PF

by Lazydaily

F

1. Chapter 5

It takes Jiraiya two weeks to arrive. Two weeks in which Sousuke tries and fails to organize a rebellion, and is killed by the Uchiha's own police force. Two weeks in which Sakura learns every inch of her chakra system well enough to draw it, tenketsu and all—double-checked against Hyuuga Riko, a branch member who owed Kakashi a favor. Now they've moved on to the incredibly thrilling "meditate on your tenketsu" aka "wait for Jiraiya" stage of the training. Sakura doesn't seem to mind, but Kakashi hasn't been this bored since he was a genin.

Kakashi and Sakura are there to greet Jiraiya as he approaches.

Kakashi doesn't want to be here, kind of on principle. He's a bit worried all of this being-on-time-so-Sakura-doesn't-turn-herself-into-a-stone thing is cutting into his reputation for being uh—the worst.

It's a concern. What if people start thinking he's responsible?

Kakashi mentally shudders.

Never be good at a bad job.

However, being here at the gate means he gets to see Jiraiya's face when Sakura takes one look at him and says, "No."

"No?" Kakashi goads, because, oh yes. He might have lived his entire life for this moment.

"He's even less of a ninja than you are! He's not even wearing a forehead protector!"

Kakashi nods sagely, and he can see the conflict in Sakura's eyes of being placed in a situation where she's agreeing with him but she works it out by deciding she'd rather agree with him than Jiraiya.

"Twerp," Jiraiya says, coming to a stop before them, "I traveled from The Land of Hot Water to help you. AKA the Land of Hot Springs. The land where everyone spends all day naked in hot springs. This is the thanks I get?"

Sakura harrumphs. "You're not even a ninja! I don't need your help!" She waves him away. "Go back to your land of Hot Water!" Then, in a smaller voice. "Hot Springs suck, anyways."

Jiraiya stands in front of them like he's taken a chidori to the chest, but hasn't had the good sense to die yet. "Hot Springs… Hot Springs suck?" he says, still kind of dazed.

"You also suck," Sakura says. "You're gross."

Jiraiya blinks down at Sakura, and then looks back at Kakashi with a sigh. "This is your student, Kakashi?"

"I've never been prouder of her than this moment," Kakashi says.

"I can kill you in five seconds."

Sakura kicks him in the shin, and then bounces around clutching at her toes. "Ow ow ow ow." She hops back over to Jiraiya and gives his gut a punch. "Stupid. Big. Bully."

Jiraiya looks down at her, and then heaves a sigh. "Have you been to the Land of Hot Water, Kakashi?"

"I'm afraid I haven't had the opportunity."

"The women spend all their time naked in the Land of Hot Water, Kakashi. That's what I've abandoned to come help your student."

Kakashi glances meaningfully down at the seven-year-old between them.

"Oh, she has no idea what I'm talking about."

That's when she goes for his head band.

Jiraiya subdues her mostly by grabbing her around the waist and heaving her up onto his shoulder.

She, unsurprisingly, does not like this and starts screaming.

"So," Jiraiya says, twitching as Sakura turns her head to scream into his ear. "Tell me what you've done so far."

Sakura twists and grabs his forehead protector, which he keeps on his head with his other hand.

Kakashi tells him about her progress in her meditation, and the curious matter of the natural energy she no longer seems to be gathering.

"Kakashi," Sakura hisses, interrupting him. "If you're my teacher, help me."

Kakashi shrugs. "He's my teacher's teacher, I'm powerless against him."

She narrows her eyes. "No wonder you're such a bad ninja."

Jiraiya sighs, trying and failing to stop her from pulling on his forehead protector.

"That's solid progress. About in line with what I'd expect from someone with chakra control like I've heard hers is—or was?"

Sakura releases Jiraiya's forehead protector, and he sighs with relief.

Kakashi is smart enough to know she's simply lulling him into a false sense of security.

Sure enough, Sakura starts doing seals against Jiraiya's back.

The doctor has cleared her for standard jutsu usage, so he lets her be.

She finishes the seals and grabs Jiraiya's forehead protector, and Jiraiya promptly finds himself holding a random civilian boy, his forehead protector gone.

Behind him, Sakura is holding up his forehead protector in victory, jumping up and down, while an angry civilian woman storms out of the store behind them and shouts after Jiraiya—

"What, exactly, are you doing to my son?"

Jiraiya freezes.

"Ma'am, you misunderstand me, you see—"

Jiraiya stops when he realizes that saying I was carrying around another struggling child and she swapped with your son would only dig him deeper into the hole he's already in.

"I'm sorry." He sets the boy on his feet and then body-flickers away. Behind the woman, Jiraiya's forehead protector vanishes from Sakura's hand, and she droops.

The woman turns her still quite-angry gaze on him, and Kakashi gives her a jaunty wave before body-flickering away.

Behind him he hears Sakura squawk "Wait!" but he does not.

It takes Sakura ten minutes to make her way to training ground three, where Kakashi and Jiraiya are sitting on the grass by the pond and enjoying tea, while speaking of the women from The Land of Hot Water.

"You're late!" Kakashi greets her cheerfully, and easily dodges the rock she pitches at him in fury.

"You should really work on that," Jiraiya comments from where he is lying beside him, taking a rather impossible sip of tea without lifting his head and smirking back at Sakura. "You can't be a good ninja if you have no sense of punctuality, right Kakashi-kun?"

"Right, Jiraiya-sama."

Sakura makes a noise of wordless rage and stomps up behind Jiraiya. He quickly jerks up to a sitting position before she reaches them.

"You're supposed to heal me," she says, hands on her hips.

"Technically, I can't heal you."

Sakura shows what she thinks of his pedantic bullshit, and kicks him in the back. He returns the favor by headbutting her in the stomach, sending her stumbling back, because he's actually five-years-old.

She stomps back up to him, but doesn't kick him. She plants her hands on her hips, and Jiraiya ignores her, taking a nice long sip of his tea.

"So teach me!"

"You've been really mean to me," Jiraiya opines to the pond in front of him. "I'm not really feeling it, right now."

Sakura's eyes light with an unholy rage.

Kakashi sips tea, glad that no matter what happens here, he wins.

She muddles her way through the three symbols of the transformation technique, and it—sobers him up. Reminds of why Jiraiya's here in the first place.

Watching Sakura use seals—it just feels wrong.

Sakura poofs into a faintly grey, distorted version of Jiraiya and then starts stomping off into the village.

She can barely do a transformation jutsu. Odds were against her replacement trick in the village actually working. He drowns his sigh in a long sip of tea.

Jiraiya's buffoon mask slips, and his expression is pained.

"I'm a big poopface!" she bellows, in a warped copy of Jiraiya's voice. "I'm not even a ninja! I'm just stupid and gross and spend all my time—"

"Hey kid, wait a sec," Jiraiya says, crossing the distance between them in the blink of an eye.

"I'm a boy so I like pooping! And smelling my poop! And peeing on Ino's flowers!"

Kakashi coughs a laugh into his hand, and Jiraiya interrupts her—

"Okay, okay. Fine, kid, I'll help you, Sage, you are the most obnoxious child I've ever met."

"Great!" Sakura says brightly, still in that warped copy of Jiraiya's voice.

