A/N: Ohmygod I'm so sorry! Somehow I forgot to upload this chapter on this site, even though I put it in my doc manager and everything!
I uh... guess you guys get a double update?
Sorry! I can't believe I did that!
They don't get around to talking about the bandits that night. It's a bit annoying maybe, cause Jiraiya knows something, and Natsu was hoping to figure out what, but…
Naruto's more important.
The blond cries for a few minutes, Jiraiya awkwardly squirming through Natsu's forced group-hug, before he realizes. It's almost funny, how sharply Naruto's crying cuts off as Jiraiya's words finally pierce through his mind and he realizes Jiraiya knew his mom well enough to tell stories. He practically explodes with questions, tripping over his own tongue as he tries to ask about her pranks and her friends and her favorite ramen and what she looked like and everything all at once, Jiraiya all but leaning away from the onslaught.
Natsu lets Jiraiya go as Naruto pauses for breath, and the old man smiles a bit sadly.
"Well let's see here," he says, trying to sound cheery. "I know her favorite ramen was Shio-"
"Whaa- really?!" Naruto all but leaps toward Jiraiya, practically smushing their faces together. "Really really? She did?!" Jiraiya leans back, gently trying to push Naruto away.
"Yes, really brat. Sheesh, is it that surprising?"
"I-I mean, I like miso better, it has a richer flavor, b-but… my mom had a favorite ramen, that's-" he trails off, picking at the hem of his shirt. "I know what my mom's favorite ramen is…" he mutters, voice soft but awed. Natsu drags him back into a hug as Sasuke rolls his eyes, scoffing quietly.
Jiraiya looks like someone slapped him with a fish.
"Naruto…" Sakura-chan murmurs. "I guess I never really cared to think about it, huh? What it must have been like, not ever knowing your parents… all I did was get angry at him for acting out, a-and even if I never said it I thought such mean things like 'if he just had parents to discipline him he wouldn't be so annoying!' and- and I never even tried to understand what…"
Natsu hums, dragging Sasuke closer as he leans forward to rest his chin on Naruto's shoulder. "Does Naruto look like her?" he asks, when he realizes Naruto's not going to say anything else, and the blond jolts under him.
Jiraiya shakes himself, glancing at Natsu before looking down at Naruto. "A little, I suppose. The shape of his face is more like hers, but the colors are all-" he cuts himself off a little, then continues with a smile. "Kushina-chan was an Uzumaki, obviously, you got her name, and she really had the clan's bright red hair. Anyone who looked at her knew she was an Uzumaki, there was really no mistaking it! Had a pretty nice ra- uh, I mean, her eyes were a purple violet? She was kinda short though…" Jiraiya trails off with a nervous chuckle, before he scrambles toward his pack. "I, uh, think I might have a picture, from when M- um, anyway, I'll just show you, gimme a sec here…"
He digs through the pack, before gently lifting out an old, beat-up journal and moving to sit back down next to them.
"This notebook was a gift from her, actually. Konoha doesn't have a lot of seal masters, but the Uzumaki clan always had a talent for the art so good some people swore it was a kekkei genkai - Kushina-chan always liked to laugh at my seals, said they were way too boring, and sometimes she'd just give me little presents like this, with 'proper' seal-work in them. The notebook's basically full of storage seals, see?" he gently thumbs through the pages, a whole bunch of squiggly circles showing one after the other.
Natsu's pretty sure they're all different, but other than that it doesn't really mean much to him, though Naruto reaches out to tentatively touch the book.
"My mom… made this?" he asks, fingers a hair's breadth away from the page. Jiraiya reaches out his free hand and ruffles at Naruto's hair.
"Yeah, she did kiddo. The seals aren't really big, they can only hold small things, so I mostly use it to store my pictures and stuff… here."
He flips a couple more pages, pressing one finger gently to the seal there, and with a quiet pop and not a wisp of smoke to show for it, a picture appears atop the notebook.
"That's my-!" Sasuke cuts off with a snap of teeth, staring wide-eyed at the photo as Naruto picks it up with trembling hands.
Natsu tilts his head a little, to get a better look.
