Published: 6/23/2019
Previously: Kakashi and Suzu discover a rogue summon is responsible for their troubles; Suzu spies unresolved tension between the Akiyama brothers; Kazuto puts an end to the problem of Sakuya.
Junichi would not allow us to help him search for the body. Almost as soon as the dust had settled he was leaping back into the rubble. Kakashi followed to help with his own Earth Release techniques, but Junichi hurled a knife at him. When I quietly offered to use my seal to give him a line down to Kazuto's remains, he seized me by the collar and spat, "Fuck off."
So we fell back and watched from a distance. He upturned the earth with doton, dug with kunai, upturned the earth, and dug again. Several hours passed, and we looked on with concern as Junichi bit down on a second and then a third soldier pill. But eventually he went deep enough to uncover the awful mangled bodies of Sakuya and Kazuto both.
Even from far off the sight of it made me ill. Kakashi half-lifted a hand as if he wanted to cover his eye, but nevertheless stood beside me in witness as Junichi knelt before the disaster i wn silence. The sun was setting then, and several long minutes passed before he moved. When he did he pulled two black scrolls from his belt pouch and sealed both Kazuto and Sakuya away. I took a faltering step forward, not sure if should invite him back to the village—something about traveling on the fumes of a third soldier pill seemed risky and unwise—but Junichi vanished without looking back at us before I had the chance.
Despite the fact that we would lose the light before even reaching Fire Country, Kakashi and I both agreed to collect our things and leave as soon as we had reported to Kubo. We travelled a little while in darkness before eventually striking camp beneath a large camphor tree. We kept that tone for the entirety of the return trip; we spoke mostly only to check on one another or confirm our direction of travel. It felt like having a brick thrown in our faces when we arrived at Konoha's main gate and were greeted with a boisterous "Welcome home!" by a sprightly-looking genin and her teammates.
"I'll meet you at the Missions Office tomorrow for the debriefing," Kakashi quietly said in farewell.
"Okay," I replied. He turned and vanished over the rooftops, and I was left standing alone on the dusky main street at the entrance of the village.
The thought of returning to House seemed suddenly unbearable, so I turned away from the road to the Namikaze compound and made for the market district instead. Itsuki-sensei was shuttering the storefront when I arrived.
"Suzu-chan? You're back," he said in surprise when I appeared at his elbow. Then he took a long look at my face and put an arm over my shoulders.
"I don't know if I can keep doing this job," I told him as we went around back and climbed the stairs to his residence above the shop. "It's like it never ends."
"What happened?" asked Itsuki-sensei. I told him everything, from the stress of first receiving the mission to Kakashi's episode in the mine to Junichi digging up his brother's broken body.
"I thought when the war ended things wouldn't be like this anymore," I said as I accepted an oversized t-shirt and a pair of slippers from my teacher.
"It's something else," Itsuki-sensei agreed quietly as he put a kettle on the stove. I went to the other room to change. Then I returned to the kitchen, sat down at the table, and put my head down on my arms. A few minutes later Itsuki-sensei seated himself across from me with two cups of tea, one of which he placed one beside my head. I turned to look at it. Then I pressed my nose against the table and began to cry.
"Suzu-chan," Itsuki-sensei said, "why don't you retire?"
The proposition was so bald, so honest, and so close to my heart that it startled me out of my tears. I sat up with a sniffle and looked at him.
"There's more to life than being a ninja," he told me, unintentionally reminding me of the revelation I had experienced when he'd first told me of his withdrawal from the Forces. "It's okay if you can't go on anymore. The war is over… no one would blame you. You wouldn't be a quitter like I was."
"But—" I spoke without thinking. "But how can I?"
"You can. It wouldn't be easy," Sensei allowed, "but you can. There are people who would help you. I'm always in need of a second pair of hands. It wouldn't be any trouble for me to give you a job while you find your feet."
I stared at him, astonished, as a distant wish suddenly coalesced into a true future. I could see myself in that life. I'd wake up in the morning, help Auntie cook breakfast, and make lunches for my cousins. Then I'd leave with Haruka and Koji and the other little ones, walk them to the Academy, and then come here to help Sensei at the shop. We would stock the shelves together again, sit and peel fruit again, and talk about the weather and our daily lives. The greatest grievance of the day would be getting wet in the rain while taking in the sale banner. I wouldn't even have to leave the village.
There would be no blood. There would be no politics. It would just be… life.
"Think about it after you've rested," Itsuki-sensei suggested kindly. He rose and touched my shoulder. "You must be tired. I'll leave the extra futon in the hallway."
The next morning after I had met with Kakashi at the Missions Office, debriefed, and turned in my report, I returned to Itsuki-sensei's shop to gather my things. Itsuki-sensei saw me off with a bag of mandarins as a souvenir. When I protested the volume of it he waved a hand and told me to share with my family. I returned to the House with my head hanging, feeling bombarded by too much kindness.