"You want to uh, change back?"

"No," Sakura says. "It's easier this way when your advice is useless and bad. Hand seals suck and I hate them."

Jiraiya makes a wordless groan.

"Alright, alright," Jiraiya says, a bit of the sannin coming out from behind the buffoon. "Sit down."

He points at the middle of the training ground, and she wobbles a bit as she makes her way over to it. "These shoes are really hard to walk in," she comments.

"You could change back."

"Nope!"

She sits down clumsily, clearly unused to the length of her limbs.

Kakashi wishes he had Obito's sharingan out, so he could remember forever the sight of Jiraiya of the Sannin, Toad Sage, falling on his ass when he tries to sit down.

Jiraiya sits down before her in an elegant clacking of his massive wooden sandals.

"Let's see what we're working with," he says, motioning for Sakura to give him her hand. She looks at him suspiciously before holding it out.

He looks down at it, frowning at what he finds there, and then sighs.

"Actually, I do need you to break the jutsu."

Sakura gives him another very dubious look and then does as she's told. Tea cup still in his hand, Kakashi wanders closer to them, activating Obito's Sharingan before leaning against a tree that gives him a decent angle on the both of them. Jiraiya twitches his hand in acknowledgement, and Sakura, of course, doesn't notice at all.

Jiraiya takes her hand in his and—

"That tickles," Sakura says, squirming.

Jiraiya frowns, and then looks at Kakashi askance. Kakashi can feel judgement in that gaze.

It's comforting, in a way. It is Kakashi's fault, after all. No one else seems to be blaming him. It's nice to have company.

Jiraiya bites into a finger, draws a line in blood under each eye, and then clasps his hands together.

"This is going to take a couple of minutes. Kid, do your meditation exercises."

"My name's Sakura," Sakura grouses, folding her legs into the lotus pose and bringing her hands together.

"Yeah, yeah."

"Old man," Sakura adds.

"That's uncalled for," Jiraiya says.

Sakura remains silent.

"Sakura," Jiraiya adds, and she smiles.

"Jiraiya," she says, -sama notably missing.

Chakra begins to spike around her belly button as she fires a tiny bit of chakra out of each of her tenketsu in turn. Or at least what Kakashi has to guess are her tenketsu—they are officially past the time when Obito's Sharingan can tell him a damn thing.

"How many Tenketsu you mapped so far, k—Sakura?"

"All of them!" she declares proudly, not opening her eyes.

Jiraiya turns to Kakashi, and mouths to him—

How many undamaged tenketsu does she have?

Zero, Kakashi mouths back.

There's that judgemental look again.

One of her tenketsu misfires, and Sakura starts again, at her belly button.

Jiraiya's eyes follow the flashes, despite the fact he doesn't have a doujutsu that should let him see them.

"How many have you done in a row like that?" he asks as his hands start to glow.

"Fifty—" Sakura stops and her eyes snap open.

She surges forward, towards Jiraiya, and Jiraiya is too surprised to stop her when she pushes her hand against his chest a moment before her ridiculous kai rips through the clearing.

When it clears, Sakura is half on top of Jiraiya, who has fallen back, and is staring up at Sakura in faint disbelief.

"You were taking in natural energy!" Sakura says, voice scolding. "You could have died!" Her kai rips through the clearing two more times, like Sakura just wants to be sure. "You would have turned into a statue," she says, eyes round, "and then died!"

Kakashi smiles behind his mask. She's wrong, but she's wrong for all the right reasons.

"You noticed that, huh?" Jiraiya says, voice light.

She slaps his chest at his levity. "If you can't, you shouldn't be meditating!" She turns to glare at him. "Kakashi! You have your stupid eye out, why didn't you help?"

Before he's forced to defend himself, Jiraiya gathers Sakura up in his arms before sitting up and setting her back down in front of him, and says "Kid—"

"Sakura."

"Sakura, I have a technique that uses natural energy. I know how to not turn myself into a frog statue."

Sakura makes a supremely dubious face. "But you're not even a real ninja."

Jiraiya laughs, shaking his head. He checks the marks on his face, and then clasps his hands again.

This time, he doesn't tell Sakura to practice, and she doesn't. She just sits in front of him, hands in her lap, glaring at him.

Her hands start twitching on her legs when his hands start to glow. When his features start to change, he plants a foot against her chest when she tries to lunge for him.

"Still part of the technique, kid."

"Sakura," she corrects, but sits back a bit.

Then two frogs appear on his shoulders, and he positively lights up under Obito's Sharingan. Kakashi squints, and only barely manages not to cover it.

Sannin are so incredibly bullshit, evidence piece number three hundred and forty-one.

"Jiraiya-chan, what the hell have you brought us out fer this time?" squawks the male frog.

"Fukasaku-sama, Shima-sama," Jiraiya says, making a little bow to each of them in turn. "Just trying to heal a kid."

"Y' need our help with that?" Fukasaku continues to squawk.

"Her tenketsu are horribly scarred, can't you see that, you old coot?" Shima squawks, voice no softer than her male counterpart.

Sakura, for her part, is just staring open mouthed at the two frogs attached to Jiraiya's shoulders.

"Talking frogs," she whispers in awe.

"You get used to it," Jiraiya says, holding his hand out for hers, which she gives him after she recovers from the talking frogs.

Sakura's other hand drifts towards Shima, who snaps "I will bite your fingers off, girl."

She stops, at that, and then reaches towards Fukasaku, who snorts roughly. This incidentally puts her arm in Jiraiya's way.

"Sakura, your arm's in the way."

"You have talking frogs on your shoulders," she says, enraptured.

She pokes Fukasaku, who endures it for two pokes before barking at Sakura to stop.

Sakura does, retracting her hand and poking Jiraiya's nose in passing.

"Using natural energy lets you do this?" she asks, voice still bright and airy.

"No," Jiraiya says. "Do not use natural energy, do you understand me? I had the frogs to look after me and still almost died—look. At. Me." Sakura, whose gaze had been drifting guiltily away, does. "Promise me," Jiraiya says.

Sakura hesitates.

"I'm being serious, Sakura, this is important."

"Listen to him, Sakura," Kakashi offers from his position against the tree. Sakura glances towards him, and then back to Jiraiya.

"Okay," she grumbles, "I won't."

"Promise," Jiraiya repeats, very astutely noticing that she didn't actually promise and that children are tiny little liars.

"I promise."

Jiraiya nods. "Good, now let's take a look at those tenketsu of yours."

"First frog," Fukasaku squawks. "What in the hells happened to you?"

"Itachi," Sakura says in a small voice.

"She cancelled the Tsukuyomi," Jiraiya expands.

"Twice," Sakura adds, voice still small.

"I was pretty sure that was s'pposed to be impossible," Shima comments idly, while Fukasaku looks at Sakura with an evaluating eye. "Bring that hand closer to me, my eyes ain't what they used to be."

Jiraiya lifts Sakura's hand closer to her.

"You wanna learn how t' summon frogs, Sakura-chan?" Fukasaku squawks.

"Really?" Jiraiya says. "You ask that now?"

"Good to get 'em early. So, how 'bout it?"

Sakura makes a considering face. "Summoning sounds cool."

