The desk is not small, but he is a large man always trying to fit better, cleaner - edges too jagged to match. The pencil scrapes the page quickly, roughly because today is one of those days - the ones when he just remembers how much he can't remember. He can't always remember what she looks like so he paints her portrait a thousand times focusing on the parts he knows: her legs, her thighs, the arc of her instep like something precious. Another page for his "perverted" works. He doesn't see it as perverted, it's more like a quest because somewhere under all the exaggerated clichés and impossible rigmarole are the greater part of his small reserve of memories of her - his mother. He retraces the foot he has drawn imagining the bed edge and the gasping - he is four.
From the time he is two 'til the time he is old enough for some of the … less inhibited johns to be interested in him, he'll be hidden under his mother's bed wrapped in black cloth and whipped into submission. He will listen to the groans and the moans of the furniture and the people upon it as the old mattress sags so very close to him dust in his nose. Turning his little face toward the light, he will memorize his mother's feet as they come and go across the golden hardwood floor. He soon learns that sooner or later she will chain the door and those pretty little feet will walk back toward him, then will come her white knees and finally her white breasts, arms, and hands reaching for him.
He'll never know, but he was a good baby - a quiet child even without his mother's bottled concoctions of sake, beer, and mother's milk - an excess of sugar added to make him choke it down. He'll never drink sake afterwards without feeling sleepy, stupid, and safe. Safe in her arms as she rocks him carelessly forcing the bottle onto him as she hurries down the hall or around the corner to deposit him with friends. "Aunties" and "Big Mamas" tall women and petit men half-dressed in lingerie makeup magically appearing on their face. Breasts huge in his view as they sing him brawdy songs while he lies on their unmade beds playing with their battered silks.
Sometimes as he lies in some backwater whore's bed, he'll remember snatches of his earlier life. Red lace, blue silk and a pretty little black-haired girl as pale as the lullabies he still remembers from the lips of women named Jasmine and Lily. Her eyes were amber, but he'll remember them as purple. Her kimono was a silvery mauve; her father's red or maybe black. They were aristocrats, but his mother was popular enough to be a courtesan in a bigger city. Instead, she stayed in Konoha as a 'simple' whore for any man - from great men to poor ones stinking of fish and ramen. A tall, pale man the girl's father was and always-punctual showing up every Tuesday at 2:00 until 5:00.
She was quiet, her eyes constantly searching the modest apartment for amusement. She never looked at him directly only out of the corner of her eyes. He grew to like that, playing the clown for her amusement, her laughter. He grew to like that and soon after to like her. Of course he screwed it up always so eager for more. He isn't sure why, but he thinks it has to do with mistaking euphemisms with practical lessons. Either way all he remembers is being snatched off of his new friend and thrown into a wall. As a trickle of blood worked its way down the back of his head, he can see the blurry image his mother wrapped carelessly in a sheet pleading with the large angry man.
He shoves her off veins twitching as he clenches his jaw shoving his still shocked child back into its clothes. The black-haired waif seems little more then a pair of wide, confused eyes in Jiraiya's recollection. Wide eyes staring at him - a semi-hard dick between chubby thighs. The little boy shoddily dressed is snatched up and away not to be seen for three years colder and crueler and still just as pale. Jiraiya won't realize it although he does remember the strange glances he has received from the prodigy. He can remember the charged-moments when he might have taken things to their logical conclusion. Might have but for phantom memory and a hand to back of his head feeling for where blood should be.
His cheek will burn for a week from the vicious slap his mother gives him. One of her chief benefactors gone along with his money when her fool son angered the man in red silk. A few hours later she doesn't seem to really care anymore a well-worn dressing gown barely covering her right side and lap as she sits at the polished kitchen table legs crossed. The sophistication of her profile and the exact angle of her legs crossed just so will form the basis of a life-long search for the same. Sadly, though he searches long and hard through cigarette dens and opium attics he has yet to find the equal.
The smoke falls from her soft lips, trickles from her nostrils as ashes dust down upon his upturned face sitting at her feet clutching one of her big toes. Sometimes he's sure her eyes were cornflower blue, but in this moment they're certainly green - "It's alright, the rich aren't any better then us. They lift their heads so high so that they needn't see their clay feet. Put up their noses so they needn't smell the bullshit they spew like water jutsu from their mouths." Drawing on her cigarette she eyes him quietly, "Do you really know what to do with a girl?"
He certainly knows by the time he is ten touching little girls behind the bushes his fingers in places boys older then him only dream about. Laughing and playing dirty games with the sons and daughters of moral less parents in the darker halls of his tenement. Smells of grass and old incense as he lures dirty old men into back alleys to be robbed and beaten. His sensei doesn't want to know how he knows what he does already stressed out with keeping the Inuzuka from killing him. He isn't suppose to wear the tattoos he does, he isn't a part of the clan.
No matter that he has met the man who fathered him. Has met and been bedded by the very same because the bastard cannot tell his progeny from any other underage lay drunk or not. Smiling even as sensei admonishes him again, Jiraiya thinks of the prank he and his friends played on the dirty son of a bitch - tying him up naked outside the police station with the word - Pedophile engraved into his back with his own precious kunai. And what could the fucker say smelling of sex and his own kin?
