From the Yondaime Story Arc:

Knock, knock. Here goes.

"Tsunade-basan? I'm coming in..."

Yondaime: The Strength of a Nation
Chapter 4: A Man with Weaknesses

Part 3: Severed Leaves

Kazama Arashi slowly opened the door to the women's restroom and listened carefully. He could hear the sound of running water. Quickly, he slipped inside and took a look around. "Tsunade-basan?" He glanced toward the sinks, then took a closer look.

At one of the bathroom sinks, Tsunade-hime, the legendary medical ninja, was having a panic attack. In her haste to clean the blood off of her hands, she had apparently placed her hands on the sink, and the fear stopped her from approaching the sink again. He could hear her hyperventilating, and her hands were shaking violently.

Arashi quickly dashed over and made his presence known. "Tsunade...come on, let's move to another sink." He guided her carefully to the next sink over and calmed her, then cut on the water and ran her hands beneath it. Arashi grabbed a paper towel and wet it, then cleaned up the mess at the other sink, and whatever stray blood he found on her. "Sshhh...shhh...it's okay. It's all going down the drain..." He felt truly bad for her...no one anticipated a situation like this could ever come up, and here she was, stuck in the middle of it with no warning.

When Arashi thought about it again, the same could be said for him. But this wasn't the time for such thoughts. Tsunade was breaking down...Arashi finished cleaning her off and smiled. "See? No more blood..." Arashi felt condescending for a moment...as if he was treating her like a child. And yet, he knew he had to do whatever he could to keep her calm, or else she might put herself under even more stress than the situation itself had given her. In the morning, she wouldn't remember the tone of his words...she'd remember that someone was there to help. At least, he hoped so.

Tsunade turned and grabbed him, pulling him into a tight hug and crying on his shoulder again. Arashi held her and patted her back, talking lightly and encouraging her. "I'm proud of you, Tsunade...you faced your fear...you did great." He could feel the tears soak into his shirt as she cried and cried...

He stuck with her for another 10 minutes, then decided it wasn't a good idea to stay in the women's bathroom for too long. Peeping back into the hallway, he noticed a little black-haired girl looking at all the blood in the hallway. She was only about 8, and she was nursing a pretty ugly scrape on her right forearm...she'd probably been sent over to get it looked at. Arashi waved her over.

The little girl stared at him. "You're in the girls' restroom, sir."

Arashi shook that off. "What's your name, little one?"

She looked at him closely...suspiciously. "My name's Shizune."

"Shizune, that's a pretty bad scrape you've got there...let me fix you up." He took a step out of the door, but then turned and looked back into the bathroom, and then back out to the girl. "Actually...could you do me a favor first?"

Shizune nodded.

"Good. I need you to talk to my friend for a bit while I clean up that mess on the floor. Someone was seriously hurt, and my friend can't stand the sight of blood right now. But I don't want to leave her in there by herself...would you help me?"

Shizune's cheeks reddened a little bit, but she took a deep breath and nodded. "Sure sir."

"Thank you very much, Shizune." He patted her head lightly. "I'll be sure the Hokage knows you've taken on this D-rank mission for me."

They traded places, and Shizune looked into the bathroom. Against the wall near the door was a tall woman. She was on her knees, and her hair was all over her head. Her eyes were red and puffy from what had probably been hours of crying. Her hands were twitching, and the little girl was touched with compassion. Shizune walked up to the lady and tapped her shoulder, and the lady looked up slowly.

"Why are you crying, ma'am?"

Shizune frowned when the woman turned away and continued crying, then she presented her hand to the woman. "My name's Shizune. What's yours?"

The innocence of a child knew no bounds, sometimes. Tsunade looked to the hand extended before her, and her eyes went wide.

Shizune's mind flipped into overdrive, and she quickly and sheepishly switched the hand she'd presented to the scared woman so that there wasn't a big scraped arm in her face. "It was an honest mistake..."

Arashi quickly got a messenger to go to the house of the medical ninja who normally took the night shift at Konoha's med center. It was obvious he was going to need to come in early today...Tsunade wouldn't be going back to work for quite a while.
Time passed. Quicker for some than others, but it passed.

