Jiraiya was up bright and well...not exactly early that morn...er, afternoon. After giving his clothes a sniff test and finding the marginally acceptable, he dressed, declared himself ready for the day, left the room he'd rented the night before, and made his way out into the village. He purchased his breakfast/late lunch along with a newspaper at a nearby 24 hour Shinobi Mart after waiting in line for ten minutes while a Chunin argued with the clerk about returning some kunai he'd purchased there the day before, apparently too blind to see the NO REFUNDS sign the harried civilian kept pointing at. After wolfing down his slightly stale roll and gulping down the cup of lukewarm coffee, he turned to the Apartments For Rent section of the classifieds and circled several likely options. He then crossed off two of the circled selections after realizing upon further reflection that they were actually coded messages one arranging a time for when a young couple would be eloping and the other from a ninja who was holding his teammate's dog for ransom. After he was done, he went in search of his former/future student since he planned on bringing him along when he viewed the selected apartments as the kid would be living with him.
After he broke in and established that Naruto wasn't home, he headed out to Team 7's favorite training ground. Kakashi had been the first to greet him when he arrived as his Genin had been much too busy training to do more than make an idle note of his presence as they continued with their tree-climbing lesson.
"Jiraiya-sama. This is an unexpected surprise." Kakashi said, looking truly surprised.
"I just dropped by to see how my godson was doing, and if he was available to go apartment hunting with me." he replied, getting straight to the point.
"Will you be training him then?" Kakashi asked in a rather guarded tone.
"Maybe in my spare time. I won't be removing him from your team just yet." he replied.
"Naruto, get out of that tree, there's someone I'd like you to meet." Kakashi called over to the the boy, who supposedly hadn't learned tree-walking until the disastrous mission to Wave that his former/future student hadn't liked talking about according to the reports he had read and the scant accounts he had heard from the boy, rather than continue questioning him.
He didn't know how it had happened but, Kakashi had seemed far more intent on training Naruto during the fifteen minutes he'd watched Team 7 work than he had in Naruto's stories of the man and what little of Naruto's training he'd seen during the last time around. It was possible that back then he'd caught his student's student during a bad month and that Naruto had complained about Kakashi so much because he didn't think he had gotten enough one-on-one training from him and thought that the man was focusing on the Uchiha boy with whom he'd had an ongoing rivalry too much. This theory was more plausible when he considered the fact that after the training trip, the Hatake had spent weeks helping Naruto master his Elemental Manipulation techniques and improve the Rasengan. Because Kakashi seemed intent so intent on training Naruto, he felt secure in mostly leaving him in the young man's hands for the most part. The fact remained that he needed to train himself so he could be prepared for the coming confrontation with Orochimaru.
At Kakashi's call, the blond haired boy who wasn't in his ubiquitous jumpsuit, but rather wearing an outfit he'd never seen before which consisted of a green top with the Uzumaki clan symbol on the back and orange pants raced over looking excited. When he stopped a foot away from where he and the Hatake were standing, he noticed that the boy had a mischievous look in his eye that swiftly vanished.
"Who's this Kakashi-sensei?" Naruto asked, looking so much like his mother at that moment, that he began to sweat.
"This is your godfather, the Toad Sage Jiraiya. He's been away hunting a missing-nin for the last eleven and a half years." Kakashi replied.
"Nice to meet you Jiraiya." Narto said grinning in a manner which was more reminiscent of his father than his mother which upped his panic level several notches since, while Minato generally wasn't one for pulling pranks, he'd learned the hard way to watch out for that particular smile the few times it had revealed itself.
"Say Naruto, how would you like to stay in a better apartment for a while?" he asked. "Since I'm your godfather, I'm responsible for several things and your care and feeding is one of them which I'll be able to tend to now since I'll be in town for some time, and will be needing a new apartment anyways."
"What about my plants?" Naruto asked, not asking a single question about him or the apartment they'd ostensibly be living in.
He had a vague feeling that he should find that to be rather worrisome, considering the fact that the boy was quite willing to move in with a person he'd just met, godfather or no.