Kakashi sighs.

Sakura will never have enough chakra to summon anything much larger than—

"How about dogs?" Kakashi offers.

Sakura's eyes light up.

"Dogs are useless," Fukasaku squawks.

Wow, fuck off, toad sage that is probably hundreds of years old. Dogs are great.

"There ain't nothin' we can do," Shima interrupts the summoning talk. "It looks an awful lot like someone already did quite the healing job. I'm sorry, boy, but there ain't nothin' more we can do." She looks meaningfully at Kakashi.

"Hyuuga Toumi," he says.

She frowns faintly. "I think I've heard of her."

"She helped me, Shima-sama," Jiraiya says, "at the cost of three forges for the Hyuuga metalworkers." He sounds a little bitter, which Kakashi supposes is fair.

"Oh, yeah, her. She was pretty good. Useless, but quite a talented young girl."

If Kakashi's math is right, she was already at least sixty at the time.

"Thanks for your help, Fukasaku-sama, Shima-sama," Jiraiya says.

"If you ever want to learn to summon toads, Sakura-chan—"

The toads vanish, and Jiraiya's features lapse back into humanity.

"That was cool. Can you teach me to do that?"

Jiraiya shakes his head. "The toad sage techniques require a lot of base chakra, and that's not something you're probably ever going to have."

Sakura frowns thunderously.

"Do you want to heal your tenketsu or not?"

Sakura finally nods, and Jiraiya rolls his eyes.

"First, I'll show you," Jiraiya says.

Sakura frowns. "But you—"

A spot on Jiraiya's right hand flares wildly with chakra, nearly blinding Kakashi, and Sakura gasps.

"Jiraiya, your hand!"

Jiraiya lets her tug it from him, clutching at it anxiously with both hands.

"It's—it's burned like me."

Jiraiya gives her a second to figure it out.

She doesn't.

"That's the point," he says. "Now I'm going to show you how to fix it."

He pulls an inkwell and a brush from his seal, and then mutters to himself "probably shouldn't have done this to my right hand," dipping his brush awkwardly in the inkwell, "gotta write with my left hand."

Sakura still hasn't dropped his right hand, and he lets her keep ahold of it as he inks a miserably complex seal on his forehead. Dense in some places and peculiarly sparse in others.

Kakashi'd say it was slipshod, but when it buzzes to life, Jiraiya's entire chakra system doubles—the seal forming a perfect copy of Jiraiya's chakra system over his own, so it's clearly anything but.

That's what we call stupid bullshit, in the ninja business. Kakashi would know, he's an expert in stupid bullshit—his teacher was Minato, after all.

"I'll write the seals for you," he says. "It keeps your chakra flowing right while you do it." With one hand, Jiraiya recaps his inkwell, and balances his brush on top of it. "Do you know what a healthy tenketsu feels like?"

Sakura shakes her head.

"I didn't either. Here," he holds out his left, uninjured hand. A small yellow flare appears over its copy of the tenketsu he burned out on his right. "This is a healthy tenketsu."

Sakura immediately pokes it, and Jiraiya winces a little.

"You'll need to get a feel for what it feels like to—" He winces again. "Right, just go on in, stab other people in the tenketsu with your chakra. Everyone loves getting a juuken to the tenketsu."

Sakura looks up at him, a little chagrined.

"It's fine." There's a small flash of chakra from his tenketsu as it unblocks itself.

She hesitates.

"Go for it, kid. Be gentler." He makes a face. When she looks up at him worriedly, he waves her off. "You're good, it's just never fun."

Eventually she stops, and he pulls his un-injured hand from her grip, replacing it with his injured hand.

"Now, you understand that your tenketsu are made of chakra, right?"

She nods.

"Actually, wait. I don't trust you."

She frowns thunderously up at him, and he ignores her, uncorks his inkwell with one hand, and quickly draws a mirroring seal across Sakura's forehead. It flares, and she shudders.

"Now, here's the steps—they sound easy, they're not. Step zero: know your tenketsu inside and out. I want you to be able to know every detail, every ugly little wrinkle, ever pimple. However it's broken, I want you to know everything. Can you do that?"

Sakura nods, very confidently, in the way all children are confident about basically everything.

"Not that fast you can't," he says, and then taps her hand. "Not a generic tenketsu, I want you to be able to see the one you want to heal. This one. I want you to see this tenketsu in your head. All of the scarring, every blemish, everything."

Sakura sits there, head hung, and he sees the tenketsu Jiraiya tapped flash intermittently as she runs chakra through it and over it, getting a feel for it.

Five minutes later, she nods.

"You're thorough, that's going to help you. Now, step one: pull apart the bad parts of your tenketsu. Everywhere it's somewhere the healthy tenketsu isn't, I want you to pull at it, just like you would a sweater. Like this—"

He says that, and then winces. He isn't doing anything, at least… not anything Kakashi can detect. Not anything the Sharingan can detect. But clearly, it's something Sakura can, because she is completely and totally focused on Jiraiya's hand in her own.

"Like that, you see?"

Sakura nods.

"And then you gotta keep doing it." More wincing. "Keep on doing it, even though it hurts," he smiles but it's strained. "Until there's none of those bad parts of your tenketsu left."

Again, Sakura nods, all of her focus on his hand before her, her eyes faintly unfocused, because she isn't actually looking with her eyes.

"Alright," Jiraiya says, with a bit of a pained sigh. "But you see how it's all ragged, the shapes all wrong?"

She nods again.

"That's where step two comes in. You take just a little bit of your chakra, flatten it real thin—" he pauses, like he's doing just that, and Sakura's gaze snaps down to the hand in her own, "—and then you fit it into those ragged edges, push it until it's perfectly flush with your coils, hold it." Another pause, in which they are both incredibly interested in something Kakashi one hundred percent can't see. "And then you release it." Another pause in which nothing happens. "If you did it right, it'll stay."

Sakura nods eagerly.

"Step 2.5: Do that until all the ragged edges are smooth, alright? Here's one." A pause. "Another." Another pause. "Another." About a minute later, and he nods with finality. "Alright, see how it's all smooth, now?"

Sakura's whole body is shivering in excitement as she nods.

"Now, you might think that's it, but—" with his free hand, he taps the seal on his forehead, the weird duplicated nature of his chakra system vanishes, and chakra erupts from the tenketsu on his hand. Sakura staggers back, and then slams her hand over his, like she's trying to keep his chakra in. Jiraiya's finger was already over his seal, ready to re-activate it, but he hesitates a bit, his face crinkled with a fond smile. Finally, he taps the seal on his forehead again, and his chakra system doubles up once more. The trickle chakra that had still been leaking out from under Sakura's hands vanishes. "You can let go now."

Sakura does, very slowly, like she doesn't trust his hand not to explode.

"Now, step 3: before, we were just filling in the gaps. Now we have to actually rebuild our tenketsu. It's real similar to step 2, but you have to be a lot more careful. Take your chakra—" pause "—pull it into a little string—" pause "—fit it along that nice smooth edge you made—" pause "—hold it—" pause "—and release it."

Sakura nods eagerly.