For Densetsu no Jiraiya, it was slower than most. He had the most horrible dream. He had a dream that he was dead...and that Tsunade was crying hysterically at his funeral. Wailing like a newlywed whose husband was murdered on the honeymoon. In this out of body experience, of course, Jiraiya had no control of his voice, and could only silently watch. The funeral lasted for hours...for what seemed like days, and throughout the entire thing, she lay her head on top the coffin and cried. It was the saddest thing he could imagine. And he was pretty sure it was driving him crazy. As the funeral went on, his frustration grew, and the entire world seemed to compress and decompress...compress and decompress...as if it were a heart beating...

Not too long later the pain registered, and he realized it was his head throbbing. He apparently had regained consciousness.

He felt more tired than he had felt in years, but something made him suspect it wasn't for lack of sleep, but for too much of it. Jiraiya took a deep breath, but he didn't budge. His head was still throbbing too much for that. He sniffed the air lightly. Definitely the medical center, not Fire Country Hospital. This place didn't smell...processed enough to be the "professional" hospital.

Slowly, memory came back to Jiraiya about what exactly had happened to put him in this bed. His hands shifted to his right thigh, and he felt the thick bandages. There's a lot more bandages here than I expected...Orochimaru must've gotten a better chunk of my leg than I thought. A voice interrupted his silent musing, and he quickly adjusted to the first sound his ears had heard.

"So the dead has awoken..."

The voice came from the right. Jiraiya opened his eyes and looked to his right and saw Arashi, looking out of the window, apparently watching the sun rise. "It appears so." The throbbing didn't go away, but it was weaker than before, and he would tolerate it. "How long..."

"Three days. You lost a lot of blood..." Arashi paused, then spoke again. "What the heck happened out there? You're the only witness or participant we've got..."

There was a time when Jiraiya would have joked around here...but it wasn't today. "We fought. I lost." Jiraiya felt cold saying it like that, but there was no reason to make any more of a report than that.

A sigh echoed through the room lightly, but only because the room was quiet and live. "Fair enough. That battle was your business."

Jiraiya made a connection he hadn't considered, and slowly shifted toward the window and Arashi's rear. Arashi was wearing his red Hokage cape, and the white flames at the bottom of the cape seemed to dance in the wind of the open window. He had thought Sarutobi had sent the reinforcements, but now he had second thoughts. "Arashi, Did you send the ANBU?"

Arashi remained still. That question had an obvious answer. "Were they any help?"

Jiraiya paused and contemplated the way things had gone...

"Jiraiya, you brought reinforcements?" You spurred Sarutobi to action? Have I underestimated you?

Jiraiya's mouth dropped open slightly, and he turned back toward the forest. Based off the sounds in the distance (the attempts to be silently sneaky), there was at least a squad of ANBU approaching. Probably more. Oh no...this could get bad. "No, I came alone, Orochimaru..." Who the hell did this? Jiraiya turned back towards his old ally...

Orochimaru's eyes burned with rage and anger. "You..."

"Orochimaru..." Jiraiya took a careful step forward...

It'd be best if Jiraiya withheld his full thoughts on what a great idea sending the ANBU without talking with him first had been. No reason to discourage a heart-felt gesture. "They took care of the forest fire...and they saved my life by getting me here." That was all he'd say on the matter.

Arashi looked down to the windowsill. "I should have gone myself to help...things might have gone better then."

Jiraiya shook his head. The boy was always getting down on himself. "Or, you could be dead and I could be Hokage..."

Both of them chuckled at that. Not a chance of that happening...they'd put Anko in charge before Jiraiya would allow himself to get the position.

Jiraiya looked down and began to fiddle with his bandages again. He wasn't feeling good enough to get up just yet, so he'd sit tight and let his brain wander. Suddenly, he thought of something. "Where is Tsunade?" She would have known when I was going to wake up, I'd imagine. "I figured she'd have come in and killed me for nearly dying by now."

Arashi stiffened up for a moment, then sighed. "I don't know."

Jiraiya looked Arashi's way. "You're joking, right?"

Arashi shook his head and spoke. "No, I'm not joking...she stole out of the city a couple of days ago suddenly. One day she was saving..." Arashi considered what he knew thus far, and decided against finishing that sentence that way. "She was saving lives, but her fear of blood returned...and the next day she was gone." A palpable sense of failure washed over Arashi as he considered the situation again, but he knew he had done all he could. He only wished he had recognized little Shizune for who she was earlier. "She took Dan's niece with her...I never should have let that girl into that bathroom."

