Sasuke: Journey

Sasuke had been an optimist as a child, if a rather frustrated one. However the massacre of his family had crushed that innocently hopeful spirit, transforming him into a highly cynical realist with a bad attitude and tunnel vision. He no longer had tunnel vision –something he was grateful for– but he was still a cynical realist, if significantly less cynical where his team were concerned.

Jiraya was a prime example of why Sasuke's cynicism was somewhat justified, as he was a crappy teacher and slightly prejudiced against 'geniuses'. Sasuke didn't actually mind the 'crap teacher' part, as it challenged the preteen Uchiha to think for himself and made his achievements that much more satisfying, but the subtle prejudice was irritating. Sasuke therefore responded with sarcasm every time he saw or heard his new shishou reacting to his so-called 'image' rather than anything the brunet had actually said or done. It was funny and he was actually starting to get proper reactions from the toad sage, so why not?

The first thing Sasuke had been given as a training exercise –after goading his shishou into giving him something to do by musing aloud over how many different ways he'd been turned down by pretty women in the past month– was to find out as much as he could about Senju Tsunade. Without Jiraya's assistance and while walking down a road in the middle of nowhere. Sasuke had taken a moment to glare irately at the Sennin then summoned a crow and spoken a short plea for information to be repeated to Sakura, who had replied gratifyingly promptly –by noon– with not just a general historical overview but non-confidential details of the elder kunoichi's mission records and favoured techniques. Jiraya had then had Sasuke speculate based on that information before ruthlessly dissecting said assumptions and why they were wrong. Which was infuriating but educational.

After a full afternoon of this Jiraya eventually decided to set up camp off road for the night, at which point Sasuke quietly summoned a second crow and sent it back to Konoha with a message for Naruto asking for ideas on ways to acquire information without involving ninja. Naruto's ideas were always original and always worked, though they sometimes took a bit of effort and were invariably off-the-wall.

Sasuke got Naruto's reply around noon the following day: it was a rather long letter wrapped around a packet of sealed documents. The blonde's elegant scrawl explained rather more about the older boy's childhood amongst geisha than Sasuke had thus far put together independently and lots of suggestions on how the Uchiha could gain similar skills for himself. The documents were apparently a variety of letters of introduction that Sasuke could present at licensed teahouses in order to have his requests considered, but Narutop stressed and underlined that any lessons Sasuke learned would be dependent on his patience, manners and funds. Like Shinobi, geisha did not work for free. They also had innumerable ways to test you and make your life hell if they didn't like you and a certain pride in their profession. The letter also warned Sasuke against letting people see his family crest or kekkai genkai: the Uchiha were feared by rural civilians, who were as a rule more familiar with the warring states horror stories of a few generations back than any more recent heroics.

Taking this advice to heart Sasuke bought himself a plain jacket to go over his clan-marked T-shirt at a roadside stall and pondered seriously whether learning things the so-called 'hard way' would mean he would be better at them in a fight when using his Sharingan. If he could defeat people without his bloodline then he would have an edge, right? After all, lots of other ninja managed.

When Jiraya decided they would stop at the town sitting in the bottom of a crater which had a fair on Sasuke immediately decided to put his pocketbook and Naruto's advice to good use. He had no intention of using the letters just yet –he wanted to get a feel for things first– but Naruto's suggestion in Wave that he spend time with a maiko was something the Uchiha had yet to try. He didn't mention his intentions to Jiraya though; he wasn't stupid.

Two hours later Sasuke had significantly less cash on him and was feeling much better. After a few slightly awkward minutes with the maiko –Fuji-chan– he'd realised that she was the wrong person to ask about the workings of the female mind, so instead he'd enjoyed himself playing gomoku, asking about the Daimyou's court and listening to various other gossip. He'd also paid careful attention to Fuji-chan's body language, tone and choice of words and thereby learned a lot about which subliminal cues could put people at ease. Naruto had been right: there was a lot that ninja could learn from geisha. Never mind that the courtly gossip had been very interesting and given him lots of ideas for codes. After all, the best codes were the ones that didn't appear to be codes at all, right?