"You keep doing this until you've made exactly the shape of a healthy tenketsu. They're not special. It's just a small enough hole that you have to push to get your chakra to go through it." A pause, presumably as he continues. "But, you gotta make sure to get the position exactly right. You feel all those tiny little chakra tubes, that all connect with my chakra system at a single point? You gotta make sure your tenketsu is right at that point they connect."

There's a long pause, presumably as he does exactly that.

He… must have finished, because Sakura raises her gaze to Jiraiya's, mouth hanging faintly open.

Jiraiya smiles at her, raises his hand to his seal, and taps it.

Sakura instinctively jerks towards his hand, but no chakra erupts from his body this time.

Yeah, okay.

Sure.

Real quick.

Kakashi has a question.

How the fuck had Jiraiya come up with this procedure? What the fuck?

Alright, alright.

Kakashi's fine.

Everything's fine.

"Do you think you can do that?" Jiraiya asks.

Sakura swallows. She looks uncertain.

"Does it hurt?"

Jiraiya makes a face.

"Yeah," he says after a bit. It hurts."

Sakura takes one deep breath and then another. She looks back up at him.

"Can you—can you show me again?"

Jiraiya takes a second, and then nods.

He does it seven more times, before Sakura doesn't ask him to repeat it.

"Can I try it now?" she asks.

Jiraiya nods. "You can. Do you want to? If you want—"

"I want to do it now."

Jiraiya nods. "Okay. Close your eyes."

Sakura closes her eyes.

He taps her hand. "This tenketsu. None of the others, just this one, okay?"

Her chakra begins to gather around the tenketsu Jiraiya tapped.

"Now, focus on this tenketsu, this one, none of the others, are you doing that?" She nods. "Tell me about it."

Sakura hesitates.

"The hole is… mostly closed. It's—a line, like this—" she draws a line with her hand. "This side, is a little more open. It's… kind of heart-shaped."

Her…

Her tenketsu are scarred into lines?

By the First's trees.

Damn Itachi to death by fire.

"That's right," Jiraiya says. "Now, before you start I want you to see one last thing."

Sakura opens her eyes, and frowns up at him. Jiraiya lowers his hand to his arm, and—rips his chakra system wide open.

Kakashi staggers towards him before a glance from Jiraiya sends him back to the tree.

Sakura, however, is clutching at Jiraiya's arm, looking at him with wide, terrified eyes.

Jiraiya raises his hand to the seal, and sends a pulse of chakra through it.

Then, unbelievably, Jiraiya chakra coils knit themselves back together.

"This seal, it's called the seal of false chakra. It duplicates your chakra system, layers it on top of itself, so that you can pull your chakra system apart, and you won't start losing your chakra to the air. And, no matter how bad you screw up, it can always put you back to the way you started."

Kakashi blinks.

What an outrageous, bullshit fucking seal.

"I had to use that a lot back when I was first learning, so don't worry too much about going too far, we can always start over."

Slowly, Sakura nods up at him.

"Sorry to interrupt," Jiraiya says. "Should have started with that, huh?"

Sakura nods, because she has no sense of decorum.

"Alright, focus on that tenketsu again."

She closes her eyes.

"You still got it?"

She nods.

"Still a line with a little heart at the end?"

Hesitation, as chakra weaves its way down her arm, searching for the right tenketsu, because she clearly didn't have it.

She nods again.

"Now, I want you to take part of that middle part, the line that's sealed closed, and I want you to start—"

Sakura winces, and her fingers dig into Jiraiya's.

"It's fine, you're doing great," he says.

She nods, takes deep breaths, and… there's nothing he can see under Obito's Sharingan.

He's totally blind.

Sakura rocks with it, until—

"That's enough, you got it."

Sakura bows her head.

"Great job, Sakura. It took me forever to get that far."

Sakura smiles a proud little smile.

"Now, ready for the—" Jiraiya stops talking. "Sakura, I'm teaching you how to do this. Wait for my explanation."

If he puts all of his focus into it, he can almost see a tiny little glow around that tenketsu Sakura is working on.

That might just be in his head, though.

"Am I doing it wrong?"

Jiraiya heaves a sigh.

"No."

Sakura hmphs, her grimace of pain slowly easing.

"Yep, yep—exactly like that, yeah, yeah—stop."

Sakura stops, leaning her head forward against his shoulder.

"You still good?"

She nods.

"We can stop."

"No."

Jiraiya laughs.

"Now—Sakura, this time you need to listen to me."

Sakura stops, looking up at him a little mulishly.

"I want you to picture a healthy tenketsu in your mind, Sakura."

Sakura pulls her head off of his shoulder, closes her eyes, lips still pinched in irritation.

"Tell me about it."

"It's… a circle?"

"How wide is it?"

"As wide as the hurt one."

"That's too wide, that tenketsu was deformed. Make it a little smaller."

Sakura nods.

"Now how wide is it?"

She makes a face.

He places one of his hands on the back of hers, and holds his hands an inch or so apart. "If the hurt one is this wide, how big is your new one?"

Sakura shows him.

"A little smaller."

Her fingers pinch together a little.

"A little more—yes, just like that. Alright, now you can keep going."

Sakura nods, and Kakashi once again is left just watching as sweat once again beads at Sakura's hairline, and her head falls.

"Doing great, kid, just like that."

Sakura's forehead is creased, and her pink hair is stuck to her forehead with sweat.

"Yep, yep—"

Sakura's body relaxes.

"Great job."

Sakura smiles, a little weakly.

"Let me see it," he says softly.

She pulls herself off of him, and he prods at her skin with his fingers.

"It seems good," he says, and she nods, a little less shakily. "Are you ready?"

She nods.

He presses his fingers to the seal on her forehead, and the double chakra system around Sakura vanishes. As soon as it's gone, Sakura is pissing chakra out of her new tenketsu, but by the time Kakashi's brain has processed that information, Jiraiya has already reactivated her seal.

"It's okay, you should have seen what a mess I made with my first try."

He had a blown a wall off the hospital, and almost died of chakra exhaustion. It had been in the report. He'd tried to replace one of the main chakra arteries in his right arm, because he's fucking insane. He had passed out before being able to reactivate the seal. He would have died if Tsunade had not been literally on top of him.

Sakura, visibly shaken, nods.

"You don't have to keep doing this today—"

"No."

A faint smile plays around Jiraiya's lips.

"A little smaller, but you could feel the wrongness, couldn't you?"

Sakura nods.

"So you know how big it needs to be? Big enough for you to pass chakra through it if you want, but not big enough any leaks out, right?"

She nods again, pinches her eyes closed. She stays like that for another minute before her eyes snap open, and her hand raises to the seal on her forehead.

"Sakura slow down—"

The seal deactivates, and—

Nothing happens.

"Great job," Jiraiya says. "If a bit rushed." he adds pointedly. Sakura doesn't meet his eyes. "Can you still pass chakra through it?"

A small pink flash sparks from her hand, and Sakura squeals.

"Cute," Jiraiya comments as Sakura leaps into the air and flails.

"I did it I did it I did it!"

"Congratulations," Jiraiya says, finally standing to his full height, and popping his back with a stretch. "Now Sakura—"

He looks down to find her gone, off climbing up a tree to rip off a leaf, despite the plethora of leaves on the ground around them. She drops to the ground and sticks it to her new tenketsu, and displays it proudly.