Jiraiya remained silent for a moment...there was more to this than was being said. Tsunade had two real fears...large amounts of blood meant death, and that was what she was truly afraid of...but the death of her close friends fit into an entirely different category for her. Her life as a teenager had been filled with death, but what really hurt her were the deaths of her younger brother and the man she wished to marry. Tsunade had worked through her fear of blood...heck, he had helped her work through it. She was still a medical ninja because she'd worked through it. And yet, somehow it came back suddenly...enough for her to not only retire, but run from the village? What had happened to cause such a relapse? Jiraiya looked down to his own thigh in thought, and the dream from earlier crossed his mind. Wait a minute...did she operate on...

What did Arashi say? "You lost a lot of blood..."

He cut that line of thought as solidly as he could. Nothing good will come of thinking like that. Whether she considers me that way doesn't merit thought here. Jiraiya rubbed his thigh for a moment. There's too much else to think about.

Losing Orochimaru already meant that Konoha would never be the peaceful place it once was again...at least not until after his elimination. But, losing Tsunade hurt a lot more in Jiraiya's mind. As far as Jiraiya could tell, she was the closest of the three to mimicking the heart of the third Hokage for his people, and it was clear looking into her eyes that she cared for them. If his former experiences with her and blood were any guide, then seeing her escape the city in a mad panic would not have been good for anyone's morale. Add to that the feeling of defeat a soldier gets when a doctor dies or runs and it was probably the worst thing that could have happened. The shinobi would feel as if injuries and death were more permanent now...and the threat of Orochimaru looming over the horizon would seem all the more close.

Jiraiya sighed. The five sennin of Konoha are down to two...master and apprentice. Jiraiya looked ahead in an attempt to see what his role should be...but as hard as he tried, he kept looking back. It was an odd thing at age 30...but he had done everything he wanted to do...and it had all been stripped of meaning by the last week. Now, there was a building drive within him to make things right. Nothing else mattered.

He sat up suddenly, grunting and ignoring the dizziness that the quick movement produced, and resting his head on the headboard of the bed. "Well...I suppose I should go too."

Arashi visibly tensed up, and quickly turned to face his sensei. "What?" There was more than a little bit of indignance contained in that word, Jiraiya noticed.

Jiraiya lightly massaged the tense muscles of his forehead, attempting to lessen the pain. "All my friends are gone...my team is gone...there's nothing here for me anymore."

"You're kidding me." Arashi's eyes expressed his hurt.

Jiraiya solemnly shook his head, and looked Arashi directly in those pained eyes. Part of him understood Arashi's predicament. Iknow what you mean, Arashi...and yes, you count. "Arashi, you're all I've got left, and you're grown up now. I've taught you everything I know, and you've used it. I'm proud of you...but I won't be much of a help to you here. I can't imagine the burden you bear as Hokage, and I don't know how to help with that. It's not that I don't want to...but what good can I do in these walls anymore?"

Jiraiya slipped his legs out of the bed and onto the floor, stood and walked over to the window of the hospital. His window had a good view of the Central Command Office where Arashi would normally be working. "My only hope of helping is to eliminate the wild cards from your reign."

Arashi rested his hands on the windowsill and continued to stare at the office building. Something in him knew that Jiraiya's mind was made up, but he couldn't help but try to stop him. "Jiraiya..." Arashi turned to face him. "Orochimaru is gone...we should worry about what's here. It's not worth it to commit resources like you toward finding him..."

"That's not what I was suggesting at all." Jiraiya found that his face was locked in an eternal frown, his prominent jaw made him look all the more intense. "Orochimaru is a brilliant man, and he has had the advantage of time to this point. He knew it would be a while before I got back up, so he could move carefully and cover all his tracks." And bathe, Jiraiya thought. "Considering we nearly killed each other three days ago, it's unlikely I'll find him again until he's fully prepared to attack Konoha...he won't let me get lucky.."

Arashi remained silent and attentive.

"I can't stop him, but I have to try. If Orochimaru knows I am out there, actively searching for him and making contacts within every country, he'll have to be all the more careful with how he does things. That will slow him down, and any moment that buys Konoha to prepare for himis worth it." Jiraiya turned and faced Arashi. "If he had an assault prepared today, I wonder if we'd be ready, Arashi."

Arashi had wondered the same thing himself not too long ago, and could not fault Jiraiya on that.

Jiraiya continued. "But I have faith that you'll get people ready. I'm going to buy you time."

Arashi took a deep breath before speaking. "I can't believe that the Legendary Sannin of Konoha are all leaving..."