The first thing he really notices is Jiraiya laying on the ground in the picture, a redheaded woman standing with one foot on his shoulder, head thrown back in laughter. The picture's a little blurry, like it was taken really quickly, and to the side there's a black-haired lady with one hand covering her mouth like she's hiding a grin.
Some sort of sticky-looking sauce is all over Jiraiya's hair.
Naruto lifts a trembling finger, stroking it down the redhead's face. "She… t-that's my mom?" he asks, voice trembling, photo shaking unsteadily in his grip.
Sasuke reaches over and grabs his wrist, holding it stable, and that's about the time Natsu realizes the black-haired woman looks a lot like him.
Sasuke's sharingan spins active, and Jiraiya opens his mouth - probably to tell him off, but then he closes it without saying anything.
"Oh Sasuke-kun…" Sakura-chan whispers, but Natsu gets the feeling she's looking at both women in the picture, not just Sasuke's mom.
"What'd'ju do?" Natsu asks, a bit curious, cause it sure looks like they'd been beating Jiraiya up.
The old man laughs. "Kushina-chan found out that I had dragged, uh,her boyfriend into peeping at a hottub with me - it was really fun, you know? He could be pretty easy to trick into peeking, and the way his face would light up, it was hilarious. But then Kushina-chan found out somehow, and she was so mad at me for 'trying to corrupt' him, so she went and got Mikoto-san. I never really spent much time with her, but she was really good with her Sharingan. Kushina-chan would rope her into pranks sometimes, I hadn't even realized they'd laid a trap for me until I was half-way in it, Mikoto-san's illusions were legendary in ANBU before she retired when Ita- uh…" he stutters a little at the way Sasuke's grip spasms, then shakes his head. "Anyway, even though she retired she didn't really lose her skill, she could trap just about anyone in an illusion, by the time I'd realized what happened it was a bit too late to escape… I think the picture was taken by Rin, one of Kakashi's teammates. I don't really remember for sure, Kushina-chan just gave me the picture for my birthday later that year so I would 'never forget the consequences of trying to corrupt her boyfriend'. I didn't interact much with the Uchiha, I think this is one of the only pictures I have of her, though I've got a few more of Kushina-chan."
"O-oh. That's… Sasuke's mom then?" Naruto asks, voice tinged with amazement. "Our moms were friends? Like-"
Sasuke jerks his hand away, then slips out of Natsu's loose hug. "We're not friends dobe." He scoffs, turning away, but Naruto's eyes water anyway, as he hugs the picture close.
"A-as if I'd w-wanna be friends with a jerk like you anyway," he stutters around sniffles.
"Boys," Sakura-chan can't help but groan. "Ugh. It's not like they're fooling anyone!"
Natsu thinks she sounds a little teary too though.
"Yeah yeah you're rivals and you don't need friends yadda yadda can I have my picture back before you snot all over it?" Jiraiya asks, wiggling his fingers with a pretence of impatience.
Naruto hands it back slowly, staring at it like he wants to commit every inch of it to memory, and Jiraiya sighs.
"I'll make you a copy when we get back to Konoha, okay kiddo? Hell, I'll make you a copy of all of them, but let me put this away before the humidity damages it, alright?"
"You'd do that for me?!" Naruto yelps, then tackles Jiraiya into a hug as he starts bawling.
Sasuke grimaces, shifting uncomfortably for a moment as Jiraiya carefully holds Naruto with one hand and seals away the photo with the other.
"Make… two copies?" he asks, so quietly Natsu almost wonders if Jiraiya even heard it.
"Sure thing, kid." The man says, just as softly, and Sasuke looks away sharply.
Well crap, Natsu muses, staring at them. Hope the Master doesn't mind a couple more members…
I'm just gonna have to figure out how t'take em back with me.
Can't be that hard, right?
Somehow Jiraiya gets all the brats back to the inn and into bedrolls. He doesn't have to tuck any of them in, thank the Kami, and he does his best to pretend he can't hear Naruto's eager whispers as he tells Natsu what he plans to do with all the pictures.
Jiraiya's pretty sure the kid's overestimating just how many he's got, since he's pretty sure sensei will have his head if he gives Naruto any pictures of Minato…
Well, there is that one picture, Kakashi's team photo. Minato gave him a copy, and if he's giving it to Naruto just so he has a picture of Kakashi then no one can complain, right?