"You can bring them with us." he replied, knowing that that was the only response he could give in regards to the things.
He remembered that Naruto's plants, some of which had lived in his apartment, and others of which had lived in a makeshift greenhouse on the roof of the building, had been the boy's pride and joy. Tending to those plants was one of the few hobbies that the boy enjoyed outside of training. The look on Naruto's face when he entrusted his plants to the few friends he had before he left Konoha for three years of training had been pitiful.
"Okay." Naruto said, grinning brightly.
And, with that, the matter of housing was settled as far as Naruto was concerned. All that was left was actually finding a place to live.
Naruto smiled. Today had gone quite nicely if he said so himself. He had managed to get a certain cheap bastard who had a habit of emptying his Gama-chan rather than spending his own money to shell out for a two-bedroom apartment and, Jiraiya had done something perverted enough during the hunt for said apartment for him to be able to start calling him by his old nickname. A nickname that the man hated just as much this time around as he had the last time.
"Ero-Senin, what time should I start bringing my stuff over tomorrow?" he asked the second Jiraiya had finished signing the lease.
"How many times have I asked you to stop calling me that?" Jiraiya said in annoyance.
"Five." he replied, knowing it had been many more before he had finally given up about a year and a half before he died. It had only been five in this time-line however.
"You can start bringing your crap over after you finish with your day's training." Jiraiya replied with a sigh. "I've got to go meet with the Hokage about something now, so I'll meet up with you later."
"Wait a minute? He's going to be living here?" the apartment manager said, finally catching on to what they had been talking about, apparently having been too absorbed in getting all of the paperwork in order before now to pay any attention to their conversation.
"Yeah, the kid's going to be staying with me. I'll pay an extra pet deposit or whatever. It's not like he'll be a problem or anything." Jiraiya replied casually.
There was a dangerous look in his eyes that belied his tone however, and he was now playing with a kunai that he hadn't been holding a moment ago. The manager who lived in a ninja village and was therefore forced to interact with ninja on a regular basis, especially since several of his tenants were ninja, was only barely cowed, which was rather commendable considering the Sannin's reputation.
"But he's the..." the manager weakly protested, cutting himself off before he said something that would get himself killed.
"The Forth Hokage asked me to look after him before he died. I kinda got caught up in chasing after a certain traitor for quite some time but, I recently got my priorities straight and I decided to come back and keep my promise. If you make things harder for me..." Jiraiya said in a slightly more threatening tone, no longer playing with the kunai which was still in his hand.
Those had apparently been the magic words, as the manager had then swallowed all of his objections.
"Fine." the manager said. "But, if he damages anything, you're paying for it."
With that, Jiraiya grumbled as he payed the pet deposit the manager had taken him up on. When the Sannin was finished with the extra paperwork on which he had been listed as a pet fox, they both went their separate ways. As he was heading towards his apartment to pack, he ran into Iruka. Accepting Iruka's offer of ramen, he followed his best friend and first father-figure to Ichiraku's.
After they had arrived at Ichiraku's and made their orders, Iruka asked Naruto about his day. Naruto grinned and brightly and cheerily chattered at him about how he helped his teammates in the tree climbing exercise and how he had helped someone he called Ero-Senin find an apartment.
"...And I'll be moving in after training tomorrow." Naruto finished
He choked on his ramen when his brain finally processed the boy's final statement.
"You're moving where?" he asked hoping he'd missed something somewhere in Naruto's excited chatter that he couldn't always follow.
"Ero-senin's new apartment." Naruto said in a matter of fact tone before going back to inhaling his ramen.
This was bad. This was very bad. First, Hatake Kakashi had taken a rather inappropriate interest in his student, constantly touching Naruto every time he saw him, and now someone whose nickname roughly translated to Perverted Hermit had convinced Naruto to move in with him. Was the boy a pedophile magnet or something?