Despite the fact that this mission to Kubo's village had only been the first after a long period of inactivity, pseudo-Team 7 entered another furlough the day after our return. Kakashi was not at a point in which he needed to take his own stay in the western ward, but I suspected that he had been benched for combat missions. Unfortunately, since the only kinds of assignments suitable to a jounin-chuunin pair were most all ones involving fights—be they with bandits or other ninja—it seemed he had no choice but to remain in the village.
For lack of anything else to do I began running low-level solo chuunin missions. They were quite mundane and consisted mostly of courier work, but it was income. Between these courier missions I began to take days off from training. I kept up with conditioning, but ninjutsu practice began to fall aside, and even though I was due to advance into the sixth tier of Hurricane Gale I let the day of the clan's biannual examinations quietly slip by. Conversely, my time at home and at Itsuki-sensei's shop began to increase dramatically. If my cousins and foster parents noticed the sudden resolution of several unfinished sewing projects, they refrained from commenting.
But perhaps it was for the better. As Auntie quietly slid open the bathroom door, I put my forehead down on the rim of the toilet seat and sighed, feeling tired right down to my bones.
"Again?" she murmured quietly, reaching a hand out to pull my hair away from my face. It was kind of her to do it. I hadn't made it in time and it was covered in sick-up, but she didn't even flinch to put her hand in it.
"I'm seeing Hayato-sensei again on Monday."
"That's good. He'll have a way to help."
I turned my head and looked past her shoulder to the hallway, listening to see if I'd woken anyone else in my mad dash to the bathroom. Chiharu and Nodoka's chakra signatures pulsed, and I figured they were using their own listening techniques to see if they could figure out what was wrong. I sighed and dragged a hand across my face.
"Why am I the only one like this?" I asked my foster mother. "None of the others have all these nightmares and melodrama."
"It's not melodrama," my aunt contradicted gently as settled down next to me. "As for the others… You children are all so good at keeping quiet. Who taught you all to suffer in so much silence?"
Her smile then was a little bitter. My mind drifted through memories of both her and my uncle, and of the strange nights when they would sometimes go to the kitchen or the porch and sit like birds above an abyss. I figured then she must have regretted being unable to open up to us. Maybe there was a culture of silence here in the House she didn't like, and she wished she hadn't contributed to it.
That was so sad. We looked at one another for a long moment. Then I said, "It was life. Life taught us that way."
Auntie blinked at me in surprise. Then her forehead creased and she gave me a sad smile.
"It's only ever the same lessons, isn't it?" she said wistfully.
"It really is," I replied. Auntie let out a small chuckle. Then she stood, went to the tub, and turned the faucet on.
"Let's clean up," she offered as she held out a hand. I took and let her pull me to her side. I took off my shirt and put my arm over the side of the tub, and she took a small basin of water and poured it over my head.
"Auntie?" I asked after a long moment.
"Hm?" she asked back as she began rubbing shampoo into my scalp. Considering the length of my hair, she had to use quite a bit, but she didn't seem bothered by the extra effort.
"What would you do if I quit and started working for Itsuki-sensei?"
No one had ever said it in so many words, but everyone knew Reiko Namikaze had been forced into retirement. None of us children knew the exact circumstances of it, but the fact that she'd fought with the clan elders about it was more or less an open secret. It was how she'd gotten her reputation as a firebrand; in the compound she was notorious for her ferocity. For someone like me to quit and throw away a career in the Forces, how would she feel?
But Auntie only asked, "Would you be happier working for Itsuki-sensei?"
"Maybe," I muttered, pressing my cheek against the tub. "I don't know. But I'm not happy now."
Another basin of water was poured over my head to rinse the suds, and then a moment later my aunt dropped a towel over my head. I sat up and began rubbing my hair dry. Auntie dried her own hands; then she knelt in front of me and put them on my knees.
"Suzu, it sounds to me like you're asking for someone to make a decision about your life for you," she told me quietly. "I can't make decisions for you. If you quit being a ninja you should do it because it's right for you, not because I said you should."
I opened my mouth, worked my jaw, and then shut it. Then I pursed my lips and looked away, resigned. She sighed and pulled me into a hug.
"Oh, sweetheart," she murmured. "I wish I could tell you how to win against suffering. But I don't know how. I'm sorry."
"Auntie, will it be like this forever?"
"It wasn't for me," she whispered as she tightened the embrace. "It was a long time, but it did get better. It did."
More time passed. Then March arrived, and the beginnings of spring began to creep out of the ground. I was feeling a little better by then; Kazuto's memory wasn't quite so sharp anymore, and Hayato-sensei and I scaled back to monthly appointments. Jiraiya, who had been out making the new year's rounds with his spy network, returned to the village.