Kid's been staring at a stone bust of the guy for years and never once saw a resemblance so maybe one picture won't be a big deal…
Jiraiya doesn't even try to sleep.
He never…
It made sense, when sensei said it would be better to not tell Naruto anything until he made chunin. Minato made so many enemies, and a secret shared is a secret no longer. Just look at the Kyuubi. They told the clan heads, and suddenly the entire village knew and sensei had to scramble to pass laws in order to keep it from spreading any further, there were honest executions to force the village to take it seriously and hopefully keep word from reaching Konoha's enemies while she was still too weak to protect the jinchuriki. Even then Naruto spent his first few weeks literally living in the Hokage's residence, attended by a full squad of ANBU every second of the day until things calmed down enough to risk putting him in an orphanage.
That Konoha's enemies are only just now realizing that they fabricated Minato killing the Kyuubi, only just now starting to realize what Naruto is, after he's gone outside the village on jobs…
It's more years than they'd originally thought they could keep the secret, and it has to have been worth it.
Right?
The look on Naruto's face when Jiraiya told him Kushina's favorite ramen, as if knowing something so small and unimportant was worth more than even being handed the Hokage's hat, makes Jiraiya wonder.
It was the smart thing to do, not telling him anything.
No one realized Konoha had a jinchuriki. He wasn't kidnapped like Kushina-chan, he wasn't targeted by assassins like Minato, he was safe-
He glances over to the kids, Sasuke tense and twitching in sleep, Naruto with half-dried tear stains down his cheeks, and wonders if safe came at the price of happy.
He's missed a lot, being out of the village for so long huh?
He had a job, a critical one. Tsunade was gone, and Orochimaru a traitor, and Jiraiya was the only one of the sannin left, and after the Kyuubi Konoha needed to be strong, look strong.
He was hardly the only shinobi to make sacrifices to try and keep anyone from taking advantage of her weakness.
It was years before Konoha's information networks stabilized, years before they didn't need his constant supervision, and just as they began to make a full recovery from the Kyuubi's rampage then there was the Hyuuga situation and then Itachi's rampage, and he barely had a chance to breathe before he was back in the underbelly of the world, manipulating information and doing everything in his power to spin it as, 'look at Konoha, surviving so many tragedies without a single faltering step' instead of the much more accurate reality of Konoha falling to pieces in the wake of Minato's death.
A distant part of Jiraiya wonders if this is just what happens when you let the Child of Prophecy die instead of being there, instead of saving him.
Is this what the Toad Sage meant, saying the Child of Prophecy could destroy the world by Jiraiya's actions? He wasn't there and now it all falls apart...
It was the birth of Minato's son, and he should have been there, not halfway across the world in Kiri of all places-
"The life of a shinobi, huh?" Jiraiya muses quietly, leaning back against the wall. "Putting the job before your family until you don't have any family left to leave."
"That sounds awful."
Jiraiya snaps his gaze back to the kids, he could have sworn they were asleep-
Natsu's sitting on the futon, hair a tangled splay down his shoulders, green eyes boring into Jiraiya's own.
"You should be asleep kid." he gruffs, playing it off with a casual stretch, but Natsu's eyes only narrow.
"That's not how it should be," Natsu argues, shifting around until he can clasp his ankles, leaning forward. "You don't put work before your friends! Even if Konoha's a yami guild, you guys are still a Guild. You still fight for your precious people, even if you're stupid with it! So why would you ever put some stupid job before the very people you're trying to protect? What good does that do?"
"It's a bit more complicated than that, kid."
"Bullshit! It's only complicated if you make it complicated! You fight for your friends. Even Kakashi-sensei agrees that friends are more important than anything else! Why's it different for you?"
"I don't know how it is where you're from," Jiraiya starts, as Sasuke blinks awake, "but in case you haven't noticed we're not the most politically stable place around. Any sort of weakness, and the other nations will start a war to take advantage of it, try to claim our territory and our bloodlines. When your jobs are important enough they can start or stop entire wars, sometimes you have to make that sort of call."
"Or," Natsu grumbles, "You could take your friends and leave the stupid yami guild before it kills what's left of em. If it's the guild that's putting your precious people in danger, you either change the guild, or you leave it. You don't just ignore the problems and hope that no one you care about is gonna die! That's not how yami guilds work! They'll just take and take and take until you've got nothin' left to lose unless you do something about it!" he throws his hands up, tipping over until he sprawls out on the floor.