The last time he'd tried to explain the "bad" kind of touching to Naruto after he'd seen Kakashi hugging the boy for an extremely inappropriate length of time before handing him a lollipop, the boy had stared at him blankly before he fell to the ground laughing. Despite this clear sign of distress - he knew what Naruto's happy laughter sounded like and that hadn't been it - Naruto had denied that anything had happened to him, and continued to deny it afterward even though he'd seen any number of signs that something was going on. All of the circumstantial evidence he'd been able to gather since that day hadn't been proof enough of Kakashi's guilt according to the Hokage who preferred to give Kakashi the benefit of the doubt where he would have launched a serious investigation had it been anyone else.
Now, someone else had discovered and was seeking to exploit Naruto's vulnerability in this area since they had seen that Kakashi was being allowed to get away with such things. Since nobody else was willing to do it, it was up to him to protect Naruto from those who would exploit him in this and any other manner.
"Um, Naruto, older men don't usually ask boys your age to move in with them unless they want something." he said, trying to remain calm, not wanting to upset or frighten the boy into silence.
His first instinct however was to find the bastard who'd convinced Naruto to move in with him and eviscerate him before leaving his body somewhere public as a warning to others who might be contemplating following a similar path.
"You think Ero-senin's a..." was as far as Naruto got before he fell to the ground laughing.
While Naruto's laughter was amused on one level, it was tinged with serious discomfort on another which was a clear sign that something was wrong and that Naruto was in distress. Apparently, something had already happened and he'd already failed to protect Naruto.
As Naruto rolled around on the ground laughing, rather large man in his mid to late forties or early fifties with unruly white hair held back by a custom hitai-ate with the kanji for oil on it and a pair of odd red lines running down his face approached Ichiraku's. He seemed familiar but, he couldn't place the man's face at the moment.
"Naruto, I knew I'd find you here." the man said watching in amusement as Naruto rolled around on the ground laughing in distress.
"H-hi Ero-senin." Naruto choked out between amused/disturbed laughs.
"What's so funny?" the man asked.
"I-Iruka-Sensei th-thinks you're th-the other k-kind of pervert." Naruto choked out before he dissolved into fits of laughter.
The man stood there staring at Naruto in confusion. It was all the opening he needed.
"Stay away from Naruto you pervert!" He yelled, kunai in hand, prepared to kill the man in order to protect Naruto.
Tenzo wondered for the fifth time how the hell he'd managed to find himself running down a dark alley or as close to running as he could get supporting a wounded shinobi from Iwa. He would have to get the man medical attention in the next town over, as he was pretty sure that the local authorities were looking for the both of them at the moment. The last thing he remembered before ending up in the labyrinth of alleyways he was currently navigating was trying to avoid the knock-down drag-out brawl that was going on in the bar he had been vainly searching. He vaguely remembered seeing a flash of blond and the swirl of an ominously familiar black cloak with red clouds and instinctively putting up a barrier to protect himself about half a second before the explosion.
He had absolutely no idea how he'd managed to survive Deidara's idea of "Art" after that or where the hell he'd picked up the Chunin from Iwa since there hadn't been any in the bar. All he knew was that he had to run, and that he had to get the guy he was half carrying some medical attention soon.
Kakashi sighed as he looked down at his drink. He was making a disturbing habit of visiting the local Jounin bar. Two visits in such a short span were most definitely not normal for him, considering the fact that he'd previously had to be dragged here during a social occasion of some sort and had been able to count on one hand with fingers left over the number of times he'd been here in the last three years. It had apparently now become the place to brood when he didn't want anyone who might be looking for him to find him however.
When had he become jealous of Jiraiya? Why was he jealous of Jiraiya? He knew full well that his own apartment was far too small to keep Naruto in, and he couldn't rent a bigger apartment with his current income and spending habits which included the care and feeding of several dogs who lived with him as often as they lived wherever it was they did when they weren't being summoned. Jiraiya however, had the means to support Naruto comfortably.
Sighing once again, he knocked back his drink and got up to leave only to be stopped by a startled exclamation about the current bane of his existence.
"Umino Iruka did what?" one of the people at the bar yelled after the person who had entered the bar as he himself had finished his drink had raced over to the man and said something.
He paused in order to listen in, as whatever it was that the Umino had done, it was sure to be interesting.
Edited 11-1-12