"No, she isn't here yet. It seems she's running late… it may be evening before she returns. Would you like to leave a message for her?" I heard Auntie's voice say as I slid the front door open.
"No," came the deep, booming reply. "I want to speak to her directly. I'll wait here for her if you don't mind."
"Auntie?" I called as I kicked off my shoes and entered the sitting room curiously. "Sorry I'm late, Auntie, Sensei had a mix-up with his neighbor's deliveries and we had to sort it out. What's—" I stopped short when I saw the man sitting across from her at the tea table. "—wrong…?"
Jiraiya's gaze was so piercing that my breath hitched. For a moment I found myself frozen. But then he let out a big belly laugh and slapped his knee.
"You've lost your touch, Reiko," he guffawed. "Ten years ago you would've known she was coming a mile out."
I sent a bewildered look to my aunt, who shook her head and replied with a questioning gaze of her own. My stomach dropped with realization. So much had happened since that trade-off in the mountains, but now he was here to take care of business.
"Here, Auntie, Sensei said to share," I quickly held out the package of persimmons I was carrying. "Jiraiya-sama, did you need to speak with me?"
Auntie's lips dropped into a concerned frown, but she seemed to acquiesce to my deflection. She stood and accepted the box. "That was kind of him. I'll make something for you to take back for him tomorrow."
"You bet I want to talk with you, kid," Jiraiya replied as Auntie excused herself to the kitchen. "Why don't you take a walk with me?"
Even though his comportment was as jolly as usual there was a certain sharpness in his voice that made a shudder crawl up my spine. I jerked my head in a nervous nod.
"Auntie, I'll be back in a bit," I called as we went for the door.
"See you, Reiko," Jiraiya bade.
We exited the House and went down to the road. A sudden cold front had blown in from the north and a harsh gust of wind cut across the bare skin of my face. Shivering, I pulled my hood up and began rummaging in my pockets for my gloves. The frigid temperature so distracted me that I followed behind Jiraiya without paying half a mind to our surroundings; as a result I was utterly bewildered when I found myself standing beside him at the end of a quiet alleyway between unoccupied houses.
Jiraiya seized my coat, lifted me off the ground, and shoved me against the wall. My head banged into the wood with a loud crack, and I would have gasped, but he moved so quickly that I was pinned with a knife against my throat before I even registered what had happened. Automatically my arms flailed and my feet scrambled to find purchase against the ground, but it was useless. He had me completely.
"I don't know who you are or what village you work for," he murmured as he leaned forward, "and I don't know what kind of threat you think you're trying to make. But if you believe I'm weak-willed enough to bend to something like this—" he brandished a familiar scroll between us— "you are sorely mistaken."
"What?" I breathed out in utter terror. His dark eyes, focused like lasers on my face, narrowed.
"Don't play dumb," he barked. "Now tell me what you've done to Suzu Namikaze, and tell me who gave you this information."
I was dumbstruck. Sweat began to gather on my palms.
"Jiraiya-sama, I—"
He pulled me away from the wall and then slammed me into it again. My head smashed against the wood a second time, hard enough this time that I bit my tongue.
"I'm not in the mood to play games," he said coldly. "I'm not buying your act. Now talk."
Stunned by the ferocity of his violence, I could only look at him in wordless shock. No one from the village had ever manhandled me with such viciousness in my life. Not even Akihiko's enraged, nose-breaking punch compared.
"W-What?" I stuttered again as my mouth filled with salty, coppery blood. "I don't—I don't understand."
Jiraiya, who looked thoroughly unconvinced, only scoffed at me.
"To begin with this story is ridiculous," he said. "Writing out this future where the Hokage dies and the Kyuubi destroys the village—what the hell are you trying to say? That you know who our jinchuuriki is and not even the Yondaime Hokage can stop you? And this whole thing about sealing the Nine-tails into his son—Minato doesn't even have kids. Who could come up with this?"
Things began to process then. So Jiraiya had read the story of Naruto. But he'd taken my gesture of handing it over in completely the wrong way. The sheer amount of classified information contained in the scroll must have registered not as a report, but as a threat—and of course it did, I thought in dismay. What kind of idiot was I? What else would a master spy in charge of gathering information on Konoha's enemies think when a nobody like Misuzu Namikaze dropped a bomb like this out of nowhere? The only remotely possible explanation was that someone from the outside had infiltrated and was using her identity to try and bring Konoha down from within. The whole thing stank of conspiracy no matter how I tried to slice it.
"It—" I held back a wince as blood began to dribble over my lip. "It—it is a story. No one told it to me. But it's true, Jiraiya-sama. I don't know if you'll believe me, but it's all true."
Jiraiya's steely expression did not shift, and I swallowed nervously as I began to realize just what kind of fate might be in store for me if I did not find a way to convince him of my sincerity. That—that would be a problem. In all frankness I had no idea of what I could do. After all, that had been the great problem about this whole issue of foreknowledge: there was no way for me to validate my claims. "I woke up one day and just knew it"... the truth never sounded more like a half-assed lie.
