous, but on second glance he felt jarred. There wasn't anything specific that threw him off; all the other winos were quite and seemed perfectly harmless (to a ninja, anyway), and there were no strange chakra signatures Naruto could detect. But still, there was a trace of something wrong, like a remnant or a stain in the air.
Naruto murmured into his cup "Old man, what's going on here?"
Jiraiya muttered back, not moving at all, "I'm not sure. It was here when I came in."
"Is it some kind of scar? A curse?"
"Good job, boy." Jiraiya sounded somewhat surprised. "You're getting quicker on the uptake. I think it is. Something happened here, and it's left its mark. You wanna follow it?"
Naruto grinned into his cup. "No duh."
They both got up and Jiraiya paid for them. Moving out, they strolled around the entire length of the town, what little there was of it. There wasn't much there, only a small general store and what appeared to be a small schoolhouse, a remnant of more stable times. It was surprising, all things considered, that there was even a place to stay here. This village might have been on a trade route once, before everything was disrupted.
Oddly, the only other place they found the trace was their hotel. Naruto felt a slight chill; neither of them had noticed. Even if Naruto wasn't very good at noticing this kind of thing, he should have seen something. Shaking his head, he waved at Jiraiya and ran off, back to the clearing. It was only when he stopped for a breath that he noticed: it was here too! What the hell?
He stopped, linking the tavern to the forest, and realized the only thing linking them together. And it made a grim kind of sense too. It wouldn't be strange, for a ghost of some kind to link to a child. Children sometimes had an unfair amount of tragedy attached to them. Naruto felt very protective of the girl at that moment, simultaneously afraid and angry for her. She was probably only five or six, and it was sad, just too sad.
That ominous feeling attached to a child probably explained how Naruto could feel anything. He just wasn't sensitive in that way, but he felt a deep and abiding sympathy for little kids. His connection to that kind of thing might enable him to see what he would normally miss.
He started searching, spreading out from the town and circling outward, searching all the places a young girl would hide out and finding nothing, before finally finding a small hut a mile away. It was empty, but it too had the same jarring feeling. Naruto shivered. It was like seeing a dark blurry object out of the corner of your eye that you knew meant to hurt you - and there was someone out there, just a little girl, who felt it all the time.
He knocked on the door lightly, careful of the rotting wood, before ducking inside and looking around. There were clothes scattered around, a woman's and a small girl's. There was a small toy duck, which used to be yellow but was now a faded orange. The place looked like it hadn't been lived in for a while, but Naruto definitely felt it was connected to the spiritual rot here.
The place was too creepy to stay in long, so once Naruto was sure no clues were there, he left to find Jiraiya.
He was sitting in front of the bar, on a bench outside. Night was coming on, so more and more people were gathering together after a long day, and they filtered in and out frequently. They all looked the same, Naruto noticed, all dark-haired and all pale. This entire town, in fact, reminded Naruto of him, from the pale coloring to the strange silence they all carried with them to the hauntedness of it all. This place had seen too much desertion and desolation in past years, and it showed.
"Yo, Naruto," Jiraiya greeted from his seat. He seemed deceptively relaxed, enough for Naruto to tell that every sense was in reality alert. "How'd your day go?"
"Good. I figured something out. You?"
"Huh. I figured out something too. Enough for us to be sure that the curse won't be following us on the road. Listen to this: thirty years ago, back when this area was more prosperous and had traders moving in and out occasionally, a beautiful healer lived here. Her family had lived out in the woods for generations, collecting the precious plants that grow out in that forest. She lived out in the woods all by herself, and came into town frequently to heal those too sick to come out and visit her. A young man, a young man who was visiting in that inn," and here Jiraiya pointed emphatically right across the street, "fell in love with this woman.
"He stayed for months here, wracking up debts and generally making a great fool of himself, mooning after her like the whelp he was. She kept refusing his advances, and would choose no other. He went mad with love, or with lust, and murdered her right where we are sitting. No one came out to help her, even though there was a window right here and she screamed for help until her last breath. Even to this day she haunts the main street right here. And she was the woman I met in the tavern, I'm certain of it!"