"Did you enjoy it Jiraiya? I didn't." She stands at the sink staring out of the tiny window above it. Another cigarette burns low between her nicotine-stained fingers. She is forever smoking in his clearest recollections. He lies face-down in the narrow hall the ash blonde carpet worn thin as silt a soft irritant. He is still sore from the beating he received on the way home. Quick glimpse of four men standing tough in a lonely dust-strewn alley. Since when has any part of the city been so blessed empty? His mother's words are barely registering. "Well, did you my ballsy little man?"
Dizzy with pain-laced rage the prodigy isn't sure if she means the prank he played, the beating he got, or the experience with his father. "He hasn't any technique." His lips are numb and swollen the corners of his mouth thick with blood. It's quiet as she grounds out her cigarette in the sink - spotless from never being used. "I know, but that really wasn't his intent with me." He knows, just as if he knows his father is his half-uncle, and his mother is his half-auntie. Speaking of which, "Auntie Mamimi is coming tomorrow." She turns away from the last rays of day to look at him and this time he's sure her eyes are pink like a rabbit or may orange like a fox; "Really?" and her perfect red lips quirk with mirth, "Then you'd better pack, cause she isn't going to let you stay here."
True enough the tight, withered hands on his shoulders lead him away from the saffron-scented apartment and down the worn, grey steps. She is clearly uneasy with being in this section of town shying away from the all-knowing eyes laughing at Jiraiya the madman's predicament. His friends are absolute bastards. Her voice is as dry as her skin but as firm as her grip. "You have our clan marks and the blood of our people tainted as it may be. You also have the eyes of the village on you - as such we cannot allow you to remain with that woman."
He isn't really sure he trusts a woman whose mouth doesn't seem to move. His belongings all in a bag he clenches tightly he knows he will run to Orochimaru who lives alone or he will run to Tsuande who is such a snob. He doesn't really mind though, all too aware of her clay feet. Of course, he can always run back home or to Sarutobi-sensei, however it goes he won't be staying with this bitch. The walk is quiet with him unwilling to converse and her too far above him in her own opinion. The compound gates are soon before them.
The first time he entered the Inuzaka compound his mother carried him. In a vanilla-scented kimono the color of a freshly bruised cloud embroidered with cranes and willows she carried him barely a month old to see the elders. He will never know the disgust with which they were observed lips curled away from too large teeth, will never know how his mother was barred from the Inuzaka council and spat upon by a more fortunate bastard. Most of all he will never know how close he came to dying saved by the grace of a grandfather whose heart had been soften by the passage of years - at least toward his grandson.
The second time he walks on his own the dust in his face as his hand is held tightly in his mother's sweaty grip. The gates are a wall going on into heaven. They wear loose, dark pants and overlong white tunics. They dress like peasants. His mother is beautiful - especially compared to the rough Inuzaka women he sees their faces too strange to be plain, too rough to be beautiful. Her broad, white forehead and high cheekbones give her a noble bearing no one here can match - despite the fact her status is whore to their own of shinobi. Every eye in the compound is on them including the eyes of a boy about Jiraiya's age hair just as white. He is an Inuzaka cousin - a Hatake although Jiraiya doesn't know it then.
Being only two and a half, he will not recall the tall, stern man with the long tan face who picks him up and takes him inside. Will not remember his mother crying as she is restrained - one hand outstretched to him as the doors glide closed. They stand in a circle around him a fire's light playing over their faces as they speak over his head. His shirt is gone along with the necklace his mother gave him. It was a pendent of a dolphin, one eye a gem - a postmortem, gift from his grandmother. It is a gift he will not see again for many years. He will not remember them pressing the brand between his shoulder blades leaving an ugly kanji so like his mother's red and gray against her milk white skin. The mark given them to lock away the family secrets unknowingly inherited. He will remember none of this however occasionally he strokes the scar and curses remembering clearly the scent of burnt flesh.
His mother spends a solid week nursing him only allowing the others on their floor and in their building the briefest contact with him. Their voices in the hallway are a constant murmur of resentment not at them but at the family that would dare hold its self so high - hurting an innocent child. And once there is shouting, a loud affected voice - one of the Big Ma's and another voice as loud as angry - his grandfather. His mother's voice joins them as he frets unfamiliar fingers dragging ice cubes down his cheeks. Later knowing fingers fluttered anxiously over his branding, over his face tracing the curve of it again and again until he sleeps lulled by the repetition.
For a moment he is seeing the grey of twilight as his mother's head bobs below a man's belly his heavily-veined hand in her hair. Her lips are slick when she stands over him minutes later. "Go to sleep honey." When he wakes up sore, but cool and aware a week later the red lines he has sported ever since are etched into his face. When the Inuzaka see them they will rise up into a frenzy. Only the combines efforts of his grandfather, his eventual sensei, and several other benefactors he has never know will save his and his mother's heads.