But then at that moment a familiar song began to ring in my ears. Jiraiya dropped me like a hot potato the second he realized who was approaching, and I wasted no time in diving into the nearby bushes. As I went I wrapped myself in every single concealment jutsu I could bring to bear. Hiding from a shinobi like Minato would take more than just simple chakra cloaking; I flattened myself against the ground and began making hand signs for heat masking, visual camouflage, and sound suppression. Then I held still and tried not to breathe.
Jiraiya whipped his head to the side and stared intently at my hiding spot, but Minato landed in the alley beside him before he could investigate further. It was a Saturday afternoon and he was dressed casually in dark sweatpants. A large knitted muffler was wrapped around his neck.
"Sensei, there you are," he exclaimed. "The gate guards said you had returned today, but I couldn't find you anywhere! I checked your house, the bathhouses, the bars… What are you doing here in the compound?"
Jiraiya visibly did not turn his gaze towards me, and he was very, very measured as he answered, "I was visiting your kid sister."
"Suzu? Was she asking you for sealing help again?" Minato wondered. Then he leaned forward into an apologetic bow. "I'm sorry, Sensei. I haven't been able to visit the House since I came back from the western front… if she's bothering you, I'll tell her to stop."
"Hey, don't worry about it for now. More importantly, did you need something, Minato?" Jiraiya evaded smoothly. Evidently he had decided that we would both be better off if Minato did not know exactly what manner of visit we had been engaged in. I was inclined to agree. "Why'd you need to come looking yourself? You should've just sent a hawk."
"I wanted to tell you in person!" Minato replied rather excitedly as he straightened his torso. "Sensei, you won't believe it. Kushina's pregnant! It's due in October!"
I slowly lifted my hands to cover my mouth, and Jiraiya's shoulders twitched as if he were suppressing the urge to whirl around. I scarcely could believe it. Had my life just been saved?
"You—" Jiraiya worked his jaw. "You're having a kid?"
"I know, I didn't believe it either," my brother laughed heartily. Then he glanced around and lowered his voice. "Actually, Kushina was really concerned at first. Well, she still is—she's worried about the seal. I figured between the two of us things would be all right, but we were wondering if we shouldn't ask you for your opinion, too, Sensei."
"I—" Jiraiya did glance over his shoulder then. Minato blinked as he teacher failed to reply.
"Sensei? Is something wrong?" Minato stepped forward and peered around Jiraiya's shoulder. I resisted the urge to squeak and redoubled my concentration.
"I… sorry," Jiraiya muttered and ran a hand through his spiky white mane. "I guess I'm more tired from travelling than I thought. But never mind—congratulations, you little nerd. You've finally managed to spawn a toad of your own."
"Jiraiya-sensei!" Minato half-protested, half-laughed. "Kushina would kill you if she heard you refer to her child as a toad, you know."
"I do know it." Jiraiya let out a half-laugh of his own. He regarded his student warmly. "Hey, Minato, it's great news. I'll come by tomorrow to talk, okay? I still have one more thing to handle before I'm free."
Evidently this was a line often heard because Minato didn't even wait to be asked for dismissal. I supposed that was what it was like to have a spymaster for one's mentor.
"Sure thing, Sensei," he replied. "I'll tell Kushina. Don't push yourself too hard, okay? You just got back, after all."
"You got it." Jiraiya lifted an arm in farewell. Minato grinned again, a grin happier than I might have ever seen, and hopped away to the nearest rooftop.
A moment of silence passed as we both waited for his chakra signature to blend away. Then Jiraiya immediately came over to the bush.
"If you've taken this chance to scurry away, you'll regret it," he muttered as he squatted, plunged his arms in, and began digging through the branches. I quickly dropped my techniques and crawled out. No way was I going to play any games with a threat like that.
"I didn't, I'm here," I said hurriedly. Jiraiya sat back on his heels and looked at me flatly.
"Are you really Suzu Namikaze?" he asked.
"I really am," I replied.
Jiraiya stared me down for a moment longer. Then he put a hand on his forehead and groaned.
"Kid, I don't even know where to begin. Where the hell did you find this scroll? And how in the hell does it know the future?"
I put a hand on my own head and sighed.
"Jiraiya-sama," I said distantly. "I'm about to tell you something absurd."
A/N: I don't like this chapter. But if I mess with it any longer we'll get stuck here for another half-year. At the very least it's still better than the last draft.
Thanks for sticking with me, friends! Drop a review if you have any thoughts. Usually when I make a chapter like this feedback helps the most. Maybe if you guys drop me a good line I'll be able to go back and rewrite this one into something better.
Cheers,
Eiruiel