Jiraiya leaned back, giving a satisfied sigh. "So if nothing else, we're safe because she haunts the town, not just random travelers." At Naruto's angry look, he amended, "But of course we're going to try to help the town, why not after all? I'm just saying, you know, that we're probably safe from her. If we need to be.
"Now, Naruto, you look like you're troubled. What did you find out?"
Naruto squinted into the distance, in the direction of the hut, troubled. "Sensei, did you say she lived alone?" At Jiraiya's nod, he continued "But I found the place she lived, a place really heavy with the taint, and there were women and girl clothes there. And there's something else. There's a girl. She was sitting out on the front porch right there when I came out this morning, and she followed me out training too. The taint is in both places. I think this healer, I don't know why, is following this little girl. But it's wrong; we need to stop it!"
No child deserved to be haunted. Naruto thought again of the Uchiha compound, silent and cold when he had visited it. A discoloration that might have been splattered blood still colored the sidewalks. The fan that splayed over the main room. Naruto hadn't gone any further in than that, even though he had wanted to look at Sasuke's bedroom. He couldn't stand to see any more evidence of his friend's self-torture.
"Alright," agreed Jiraiya, somewhat surprised at Naruto's vehemence, though he knew he shouldn't be, not really. Naruto was much more compassionate than his teacher, maybe because he was young, maybe because he was born that way. "If we want to help this little girl, we should probably find her."
Again, for the second time that day, they searched the tiny little street, this time with dark approaching. The tavern was the most likely place for the healer to go, but she was following the little girl, who might have gone for shelter somewhere.
Finally, when they couldn't find her anywhere in town, they went back to the hut. Though they waited there for several hours, huddled in the woods outside the mold-black shack, nobody went inside or near it. Those were some of the most eerie hours of Naruto's life; he couldn't stand the idea of a orphan using it as a shelter, night after night, going into the blackened ramshackle thing. He himself had slept in places that looked worse, but never anywhere that made him sick just to look at it. The house almost vibrated when he looked at it, it was so cursed.
In the depths of night, when the moon had fully risen and the birds were starting to sing, they gave it up as fruitless and went back to the inn for the night. Maybe she would show up to watch Naruto train tomorrow?
Right when Naruto was about to climb into their window, however, Jiraiya stopped and canted his head towards the main street. They climbed slowly over the roof of the hotel, only to freeze at a grey-black figure, which Naruto slowly realized was the child. But different, possessed by a furious rage.
"We have to help her!" Naruto hissed. "She's being hurt by that ghost!"
Jiraiya tensed. "Naruto, when you look at her, what do you see?"
"It's the same orphan, but she's surrounded by an angry aura. That's the ghost, right?"
He nodded slowly. "But when I look, Naruto, I see a beautiful woman – the woman from the bar – now with a stab wound in her stomach. We see the same aura though. "
"Is the little girl possessed?"
"Um, maybe. I've also heard that ghosts take on different forms, depending upon who they're facing. The woman... she looks very violent."
"The little girl just looks angry." Naruto blinked in wonderment. Did this mean that the ghost was two people? Or that she liked Naruto better?
"You should go down," Jiraiya said, nodding firmly, almost but not quite hiding his fear.
"Coward," Naruto muttered, sticking out his tongue before crawling down the front side of the roof. He wasn't afraid, for some reason. He just felt that the little girl had been if not friendly, at least not mad all the times before. When she turned to look at him though, her eyes were so wide and black he started to have second thoughts. Bracing himself, he kept walking forwards.
"You. What are you doing here, traveler?" The voice was hushed, and a small child's, but it echoed and hummed.
"Eh... I was looking for you. To help you," he added. What the hell were you supposed to say to a ghost, anyway?
"Help me? Little child, you cannot help me. I do not want to be helped, after all." There it was again, that echo. She was a little girl, but she was also a woman, a gentle-faced one that reminded him of Haku. When Haku was in his girl clothing, of course. She made Jiraiya afraid, but to him, for a second, she looked caring like Iruka did sometimes. She made him feel happy a little, even with the seeping hole in her stomach.
"Why are you here? And you were a little girl. You are the woman, right?"
She nodded, looking dark. "I am the healer you were speaking of earlier, with that pervert."
Hah. Naruto laughed nervously, thinking that in this case Jiraiya's obvious pervertedness wasn't so good, considering how and why she died. "Is that why you look like a adult to him? Cause he's like that?"