Jiraiya frowned. "The Sannin are finished, whether I stay or not. I'm nothing more than an old soldier now. I'm little good to you alone."

"You could teach a team..."

Jiraiya raised an eyebrow. "You think that would do more good than slowing Orochimaru?"

For the first time, Arashi really considered the relationship he had with his sensei. Yes, he'd been the student, but now he outranked his teacher. It was quite possible that if he felt strongly about this, he could pull rank on Jiraiya and Jiraiya might listen. But, that wasn't the way Arashi did things...and he suspected Jiraiya wouldn't listen. Besides, if Jiraiya felt so strongly, he'd best follow his heart.

Jiraiya chuckled emptily. "I had enough trouble training you...I wouldn't want a whole team of rugrats if I could help it." He frowned as he made the effort to turn around and walk back to the bed. "Mindful, I'm not gone yet...I'll give this leg two more days to rest. Then I'm out the door."

Arashi frowned and bit his lip lightly. As he thought, Jiraiya already had his mind made up. The "discussion" was over. Arashi pushed the frustration building within him back. This man had done too much for Arashi in the past for him to go off the deep end.

Jiraiya slipped back under the covers. It was obvious that his old student wasn't very happy with him right now, but this was necessary. Jiraiya spoke again. "And as much as I hate to say it...don't expect me back too often. This type of work is going to take secrecy...and time. I'm traveling all across the known shinobi world. I won't have too much time to come back and make reports. But I'll make sure you know when the attack is going to happen...somehow." He fought off the wooziness he was feeling a bit...obviously he wasn't recovered entirely yet.

Arashi nodded and helped his instructor tuck back in. He gave Jiraiya as warm a smile as he could muster, considering the situation. "Rest now, Jiraiya...we've all got long days ahead of us, it would seem. I'll see you tomorrow." Arashi waved behind him as he walked out of the hospital room to get started on his day.

Jiraiya sighed, watching the big kid leave. I didn't tell you the real reason I'm leaving...you wouldn't grow while I'm still here. Jiraiya considered his past experiences with the boy he'd pretty much raised as his son. You'd depend on me...and I'd end up co-Hokage in some fashion. That's not the way it's meant to be. A child never grows as long as his father is coaching him through every step. And it's time for you to realize just how strong you are...how completely your training has prepared you for this.

It was the truth, but it didn't make it easier for either of them. A tear flowed from Jiraiya's eye as he considered how badly the last few events had changed everything. This Konohagakure is no longer my home. The Sannin are finished. This is your home, Arashi...you will defend it best. And I'll leave it to you.

As Arashi returned to his office, he fought back the anger that threatened to make him scream aloud. Logically, he knew that everyone had their reasons. Saru-dono was sick with grief. Tsunade's phobia would be hard to deal with within the walls of the village, especially as a legendary medical ninja. Jiraiya was working for the greater good. But no matter what he tried to do to convince his mind, in his heart he just felt...abandoned.

Deep within him, his heart began to beat harder...faster...and he had no idea why. It didn't have any thing to do with the stairs he was climbing, he suspected.

"Well, Konoha...we've seen the sun rise once more..."

For the first time in a long time, he pessimistically wondered if they'd all live to see it set.

TO BE CONTINUED...

I seem to write well in streaks...I cranked out a one shot earlier with many of the same characters, and just kept moving to get this. This'll probably be the last thing I do at least until the weekend...I need to learn about entropy soon for my thermo homework, so I'll focus on that the next few days. Also, this is going to get held up for a bit because I need to get one more chapter of V&H out before the next part of this will make total sense.

(Also, for those who need to know, after rereading ff's rules, I've kicked the fic up to teen rating. The coarse language is probably strong enough to warrant that, and the blood drama from the last ep certainly is. It's fitting anyway, because the second half of the fic is a bit more mature anyway.)

This fic's become way bigger of a deal than I'd ever imagined it could, and I just want to thank all the readers and reviewers. I hope everyone's enjoying the ride thus far, and I encourage you to keep reading, 'cuz I've got some really fun stuff planned for this fic in the later chapters. As always, reviews are welcome and greatly appreciated!

(If you have questions ask them as well...I try to get as prompt a response back as possible, and normally reply within a day However...if you've got questions you want to discuss or think other people are curious about, I'd prefer you post them to my forum. I'll take either though, as long as you ask!)