Jiraiya sighs. "That's called treason kid."
"Yeah I figured." Natsu grumbles, speaking to the ceiling. "Unlike normal guilds, most yami guilds don't like it when their guys try to leave. If I ever wanted to leave Fairy Tail, I'd just be like 'Yo, gramps, I'm outta here!' and he'd ask if he needed to tape the rules for leaving to my head or something to make sure I remember, and I'd light 'em on fire, and that'd be that, y'know? No one would care- well, I mean, they'd care cause we're all friends, but it wouldn't be a bad thing, right? They'd just be all, 'You'd better keep in contact! And we're not paying your bills anymore either so don't come crying to us when you light another mansion on fire!' and… I dunno. I don't wanna leave, but if I did, no one would stop me. That's how it should be. It's kinda sick they'd force you t'stay, but I guess that's yami guilds for ya…"
"Your guilds must be pretty small, huh?"
"Bout a hundred guys in Fairy Tail, yeah, though we're one of the city guilds - that means we're the only guild in a particular city, so we've kinda got exclusive contracts with the citizens. Some cities have loads of guilds, and some guilds are way out in the middle of nowhere, but yeah, the guild itself only has like a hundred or so. But what's size gotta do with it? You'd think it'd be easier to leave if you have more people, not harder. Sheesh."
Natsu sits up again, ineffectually batting hair out of his eyes as he does.
"Thought so," Jiraiya says. "Your guilds… probably act a bit more like we did a hundred years ago, in the Warring Clans era. Clans didn't always mean everyone was blood related. The more powerful clans would have retainers, artisans, craftsmen, who'd move with the clan and were considered a part of it. Couple hundred people or so at a max, and usually much smaller than that. And people did leave those clans, all the time. Usually unless you were directly related to the main family, even if you were blood it wasn't a huge issue if you decided to strike out on your own, though each clan did handle that differently. But once everyone came together to form villages, well. That changes stuff. Civilians can still come and go as they please, for the most part, but those of us who choose to become shinobi, it's- Konoha's a Village, kid. The shinobi protect the village. Protect the people living in the village. We work with the Daimyo to protect the people in the country to an extent as well. When you choose to be a shinobi, you're choosing to be a part of that. And if you defect, you can hurt a lot of innocent people by it, even just indirectly. Once there's that many non-combatants to protect, there's just sacrifices that have to be made. I chose to be a shinobi. It's not like I was forced into the academy or anything."
Natsu scrunches his face, visibly dissatisfied.
Then he tilts his head, and Jiraiya's got about a moment to realize he's probably listening to Sakura before he starts talking again.
"So, does the Daimyo call people traitors if they decide to leave his court, even after agreeing to serve there?"
Jiraiya sighs, more heavily this time. "Kid, it's- this is getting way off track. Sakura-chan's own dad retired from the Shinobi corps, my teammate Tsunade has even left the village and hasn't been back in years. It's not impossible to leave. There's just a difference between one person deciding to leave, and an entire group of people deciding to leave at one person's prompting. I was just moping because my job's one of the most critical in the village and sometimes that means I'm not where I want to be, is all."
"So you're saying that you wouldn't be allowed to leave even if you wanted to? Cause you're so important?" Natsu asks with a grin that looks like it should be fanged.
Jiraiya groans.
"Go back to sleep kid. Please. We'll be getting up early to talk about those bandits, and I'm not gonna have pity on you when you're dead on your feet because you stayed up past your bedtime."
Natsu tilts his head again, then shrugs. "Yeah, sure thing." He says, entirely too easily, before twisting around to get back under his covers.
Jiraiya has a Bad Feeling.
Sasuke shifts a bit, and Jiraiya sends him a mild glare.
"That means you too, Uchiha."
Mikoto's spawn smirks at him, before rolling over and pulling the blanket over his head.
Jiraiya really regrets taking this team of brats.
At least it's only temporary. It's okay, you can give 'em back to Kakashi soon.
As long as they don't decide to mass-defect and start a rebellion against Konoha.
Kami-sama why me?!