On his way to find Jiraya after leaving the teahouse Sasuke lingered in the fair, trying out the games while keeping his ears sharp for useful information. It was good training, or at least that was how the twelve-year-old justified it to himself after winning a dozen beigoma at a spinning-top game, a stuffed toy cat as big as his head by throwing balls at a target and six shubunkin goldfish at goldfish scooping. Of course the poor goldfish couldn't stay with him while he travelled who-knew-where with Jiraya, so he bought a small lidded tank for them to be parcelled up in and sent back to his cousins in Konoha. Sasuke then bought himself some okonomiyaki to eat right away and some okaka onigiri for later, as Jiraya was an impulsive or at least hard to predict individual. He probably wasn't impulsive, Sasuke decided thoughtfully as he handed over a few ryou for some menko cards for his boy cousins who wouldn't be interested in the fish, but the toad sage came across that way since Sasuke wasn't yet perceptive enough to notice all the cues the jounin was responding to.

Before locating his shishou Sasuke bought a handful of cheap sparkly trinkets for his lower-ranking crows, a rather fancier but still shiny netsuke in case he needed to bribe one of the more powerful karasu-tengu at short notice, a set of fan prints showing famous views of Hi no Kuni –his mother had collected fan prints before she died– and, just for fun, animal masks to match his cousins' names. After all that shopping he was rather loaded down so Sasuke stopped at a tea stall so he could sit down and properly pack away his purchases. Sealing everything except the goldfish tank into a scroll and using the table to cover what he was doing, Sasuke sipped his tea slowly while carefully wrapping said fish tank in waxed paper, tied it firmly in place with a strap then left, scroll neatly tucked inside his jacket, to find a reasonably discreet rooftop to summon on.

Ironically it was while searching for a back alley with roof access that he found Jiraya: the massive man was being chatted up by a couple of scantily-clad women who were 'helping' the jounin spend his money. Sasuke privately doubted his shishou was as drunk as he was acting but it was still a let-down. What a moron. Genuine or a cunning intelligence-gathering strategy, he could be a little more dignified.

"Jiraya-shishou?" he asked dryly. "Have you decided where we'll be staying this evening?" The pre-teen barely glanced at the women, hoping to convey the impression that he was so used to the older man acting like this that he had long since ceased to react.

"Ooh, Sasu-hic!" Jiraya slurred. "Erm… hahaha! Nope!" Sasuke glanced down at the almost empty decoy wallet lying amongst the bottles of alcohol and scraped plates of what had probably been expensive delicacies. The brunet shook his head wearily.

"What is it with you and women shishou? Never mind –I don't want to hear it." He pocketed the thin wallet, slouched over to the sofa and offered the sennin a hand. "We'll find somewhere cheap on the edge of town shishou, but we'll have to do it now. It's late."

"Yer a good kid, Sasu-chan," Jiraya mumbled, grabbing the outstretched hand but getting to his feet without actually forcing Sasuke to take his full weight. "Until we meet again pretty ladies!"

"You're a dirty old man, shishou," Sasuke grumbled, Jiraya's hand on his shoulder steering him away but not leaning quite as much weight on him as it appeared to.

"I get no respect; brats these days…" the jounin grumbled quietly as they left the stand and the women behind, then abandoned the fair altogether. "Have fun, gaki?"

"I bought presents for my baby cousins, the harvest in Rice Country was a bit low this year and the latest fashion from the capital is for tortoise-shell damask, preferably in blue-grey," Sasuke said lowly. "There are also rumours that Konohagakure is getting complacent, what with how there were foreign shinobi passing through near here a month or so ago."

Jiraya grunted, steering Sasuke to a cheap hotel right by the wall of the crater the town occupied. The Uchiha still wasn't convinced that building a town in a hole in the ground was a good idea; what happened when it rained?