"Why did you do it?", the tall, dark man asks. His hair is down his back ending at his waist. His mother's hair goes only to her shoulders pale as watered mead. "They branded him to bream his link to their precious clan; I tattooed him to always remind him and them of who he is." They stand in the shadowed alcove the man's hand on his mother's shoulder. The tall man sighs his brown face showing every one of his years. "We'll, we've settled them, but don't expect to be on their list of favorite people." There is more but he doesn't recall it finding instead a recollection of broad, brown feet settled firmly on the chilly floor. A strange x-shaped scar above a cracked heel. "Little boys shouldn't play beneath their mother's bed."
The third and last time he walked into the compound his aunt's hand tightly grips his wrist. So tightly fingerprints remain behind - dark blue to pale white. Marks as blue as his mother's face the dark purple bruises obvious on her neck. He only finds out because this would be the first place he runs to after escaping the Inuzaka compound. Would run to climbing up the cracked brick walls to the window only to see her scrawled on the floor face turned to the door dress pulled up to her neck. Her stomach is slimy and her thighs bloody. He doesn't scream as he spreads the oil and whispers the fire jutsu taking only two pictures, a dress, and her book of poetry. The room burns for hours along with the rest of the building and the embarrassed city gives the tenets a new building with no rent for several months.
The Inuzaka never knows he is aware of their treachery - they still don't although they suspect. He snuck back in that same night to stay awake as he plotted his mother's revenge. All night he plotted as he read the poems written in a script like spider webs thin but strong, tenacious. They shake him awake at two in the afternoon to tell him his mother is dead. He says thank you eyes totally dry before jumping out the window.
He is gone the rest of day into the forest. Two days later his father is a ghost trapped screaming in a pain-wracked shell the tea he drunk poured down the drain by his dutiful son. Three days and his grandfather is a burnt husk in the forest never to be found his hand and belt left on the doorstep. Jiraiya is in his room all day as many witnesses can testify to quiet and still staring at the ceiling he kunai at with unnatural precision.
The compound is quiet waiting for the next step and it is four, five, and six days after his mother's death that the Elders writhe on their beds groaning for mercy to things unseen. Orochimaru never asks what he needed such plants and herbs for, he doesn't need to - everyone knows Jiraiya's story. On the seventh day beneath a sky the color of pearl he stands alone before his mother's grave with his papers of emancipation clutched tightly in his bandaged right hand.
As he left the damnable compound behind him, one of the stupid mutts there bit him hard enough to need stitches. Stupid Kuromaru. Behind him in the branches of a willow, his cousin Toboe watches him closely listening for words of confession, confirmation. Instead, Jiraiya tells him and her - his mother the story of a samurai and a girl mistreated by her kin. It is his first story and the only one he has only told once.
Once there was a samurai - a second son nameless because all second sons are nameless. He was not tall and his hair was not black but a mousy brown. In his too large mouth there was a gap between his too large teeth. And there was a girl - a beautiful girl also nameless because her father was a fool from a clan of the same. Her hair was short because she lived with her father and his wife hated her, her hands were red and her eyes huge in her face because all the women sided with her father's wife.
Life is sometimes a story so it isn't surprising they met. Both being nameless they became the mirror of each other's life. So the nameless samurai took the nameless girl to live with him in his echoing clan house where the people were ghosts. And it was well because she was beautiful and clever and he was happy to have her to himself. The cherry blossoms came twice in her time there and her hands became soft and white and clever.
Sadly, because men are little better then rabid dogs the nameless girl was soon wreath in grief. Her samurai's family had the hatred of a rival family from which a strange rogue arose to kill them all. He was not handsome or exceptionally clever or even very strong. All he had to his name was that he loved the blood of his clan's enemies and most times that is all that is needed. So he killed them all except her newly pregnant.
Because she was beautiful she lived so that he could rape her not with his manhood but with the hilt of his sword as he forced himself into her generous mouth. Forced himself in so that the corners of her mouth cracked and bled making him smile. When he left she vomited beneath the wisteria she had once planted in hopes of a long marriage. Lighting the house behind her on fire with the one jutsu she could do she was left to wander back to what should have been home in a daze.
To her relief the baby stayed with her for awhile. She was nearly there when the blood began to stream down her long legs followed by pain and a large clot that might have been a son or a daughter. She buried her loss in the ground like a dog as though it might spring up into a tree to hang herself from. She is still nameless when she returns; her lost too great a thing to mock with petty cruelty. And then a month later her most persistent tormenter rapes her. And finally she has a name and it is the same as her mother's - whore
Nine months later she has a son she names after a legend her fingers in his old man hair. One day that son too is taken from her and remembering that her father had once told her the child's life was her own she waits for her death. When it comes she doesn't cry or speak - she simply dies. Traditionally retribution comes a week after death, but some people aren't ever that patient.
"He laid flowers on her grave as blue as the sky and walked away." The pencil stills in his hand as he realizes - The gaki's steps pound down the hall toward him. The wooden slide-door bangs into the frame as the obnoxious little idiot barges in. "Ero-sennin, I finally did it!" Sliding a story that will never be told again much less published beneath a thousand other things he turns and says, "Right and it only took you twice as long as it should have!" They argue loudly and dumbly - the one sealed, the other branded.
End
Sometimes I confuse myself… and sometimes I make myself proud.