"Possibly. And you are a child; I cannot bear you ill will." She looked so gentle when she said the word 'child,' almost incandescent.
"Did you like children?" he asked curiously. She really wasn't all that scary-looking right now.
"Yes, I had always loved them. I held a child in my belly when I died," she ground out, fully adult and angry, before she calmed down again. "Her spirit was too weak to stay. I am in this form with you now because you want to see it. And because it comforts me. A child's heart is stronger than an adult's. As a child I can forgive, when as a woman I can only be angry. I loved this town as a little girl, and when I am like that, I can love it still."
She paused then, looking sad and small, even when in the form of a beautiful woman. "If you would have love from someone, get it when they are a child; people are more capable of love then than at any other point. I am almost glad my little girl died, rather than have to grow up in this town, which is rotting and sad and will die soon; some places should not be loved.
"One day this village will simply be a ghost, and I will haunt nothing but empty buildings. I am happy, in fact, that she must not stay here and haunt this place too."
Naruto felt unspeakably sad when he remembered the baby and toddler and little girl's clothes scattered around the shack. To be anticipating a baby so much, and to be thankful you never had it... this was a cruel place. "Is there anything we can do? How can we give you peace?"
She smiled at him. "Some things are not meant to be forgiven. And sometimes there is no resolution; I am a ghost now, and wish to remain one until I fade away. There may be no point to it, but I would rather be a creature of memory and hate than have the past fade away. The evil my murderer committed must be remembered, both because he killed myself and my baby, and because no one reached out to stop him, though they could see his descent into lust and obsession. My tragedy must be remembered, though it causes me only rage and pain." And that, Naruto thought, was the saddest thing of all, though he couldn't tell why. His chest felt heavy like he would cry, but he pushed the tears down. It ached.
"Now leave me, you and your older friend. I have no patience for him, but no wish to hurt you, child. Go hide in your room, and leave tomorrow. Trouble me no more." When Naruto looked at her, he could see only the woman; the little orphan girl he had seen was gone. He turned around and couldn't look back until the inn door was closed behind him.
When they woke up that morning, they got dressed silently; they hadn't spoken of the woman, Naruto couldn't tell if it was a sensitive subject with his teacher. Probably not. After all, Jiraiya had seen much worse things. It stuck in Naruto's head though, even as they left the town behind until it finally disappeared in the mist and the trees.
Shortly after they left, Naruto and Jiraiya were once again sitting and staring into a fire. Naruto had to ask. "Jiraiya, how are you able to just go a day without training? How are you able to forget?"
"Naruto, it was not hard for me to let go. For you, every town holds some reminder of your rival. I see Orochimaru reflected in nothing. He doesn't occupy enough of my mind for me to see him in every event, every coincidence. No thing in my life serves as a way to understand his."
At Naruto's blank look, Jiraiya put his pipe down, looked Naruto in the eye, and said flatly, "I'll only tell you once, Naruto, but it's obvious that you need me to spell it out. Orochimaru and I are not the same as you and Sasuke. Orochimaru, I didn't want him to come back. He turned from a creepy little kid to a creepy and insanely driven man in a flash, and without me really caring either way. We were not ever friends, let alone the intense, obsessive thing you silly little kids seem to be wrapped up in." With that, he settled in on himself, staring fixedly at the fire.
Naruto sat there for awhile. To think, that things were not the same. It seemed he always needed things spelled out for him. Jiraiya had said once that there were always metaphors and parallels in life, but Naruto was just too slow to grasp them. He had been smugly joking at the time, or had been as far as he could figure out.
So Team 7 and the Legendary Three were not the same? It was true, Naruto supposed, that Jiraiya could write and Naruto could not; Sakura didn't like risks the way Tsunade did. He didn't know what the differences between Orochimaru and Sasuke were; he probably wasn't subtle enough to see them.
But if that was not a true metaphor, what was? His mind kept going back to the ghost woman, and how sad she made him, sad beyond the rape and murder she had suffered. "My tragedy must be remembered, though it causes me only rage and pain." Naruto felt like he was being bashed over the head with whatever it was, he just couldn't see it. When they both bedded down, he still didn't quite understand.