"I can be a ninja again!"

"Yes," Jiraiya agrees.

Sakura screams and runs in a circle.

Dealing with children sure is an exercise in emotional whiplash.

In her circles, she makes her way to Kakashi, and shoves her leaf in his face.

"I did it," she said, like he had ever doubted her.

"You did."

"Sakura," Jiraiya says, clamping his hand down on Sakura's shoulder as she runs past him for probably the fiftieth time. "We need to wait a couple days to make sure your new tenketsu holds. And in that time, you can't do anything to any of your other tenketsu, okay?"

She nods excitedly.

"Promise me."

"I promise," she says, concerningly solemnly.

Jiraiya nods, drawn in by her tiny, adorable face.

(Rookie mistake.)

"Also," she says, standing up on her tip toes and ratcheting her voice up to a scream, "I'm gonna be a ninja again!" She pulls his forehead protector from his face, and then proceeds to run around the clearing like a chicken with its head cut off, waving it proudly above her.

Kakashi laughs into his hand as Jiraiya gamely chases after her, instead of stealing it back with a body-flicker.

At least this time, he'll be the one who gets to spread the stolen-forehead-protector stories.

But she was a genin when she stole Jiraiya's, he can already hear people making excuses for Jiraiya in his head.

She was horribly chakra scarred at the time! She didn't even use any jutsu, he can imagine his response, followed by everyone shaking their heads sadly at his pitiful excuses.

Man, people are the worst.

Jiraiya leans into Kakashi's side, as Sakura frantically jumps up and down on the pond, stomping on it with both feet, gloriously joyous now that she can use the tenketsu on her feet again.

There is a moment of silence as Jiraiya watches Sakura's ridiculously frivolous use of her extraordinary chakra control.

"You got any plans tonight, oh grand-student of mine?" he says.

Before them, Sakura spins in the air, pink flaring out from every tenketsu in her legs, and comes crashing down upon the pond, back first, having forgotten that although she's done both arms, both legs and her chest, she has not done her back yet, and therefore she falls straight into the water.

She gives out a squeal of surprise, catching the surface of the water with her hands before she falls all the way through, and Kakashi shrugs.

"Read some porn, sharpen some kunai."

Finish the seal array for the Hiraishin.

"Then you're drinking with me," Jiraiya declares, throwing an arm around Kakashi's shoulder that Kakashi would like to claim he could have avoided, but really, really couldn't have.

(The Sannin are still such incredible bullshit.)

Sakura scrambles back over to them, and turns around, whipping her hair to spray them with water.

"I can walk on water again!" she crows.

And that's how an hour later, Kakashi finds himself at a dingy table in a dingy bar-brothel, as Jiraiya slams his sake cup down onto the table with a satisfied sigh.

"That's the stuff," he exclaims, cheeks faintly red, even though there's no way on Earth he's actually had enough to get buzzed.

He really is quite good at being a buffoon. Kakashi didn't even notice him activating the transformation technique.

Kakashi agrees with a non-committal hum, and Jiraiya responds with a boisterous laugh.

"If that's all you've got to say," he booms, pounding Kakashi on the back, "you clearly haven't drunk anywhere near enough." He leans back, his massive bulk only barely contained by the chair, and gestures at the madame of the brothel-bar they're in, spreading his other arm wide. "Just bring over the whole bottle, beautiful." She gives him a smile and a quirked eyebrow, and he laughs. "You drive a hard bargain—bring the whole damn shelf."

She laughs, a low, rough thing, and Kakashi hears a matching rumble in Jiraiya's chest, a different beast from the booming cackle he had so proudly just crowed out.

The woman struts her way over to the shelf, every step a production, and pulls three bottles off the shelves with a smile that has a whole lot of promise for a man who isn't him.

He downs the cup before him, and it burns as it goes down. He coughs as he puts the cup down, and Jiraiya's hand is on his back again, pounding away.

"That's the spirit!" he exclaims, not looking at Kakashi.

Kakashi pours himself the last of his current bottle, burns away a bit of the alcohol in his system because he was in Anbu way too long to let himself ever get drunk. He'll let himself get just a little tipsy, though.

He is with a Sannin, after all.

The madame lets Jiraiya wrap her up with one of his massive arms as she sets the three bottles before them, and she says—

"I'm very flattered, but—" she leans down to Jiraiya's ear, and then whispers in a voice that hides nothing from a ninja, "—I ain't free."

She pushes away from Jiraiya as he makes crushed noises at her back.

"You wound my honor, Madame," he crows after her back, and she mouths prove it over her shoulder. Jiraiya lets out a very honest sounding groan.

"Did you invite me just to ditch me for a woman, oh great toad sannin," Kakashi asks without venom, because uh. No judgement here.

Jiraiya slams down his cup on the table between them, and in the sound, Kakashi can hear the genjutsu.

"Later," he says, in a far more reasonable voice, redness gone from his face, pouring himself an overflowing cup that spills out onto the table.

Kakashi sets his cup down, and Jiraiya fills that one up until it's spilling out onto the table, too.

"Tell me, Kakashi, could you have pulled that shit Sakura pulled with that pond today?" He takes his cup, the liquid sloshing up out of the cup and then miraculously falling back into the cup as he raises it to his lips and takes a nice long drink. "Because let me tell you—I couldn't."

Jiraiya legendarily has the chakra control of a brain-dead rabbit.

But.

You know what they say about legends.

"Could Tsunade?" Kakashi asks, taking a drink, then burning away the alcohol in it as soon as it hits his system.

Jiraiya snorts, setting his cup back on the table with a hearty thunk, reinforcing the genjutsu hiding them from prying civilian eyes.

And low ranked ninja eyes.

Most jounin eyes.

(The sannin are bullshit.)

"Of course she could, answer the damn question."

Kakashi has hit water travelling at body-flicker speed before. He had ended up wet up to his ankles—

The water hadn't even been splashing as she slammed her feet into it.

"No."

Jiraiya laughs, loud and long.

"That's good," he says, topping off his cup, topping off Kakashi's. "You gotta start by acknowledging the little things."

Another swig, slam.

"She broke a jutsu that I couldn't," Kakashi points out.

"You're fine. She needed Toumi Hyuuga and my assistance to be able to perform E-rank jutsus again," Jiraiya says dismissively, waving his hand, the sake in the cup once again sloshing every which way and all right back into it again.

Kakashi takes a drink, relishes the burn.

"You know how old Minato was when I knew he was stronger than me?"

Kakashi's hand stutters on its way back to the table, and his Sake splashes onto his fingers because he is just a lowly jounin. He flicks it away with a quick water jutsu. He isn't sure how to respond, but thankfully, Jiraiya doesn't actually require a response.

"Eleven," he says.

That was—not the answer Kakashi was expecting.

Jiraiya tops off his sake, and Kakashi banishes the sake from his finger as it overflows.

"When he was a chuunin?" he says.

"During his Chuunin exam. You know none of the kids even touched him? Didn't have his Hiraishin yet, no Rasengan, nothing more than the academy three and some D-rank jutsus. Not a single kid could touch him."

"They were genin," he offers.

