Characters: Naruto, Mito
Summary: The advice of strangers shouldn't be discounted.
Pairings: None
Author's Note: I love the fics involving the living meeting the dead without realizing they're dead entirely too much.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

Naruto had a bad feeling from the moment Jiraiya told him to sit down and pull up his shirt because he wanted to look at his seal. He couldn't put a finger on it, just had a bad feeling he couldn't place. He'd tried to direct Jiraiya in a different direction, distract him from it because he knew he couldn't outright convince Jiraiya to leave the seal alone.

Naruto soon had reason to know that he shouldn't have let Jiraiya go messing with that seal.

Waking up two weeks later in the hospital was one of the worst experiences of his life, if only because he couldn't move and whenever he tried to the worst bouts of pain he'd ever felt. Seeing Jiraiya in the bed beside him, sitting up and reading Icha Icha while sipping out of a hospital cup but hardly looking any better than him didn't make Naruto feel very good either.

It might have just been Naruto's imagination but after they were discharged from the hospital Naruto could swear that Jiraiya was avoiding him. Well, not avoiding him so much as giving him money to go wander off in town while he entertained several fast women at the nearest brothel. He was either having sex at the moment or doing re-enactments of Icha Icha; Naruto didn't know which and he was pretty sure he didn't want to know.

Avoiding… Yeah, he's avoiding me. Naruto supposed he had to face up; Jiraiya had been doing this for a month. That probably counted as avoidance.

Figures.

"Excuse me." A woman's soft, slightly rasping voice was calling, the only one Naruto could hear; the town's residents had all fled indoors at the oppressive heat of summer.

Naruto looked around. Sitting on a bench slightly in to a garden off the main street, strikingly contrasted against the dark green bush behind her, was a woman. She had on a white kimono starkly in contrast with her red hair; gold jewelry was at her brow and throat and wrists. She curled one long finger and patted the bench beside her; with her other hand, a silk fan fluttered at her throat. "Why don't you come over here and sit down instead of wandering aimlessly?"

Despite himself, Naruto gulped. Okay, pretty girl, what do I do?

…Oh, Hell, I go sit down, of course!

Forcing a slightly nervous grin onto his face, Naruto came and sat down by the young woman, feeling his face grow slightly hot under the scrutiny of her blue eyes. Something else was coming over him at the same time. She looked familiar somehow; he couldn't place his finger on it, though. As he sat down, the sweet, perfume-like smell of the white rose bushes around them filled his nostrils and Naruto felt a little light-headed.

"So…" There was an accent in her inflection unlike the residents of the village "…what is it that leads a young man to wandering about a town on a day like this, all by himself?"

Naruto shrugged, shedding the last of his unease. She seems nice enough. "My sensei dropped me and went to go "entertain"—" he shuddered "—some of the women over there." He pointed towards the discreet narrow building and the woman's nose wrinkled in distaste.

"Does he do this often?"

"Yes! Ero-sennin—"

"Ero…sennin…" The red-haired woman's lip twitched in such a way that it looked like she would either laugh, cry, or show some sort of disgusted reaction at such a moniker. Naruto didn't notice.

"—Ero-sennin's always ditching me for strange women when ought to be training me!" Naruto shouted in the direction of the brothel, hoping Jiraiya would hear him and maybe feel guilty.

A single, finely clipped eyebrow rose. "Always?"

Again, Naruto felt his face tinge with color. "Well… He's been doing it more often since…" Naruto cringed as the thought of losing consciousness after feeling some bizarre burning sensation coming over him and waking up two weeks later to discover that he'd nearly killed Jiraiya came over him. I swear I didn't know… "…It was an accident!" Naruto exclaimed suddenly, and the woman jumped, blue eyes going wide. She stared at him incredulously, dropping her fan on her lap. "And it was Ero-sennin's fault anyway," he muttered, narrowing his eyes as they dropped to the ground.

Beside him, the young woman sighed softly, creases appearing in her pale forehead. "Some sort of misunderstanding?"

"Something like that, yeah," Naruto mumbled.

She put a hand on his shoulder and smiled. Her smile must have been infectious, because Naruto found himself smiling too; Funny, I thought only I could do that. A small wind made the smell of roses pick up again. "Well, the important thing is that you don't wander off from him anymore. If you want this rift to heal, you need to eliminate physical distance as a symptom."

He nodded. Never thought of that.

Her face soured slightly. "And Naruto? If Jiraiya ever tries to "examine" that seal again you need to knock him out and threaten him with death when he wakes up if he still has that bright idea in his head. As an expert I can tell you that the seal keeping the Kyuubi in is something that doesn't need to be messed with; Jiraiya's biting off more than he can chew."

"Oka—What?" Naruto had been trying to get up, his head turned, when she said that. The scent of roses became overpowering as he whirled around.

The bench was empty. All except for the silk fan, neatly closed and glistening in the summer sun.