Naruto knew it was stupid.
He knew he should tell the old pervert.
He knew this probably does concern him, because despite the seemingly random drift of their journey, someone managed to find them.
Naruto doesn't want to tell Jiraiya, though. He knows the letters will stop coming then.
It's not like they said so. If they had, he would have gone straight to the old man because, hey, obvious red flag and even he isn't that dumb. They didn't threaten him to keep quiet or even say that he shouldn't tell anyone. They didn't really reference the fact that he was supposed to be off the map at all.
What they did say was…weird.
He found the first in the bathhouse, in the pocket of his jacket as he was putting it back on. The old man was still peeping and there was only so much Naruto could stand being told to 'practice his chakra control' while Jiraiya giggled incessantly. In the first of many bad moves, Naruto opened it right then and there, heedless of the fact that it could have been a trap.
It wasn't a trap.
Or if it was, Naruto couldn't see the endgame, couldn't see where he'd get caught in the web. He was good with traps—usually, he could spot the really clever ones. The simpler ones sometimes slipped his notice because he didn't expect them. Sakura said that was silly but she didn't get it, not really. Didn't understand that Naruto couldn't see the tree when he was staring at the forest.
It was what tripped him up in training, more often than not. Jiraiya made him figure out all the fiddly stuff on his own.
The first letter talked about rain. Well, it might have been talking about something else. But it said it was talking about rain.
Talked about how rain seemed endless when he were standing under it, but when he watched it roll in he could see how contained it really was. He could imagine how far up the clouds extended and how far out, but more than that, he could imagine where it ended. The line where the sky was the sky again, where the water didn't fall.
Naruto didn't know why he thought it was a he—the letter was in first person. But he did. And the person who was writing to him never cared to clear it up.
It was pretty. Naruto didn't know anything about poetry but he thought maybe this was supposed to be like that. It talked about how gray and blue seemed so connected but were really distinct from each other.
Naruto thought he could agree, imagining the colors bleeding together on a sheet of paper.
Naruto wondered if he should write a response but decided against it.
He didn't know where or to whom he would send it.
The letter wasn't signed.
So he kept the letter with him, rolled up in one of the blank scrolls in his bag.
Three weeks later and a dozen villages apart, there was another letter stuffed into his weapons pouch. That was a little freaky, because he hadn't taken the pouch off between the time the letter was not there and the time it was.
He probably should have told Jiraiya about it then; the correspondent was obviously a shinobi. But he wanted to read it first. To see if this shinobi had anything more to say about the rain.
This letter wasn't about the rain.
This letter is about kissing. Naruto blushes and shoves it back in the weapons pouch.
He reads it later by the river, when an argument gave him the opportunity to walk away in a huff. He hadn't planned it like this, but it was a perfect opportunity, so he sat down under a tree and began to read.
It really was about kissing. It was lurid and descriptive, dripping in a sensuality that not even Jiraiya could conjure on a good day. But it was also about something else, Naruto suspected.
He didn't like kissing. It was personal and private and he didn't like kissing because he did it with strangers. With people he didn't know or wished he didn't know. He didn't want people to know when he was kissing someone. He wanted it to be secret, wanted to clutch it close and keep it with him. But someone always knew he was kissing because they were the one who told him to do it, or the one he had to tell about it.
Naruto knew about seduction missions. He hadn't been on one, but he'd gotten the same lectures everyone else did. They weren't just for kunoichi. Sometimes the target didn't like kunoichi. Naruto got the feeling the correspondent had to deal with those kind of targets.
He talked about how it felt to want to kiss someone. Naruto felt his stomach hollow out and his mouth go dry because it kinda made him want to kiss someone.
He'd never felt like that before. Even with Sakura, he hadn't wanted to kiss her so much as be around her, look at her and have her look back with affection in her eyes.
This was longing. This was feeling an absence at your side. This was looking around for someone and realizing you didn't have someone to be looking for.
Naruto thought he could understand Jiraiya, a little bit, if this was how he felt all the time.
The next few letters were about diplomacy and poison and convalescence. They were a little more structured, a bit distant.
Naruto wondered if the writer felt he'd crossed a line and had to take a step back. Maybe being so personal was a little uncomfortable, but it wasn't like Naruto knew this guy so it didn't really matter, did it?
Or maybe he'd found somebody he wanted to kiss and didn't need to talk about it anymore. That shouldn't have mattered either, Naruto thought, but it did.
It mattered a lot.
There weren't always letters. There were long periods where he'd check every nook and cranny of his belongings and not find anything. He'd catch himself thinking about it and remind himself that it was silly and dangerous to want letters from some guy he didn't even know.
That didn't stop the wanting though.
Finally, there was one in the cereal box—that super sweet stuff Jiraiya made a face at every time he bought it—and Naruto was elated and relieved even though it was depressingly short.
It said,
Naruto,
sorry i'm sorry shouldn't have done it but
should have said
i didn't sorry
missed writing
you
i'm alone for awhile now so it'll be okay again. Tell you about stakeouts later.
And he did. He went over designing a stakeout, what supplies to have on hand and what supplies you could get on mission depending on the location and target. Naruto thought he learned more about being a shinobi from his correspondent than he did from Jiraiya.
That wasn't fair. Jiraiya was trying to help him.
When Naruto wakes up and Jiraiya is dying, has been hit with something hot and sharp, and Naruto has to carry him to the nearest hospital and wait in anxiety for hours to learn whether he's lost someone else.
Whether he's failed his precious people again.
It's bad. Jiraiya tells him what happened because he doesn't remember anything past "Sasuke was never your friend!" They both decided that they wouldn't do that again.
It took weeks of dancing around each other, careful with every word and movement, to get back to where they had been before.
Monster hadn't broken his control, friend had, but he felt like they were one and the same where he was concerned.
The next letter talks about him.
But it doesn't say monster and it doesn't say friend.
It talks about how his eyes look when the sunlight catches them, likens them to glittering ocean waves. It talks a lot about how determined he is, how he makes his own destiny.
Naruto is humbled that someone could think that. That someone believes him when he says he will change the world. He doesn't disbelieve it himself, but having faith and being sure are not always the same thing.
His correspondent is sure. He thanks him for being who he is.
Naruto is pretty sure he's in love with whoever this is. And that's dangerous. That's the trap. He needed to tell Jiraiya about them, about the letters. But he was twenty-four letters in and their journey was coming to an end. They were packing up and moving towards Konoha with intent in their steps.
He doesn't tell Jiraiya. He doesn't tell anyone. He's in love and he doesn't know who he's in love with.
He's home and the letters stop.
He's heartbroken, but not surprised.