Kakashi takes a drink as Jiraiya slams his cup back down.

"In the first round, he fought this kid from Mist. You might have heard of him. Kisame?"

Kakashi has, in fact, heard of him.

"That chakra of his isn't a recent thing, I promise you. I could feel the pressure of it from the stands, scared the life out of me, you know. My adorable student, how would he stand up against half a damn tailed beast of chakra?"

"What did Minato-sensei do?"

"Beat him into the damn ground. No weapons allowed, Sage knows why, so he had to use his fists, because he didn't have any good offensive jutsu. Took twenty minutes to beat through all that damn chakra. Didn't let the Kisame kid get off a single jutsu. I could beat the Kisame kid, sure. But I couldn't have beat him like that. You think you could have done that?"

He really doesn't.

"That wasn't all. That chuunin exam was stacked. Cloud was neutral ground at the time, so that's where everyone sent their hopefuls. He got his first Bingo Book entry from Cloud that day. None of the other villages were smart enough to see what strength it would take to do that with their fists. Nobody gives straight up taijutsu enough respect."

As a colleague of Guy, Kakashi knows that all too well.

"But Kakashi," Jiraiya continues, filling both of their cups up until they overflow, "I think I knew what he'd be the first time I met him. Two normal genin and then Minato. Some kids, they're just fucking monsters, straight down to the bone."

He looks at Kakashi now, and Kakashi sees what he's trying to say. He downs the cup.

"What is it you're trying to say, Jiraiya?" he says because he doesn't want to admit it.

Jiraiya downs his whole cup, slams it back down onto the table.

"Some teachers, they aren't prepared to raise a monster. They get scared, lash out. Sometimes they kill their monsters. Sometimes they break 'em, turn 'em loose against the whole damn world."

He leans on the table, and it creaks under his weight.

"Especially us normal ninja. You, me, Sarutobi-sensei. We're strong, yeah, but there's something different between us, and ninja like Tsunade, Orochimaru, Minato. We're… well, we're reasonable. They aren't. You've got a monster, Kakashi. I want to make sure you know that, and you aren't gonna go and do something stupid with her."

His brain comes up with excuses.

She can barely do the academy three.

She's got a chakra pool the size of a puddle.

What can you do with chakra control alone?

But he's felt that feeling in his bones ever since he saw a seven-year-old girl make snake with her hands, and ram with her chakra.

Some kids, they're just fucking monsters, straight down to the bone.

He remembers her kai, a fucking abomination of a thing he felt like a physical force.

He remembers Tsukuyomi, and how utterly powerless he was against it for forty-eight hours when she broke it in a matter of seconds.

He remembers her gathering nature energy as she meditated, how she told it to fuck straight off, and it listened.

"Yeah," Kakashi says, downing the rest of his sake. "I know what I've got with Sakura."

He feels a little light-headed, and realizes he had forgotten to keep burning away the alcohol in his system. He blasts it away, and feels a little better.

"She's gonna be stronger than you one day," Jiraiya says refilling his cup.

Kakashi downs it. Sets it down.

"I know."

Jiraiya fills it again.

"You sure about that, Kakashi?" He isn't drinking, just putting enough of his weight on the table to make it groan. There is pressure in the air, growing with each word, not a hint of a smile on his lips. "You ready to get your ass beat by a child? Twelve years old, if you're lucky? You ready to watch as she shoots on past you, to places you only wish you could go? You ready to watch her achieve all the dreams you had to give up on, because you're nothing but an ordinary-ass ninja?"

Kakashi looks at his sake, downs it.

Does Kakashi have dreams for Sakura to stomp on, by using them as nothing more than stepping stones?

He doesn't know. It's been a long time since Kakashi dreamed about much of anything.

"Yeah," he says. And then. "I'm looking forward to it."

Jiraiya laughs, then, the pressure lifting and his hard mask cracking into smile, slamming his massive hand into the table, making it creak and shake, and no one looks at them because the genjutsu is still holding strong.

"You're a good kid, Kakashi." Jiraiya's hand slams into Kakashi's back again, and he has to fortify his body with chakra to keep himself from going face first into the table. "Tell me about her, Kakashi. Not any of the Itachi shit, I've heard that before, and what a fucking story, I could go my whole damn life without having to hear it again."

Jiraiya takes a drink then, great and overwrought, and this time Kakashi sees the transformation fall in place, in that moment Jiraiya slams his cup back into the table, using his own buffoonery as a distraction for his jutsu.

Kakashi slowly rotates his empty cup in his fingers. "The first time I met her, she was doing the transformation jutsu, focusing on every seal. Which were, of course, Dog, Boar, Snake."

Jiraiya raises an eyebrow at him as he fills Kakashi's cup.

"Is that so?"

"When I taught her the clone, she was trying so hard on her hand seals, but you should have seen how bad they were, her stubby little fingers could barely make them, let alone channel any chakra through them, so I told her she didn't need them."

Jiraiya laughs, drinks, slams.

"And did she go and do it?"

"She went and did it. Perfect clone, couldn't have made one better myself."

Jiraiya laughs, and Kakashi continues. He tells Jiraiya about her first transformation technique, sealless and flawless, tree-walking on her third try, water walking, water jumping, sand waking, grass walking. The way she cancelled Obito's Sharingan's genjutsu with barely a blink, her moaning and complaining whenever she had to do taijutsu and bukijutsu. Tells him about the trick she pulled to get his forehead protector from his head on her final exam, a trap three layers deep, using the jounin that had showed up halfway through to her advantage, copying Inoichi's family jutsu. Even though Jiraiya told him not to, he tells Jiraiya about Tsukuyomi anyways, how it felt to be unable control his chakra, and—

"That jutsu closes in two seconds, Jiraiya. I had forty-eight hours, and she never felt a thing. She broke that damn thing in two seconds."

He can feel the alcohol in his blood, now. He's been forgetting to clear it.

"Let it go, Kakashi," Jiraiya says, hand solid and steady on his back. "I'm here, there's nothing you need to watch out for."

Kakashi laughs, but does as he's told.

He tells her about how bad her scarring was, the seizures, Toumi, and—

"First day she comes back, she snaps off a kai that almost turned Obito's sharingan off." His speech is getting a little slurred. "You've felt it. Does Tsunade's kai feel like that?"

"No," Jiraiya says, downing another cup, refilling both of their cups again.

"No?"

"Nah."

"And then she goes and steals your forehead protector—did you let her?"

"Not the first time."

"The first time she stole my forehead protector for real, she did it in the middle of a civilian market, paid off some civvie kids to scream like a banshee from an alley, and then ripped it straight off me when I went to look. When I got to the alley, she'd left one of her clones, waving at me—it took me an hour to find her again. I had to use my ninja dogs, because she doesn't have enough damn chakra to find any other way."

Jiraiya laughs, refills Kakashi's cup. Kakashi sends it slamming back and blinks against the new burn. He glances at the table, and finds two sake bottles on their sides, a new bottle uncorked.

"Everyone laughs at me like—haha you let an academy student steal your forehead protector. But fuck, Jiraiya. I'd like to see them face that little terror for three damn months and stop her from getting it at least once."

Jiraiya laughs. "I didn't last a day."