"Who was yesterday's letter from gaki?"

Sasuke glanced at his shishou. "Naruto. I wanted his perspective."

Jiraya didn't say anything else to him, instead turning his attention to the clerk and signing them into a room on the upper floor before ordering Sasuke to stay put and ambling right back out again. Moderately irritated at the man's negligence the young Uchiha stomped up to the tiny room, locked the door, opened the window and summoned a crow to take his various purchases back to Konoha. Once that crow was winging its way across the darkening sky Sasuke briefly pulled on the youki in his seal so he could summon Ajari-dono. Ajari-dono was the youngest and weakest of the daitengu, a genjutsu specialist and capable fūton user; wind was the most common tengu affinity followed by fire. Sasuke then spent a frustrating and exhausting few hours under Ajari-dono's exacting tutelage before the tengu was satisfied enough with the pre-teen's progress to dispel, allowing the brunet to eat his onigiri and fall into bed.

Jiraya wound up keeping them in Toshiya-gai for six weeks, time in which Sasuke learnt the town was named after the archery contest held annually in the town's long, wide central street that doubled as a festival square. Sasuke also managed to improve the clarity and flexibility of his genjutsu to Ajari-dono's satisfaction and the daitengu taught him a new illusion technique. Said genjutsu attacked a person's sense of direction, enabling the caster to lead an enemy astray. All of the Crow clan were very particular about perfecting techniques they knew before learning new ones, which Sasuke had found confining until Ajari-tengu had defeated him with three basic jutsu without ever touching him. The Uchiha had then been a convert to the system and Ajari-dono had promised that once his genjutsu skills were 'adequate' Sasuke would be permitted to study uchiwa-jutsu under Sagamibō-tengu. Sagamibō was apparently a water-natured daitengu who used a special fan to create wind, allowing him to manipulate the weather and create rain or snow. Sasuke was looking forward to the opportunity but currently he was more preoccupied with trying to persuade his tengu sensei that the hotel room window was actually the door to the hall and vice versa. It was much more challenging a task than it sounded.

When not busy practicing his genjutsu in the hotel room Sasuke left the town to do taijutsu and kenjutsu kata in the woods near the crater, or wandered around the town listening to gossip. He also visited Toshiya-gai's most reputable teahouse twice a week, where he learned a large number of gambling games involving dice or hanafuda and even more about reading people. He also learned a great many different ways to cheat, which all the teahouse women were very good at as they often lost on purpose to their clients. Sasuke repaid the okaa-san's generosity in allowing those 'lessons' by doing chores than involved heavy lifting as well as allowing himself to be used as a test subject for some of the younger maiko to practice their skills on. Naruto had made it clear in his letter that goodwill was a kind of currency and Sasuke felt it wise to invest heavily for his career's sake. That this involved learning to resist subtle feminine wiles, how to put people you didn't actually like much at ease with small-talk and occasionally being used as a dress-up doll for 'authenticity' was embarrassing and instructional in equal measures.

Sasuke wasn't sure whether or not Jiraya knew what his student was getting up to while said sennin was out 'doing research' but the man hadn't said anything yet, either about the tengu or the teahouse visits.

Notes

gomoku = 'five in a row'; a boaerd game played with Go pieces

beigoma = traditional Japanese spinning top toys

shubukin = 'red brocade'; type of calico patterned goldfish

okonomiyaki = savoury pancake with a variety of toppings

okaka onigiri = onigiri with a dried, fermented and smoked tuna filling

menko = cards with images from popular culture used to play a game, also called 'menko'

uchiwa-jutsu = fan techniques

hanafuda = playing cards, usually for gambling games

A/N: Yep it's been forever but I've got a new chapter written! I've got a few more ready to type up but it's long and slow as I also have quite a bit of coursework and I'm procrastinating. Never mind all the other plot bunnies nibbling on my brain as my muse refuses to invest in a rabbit-proof fence.