"Damn straight." Kakashi blinks, and the room's at a really funky angle. But then Jiraiya's hand is there on his arm, holding him up, pushing him back to vertical.

Silence falls between them, and Kakashi decides he's had enough of this being drunk business as he topples to the other side and Jiraiya has to grab him by the flak jacket to keep him from toppling to the floor. He burns it all away, and shivers as his sobriety hits him like a truck.

It knocks him straight back into his chair, and leaves him gasping at the ceiling. Jiraiya claps him on the shoulder, and starts to speak. "You know," he says, "it took me eight months to regrow my chakra system, and your student is going to do it in a week."

"You had to develop the technique," Kakashi counters.

"Nah," Jiraiya shakes his head, draining his cup, sending it slamming down. "That's Hashirama's technique. Everything good in this world is originally his, I swear on the Sage."

If it's Hashirama's, that means—

"Yeah, it was a forbidden Senju technique. We were still kids—maybe thirty?—and there were still other Senju around—Tsunade wasn't even clan head yet, and I'm sure they tried to to stop her, but have you ever seen someone stop Tsunade from getting what she wanted?"

Kakashi has never seen someone try.

"They almost threw her out for that. And she did it for me." Jiraiya's smile is misty. "I didn't deserve it but she went and did it anyways. Best friend I ever had."

Kakashi takes a drink, doesn't interrupt.

"You ever see her heal someone, Kakashi?"

He nods, lets Jiraiya fill his cup, burns away the alcohol in his system before raising it to his lips.

"It's total nonsense is what it is. She healed a hole the size of a fist someone had punched in my abdomen in the war in the middle of a damn battlefield, because I couldn't have made it out. One-handed, fighting with the other to beat away any idiot who tried to stop her. I've got scars, Kakashi, but not from that."

Jiraiya slams back his drink, and then stares up at the ceiling.

"Before Orochimaru almost scarred me down to the bone, my chakra control was horrible. I couldn't walk on water, could barely perform the academy three. I wasn't defenseless, not by a long shot, give me a summoning jutsu or a mega fireball, and I could do that all day," he pats his stomach with a laugh, and yeah, Kakashi's heard the tales of Jiraiya's comically large chakra reserves. "But my chakra control was, well, it was legendarily bad."

And you know what they say about legends.

Kakashi waits, taking a sip of his sake, relishing the burn.

"But after I rebuilt my chakra system, one miserable, eternal inch at a time, I was suddenly top of my class. No Tsunade, mind you, but well—" he gestures to Kakashi. "Like you."

Ouch.

"And it was hard, for a long time. That, on the one hand, Orochimaru was trying to kill me, trying to burn me out from the inside. But, on the other, I would never be the ninja I am today without him. If I hadn't had to do that. I… lost sight, for a little while. Started being thankful to Orochimaru, forgetting why he'd done it." He takes a drink. "I was so much stronger after, night and day. Jutsu I'd never been able to get the hang of, always breaking or busting from not, well, not the general ballpark of the correct amount of chakra," he laughs, and Kakashi laughs, "and suddenly I could get 'em, just like—" he snaps his fingers "—that."

Jiraiya turns that heavy gaze on Kakashi.

"Tsunade was the one who, well, beat the sense right back into me. 'He didn't give a shit about you, he was trying to kill you, what hell are you doing being grateful? You did this, not him.' And when I say beat, I mean beat. The woman's got a punch like a tailed beast."

He laughs, but his heavy gaze doesn't leave Kakashi's, pinning him to his seat.

"It's gonna happen to your student, too. We're not all blessed with Tsunades ready and waiting to beat sense into you with her fists—" Kakashi thinks, briefly, of Ino, and thinks that maybe, Sakura is— "so you're going to have to be the one to deal with it."

Kakashi nods.

"Could she have done that shit with the pond before? Flashed chakra from her tenketsu like that?"

"No."

"I don't know if she'll even notice, she seems to have the attention span of a tadpole—" Kakashi remembers Sakura, content to do nothing but track her chakra pathways for hours upon hours, until Kakashi wants to rip his hair out with the tedium of it all— "so she may not notice, but even if she does she won't tell you—you have to tell her, convince her, this is her doing. She did this. Itachi just wanted her to hurt."

"I will," Kakashi says, a smile playing a bit at the corner of his lips.

"What?" Jiraiya says, when Kakashi's smile fails to die.

"I can see how Minato was your student," Kakashi says.

Jiraiya laughs. "Is that an insult, or a compliment?"

Kakashi shrugs, and receives a massive hand to the back for his trouble.

"And for the sage's sake, teach the girl how to properly cancel, you moron. No way someone with chakra control like that should be eating jutsu backlash, what the hell is wrong with you."

Kakashi laughs, settling back in his chair. "I will," he says, trying to think of how to do it safely—maybe he could—

"Think later, brat," Jiraiya interrupts him, pouring him another cup. "Now I want to see you so drunk you piss yourself."

"I didn't know you were into that," Kakashi says, downing the cup.

"If you get as old as I am," Jiraiya says, matching him, "you find you're into just about everything."

Kakashi laughs, lets Jiraiya refill his cup.

Three days later, and Jiraiya is kneeling before Sakura, his fingers over the seal on her forehead.

"Now, Sakura," he says to her as she bounces faintly. "You've just regrown some of your chakra pathways. Unlike your tenketsu, if these give way, the results are… louder."

Sakura stops bouncing, her green eyes widening with fear.

"So what I want you to do, if you can, is slow down your chakra flow. Just a little. I'll be right here, so no matter what, I can catch you, but it's still a lot easier on everyone, if your chakra flow is a little slower."

Sakura nods, and then all of the chakra in her body stops. Kakashi shoots forward as she pales, and her legs give out.

Jiraiya, however, is faster, bellowing out a kai before Kakashi can cross half the distance.

It shocks Sakura's chakra into moving again, and color slowly returns to her cheeks.

"Okay," Jiraiya says. "I wasn't expecting have to say this, but—slow, Sakura, not stop. Do not stop your chakra flow. Never stop your chakra flow. You need that to live."

Sakura, blinking groggily, responds, "But isn't that how you do a kai."

Jiraiya pauses, mouth open, and then turns to Kakashi, eyebrow raised.

Kakashi nods.

"That explains so much. Look brat—"

"Sakura."

"You just stopped your damn chakra flow, you're a brat right now." Sakura wilts a little and glares at Jiraiya. "I guess, theoretically, if you only stop it for a moment, it's fine. Clearly. Because you do that kai all the time."

In response, Sakura kais, and Jiraiya fails to suppress an uncomfortable shiver.

Of course, once Sakura learned her kais make other people uncomfortable, she started doing them all the time. For fun.

"Okay," Sakura says.

"Promise me."

"I promise," she grouses.

"To?"

"Not stop my chakra flow too much."

Jiraiya sighs.

"Thank the Sage I can hand you back off to Kakashi today."

Sakura's expression brightens at that, and she starts to bounce.

"Now, Sakura. Slow."

Sakura frowns, and her chakra flow visibly slows under Obito's Sharingan.

"Good, just like that."

Slowly, Jiraiya presses his fingers to her forehead, deactivating the duplicated half of the seal, clearly ready to slam it back onto her at any moment if a chakra pathway breaks and Sakura gets blasted across the clearing.

Sakura squeals, flinging her arms up in the air. She tries to dash towards the pond, but Jiraiya's arm is suddenly around her middle, holding her to him.

"Wait," he says, and Sakura listens.

They wait. The seconds tick into minutes.

"Okay, I want you to do a transformation into uhh, Kakashi."

"Kakashi's gross."

"Fine, pick your favorite."

Sakura is immediately replaced by Ino, and Kakashi coughs in surprise.

"Is this—Is this Inoichi's kid?" Jiraiya asks, glancing at Kakashi out of the corner of his eye.

Kakashi nods.

"What do you think the chance is that he sees this?"

"About a hundred percent."

"Great," Jiraiya says.

"Can I go now?"

"No," Jiraiya says, now holding a squirming Ino instead of squirming Sakura. "I need you to do some more—"

Sakura changes into Hinata, Shikamaru, Naruto, Sasuke, Kakashi, and finally Jiraiya in a concerningly rapid sequence.

"I'm a poopface," she declares in a perfect replica of Jiraiya's voice.

Jiraiya relaxes a bit.

"I think everything's fine, but I want Shima-sama to check. Don't go hiding anywhere, brat."

"Sakura."

"Sakura," he corrects himself with a sigh.

Sakura transforms into a leaf, swaps with a leaf falling from the trees around them, and then proceeds to continue to swap with all of the falling leaves around them.

"That counts as hiding!" Jiraiya yells after her, and Sakura pops out of a leaf off to their side.

"Boo," she says.

Jiraiya bites his thumb and swipes a bloody streak under each eye before clasping his hands together.

"Don't give me that look, Kakashi, normal summoning isn't guaranteed to get them."

"I didn't say anything," Kakashi says, despite having thought it real loud, eyes following Sakura as she runs into the forest and breaks off two branches before returning. She throws them into the air, leaps after them, and then proceeds to replace herself through them as they fall.

As faintly offensive as it is to watch a child perform the sealless replacement technique faster than Kakashi can, it's a useful for metric for how much Sakura has improved from regrowing her chakra system. She appears to be about three to four times faster, and she was already faster than he was.

(Give him seals and he can spin through them faster, but if he has to manually mold his chakra, he doesn't have a chance.)

You gotta start by acknowledging the little things.

Sakura hits the ground, and then the ground explodes with clones. Sakura staggers, because her chakra reserves haven't improved at all.

They pop, and all that chakra goes sucking back into her.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Jiraiya's eyes widen.

Kakashi gets another look.

Not new, Kakashi mouths back.

Sakura tries again with four clones, and then they all throw their hands into the air and start to bounce in perfect synchrony.

"I'm a ninja again!" they all crow in unison.

"Wheee!" She jumps up, flares pink from 361 points across her body, and then runs to the pond (her clones bursting as they run into him, Jiraiya, and a rock), leaping up and then falling down onto the water, back first.

The pond gives under her and bounces her up once before she settles back down upon it, arms spread in every direction.

She starts to make water angels. When she twists to look at the quickly vanishing ripples, she frowns.

There's a flash of light from his right, and he hears—

"Again?"

"I want to make sure she put herself back together right, Shima-sama. My pathways gave mid-mission, and I would have died if it hadn't been for Tsunade."

Shima sighs, sounding very put-upon.

"Well, come here, then, girl," the Shima says.

"My name's Sakura," Sakura says mulishly as she sits up from the pond and bounds over to them.

"Uh-huh, I'll make sure to remember that when you're more than a girl."

Sakura scowls up at her.

"I can't see anything from here, boy," she says, and Jiraiya kneels obediently, leaning forward so Shima can stretch out towards Sakura. Her frog eyes narrow consideringly.

"You did this yourself, girl?"

Sakura looks confused. "Everyone kept telling me I was the only one who could do it?"

"Yeah," Shima comments, looking consideringly at her. She suddenly detaches herself from Jiraiya, whose features snap back into humanity, and hops down from his shoulder, revealing arms from where they'd been hidden under her cloak.

"Shima-sama," Jiraiya complains, staggered by his sudden loss of sage mode.

"Suck it up, Jiraiya-chan," Fukasaku says, patting him on the back of head and hopping off his shoulder to follow Shima.

Shima stops before Sakura, reaches up with her hands. "Come closer, girl," she says, taking Sakura's face in her webbed hands when she grows closer, twisting Sakura's head this way and that. The worst scarring and most extensive re-growing she had was in her head, because, well. Genjutsu.

Fukasaku hops down to a stop beside Shima, looking consideringly up at Sakura.

"Looks like she did a damn better job than our boy did," he squawks.

"Yeah," she squawks back. "Boy, give me the contract."

"Shima-sama?"

Shima turns a baleful glare back at him, and he obediently summons a massive toad, who produces a massive scroll from his mouth, and hands it to Shima, who takes it in one hand, despite the fact it is twice her size.

Shima jumps up and unrolls the scroll under her, landing on Minato's name.

"This here's the summoning scroll for us toads of Mount Myouboku," Shima says.

"But I'm gonna learn to summon dogs!"

Shima twitches faintly at being ranked under dogs.

"You can be a part of as many summoning scrolls as you want, girl."

Sakura's mouth falls open and her eyes sparkle.

"But."

Sakura jerks her mouth closed.

"Summoning is dangerous. It will take all the chakra you give it, and you don't have much chakra to give."

Sakura blanches, probably remembering what it felt like to be chakra exhausted.

"Yeah, that there's the right attitude to take with summoning. You'll never have enough chakra that you can actually get a toad that'd be useful to you in a fight, so don't try."

Sakura nods, slowly.

Jiraiya crouches behind the scroll.

"Shima-sama?" he asks. "If that's true, then why?"

Shima looks back at him, and then back at Sakura. Her eyes fog, and her body stiffens.

"There will be a time when you need us. When all hope is lost. We are older than the entire world, and all that the world has forgotten, the toads of Mount Myouboku remember."

Sakura frowns.

Some kids are just fucking monsters, straight down to the bone.

You're ready to watch her achieve all the dreams you had to give up on, because you're nothing but an ordinary-ass ninja?

Kakashi remembers the dream he gave up on.

Recognition as someone who mattered.

The ability to make a real, actual difference, to change this hellish world they're all trapped in.

Shima blinks and seems to come back to herself. Sakura is looking distinctly awkward.

"Shima-sama?" Jiraiya asks.

She waves him off.

"Can I still summon little toad helpers?" Sakura says, and Kakashi laughs.

"Yes, girl."

"But they won't channel nature energy for you, brat," Jiraiya adds from where he's crouched behind the scroll.

Sakura sticks her tongue out at him.

"So, will you sign our contract, girl?"

Sakura looks considering.

"My name is Sakura," she says.

"Sakura," Shima says with a smile.

"Okay," Sakura agrees. She crouches down, looks around for a brush, and then frowns. "How do I… do it?"

"You sign in blood, brat," Jiraiya says.

Sakura makes a face. She looks at Jiraiya, and then over at Kakashi.

He likes having Jiraiya here, it makes him look like a reasonable authority figure.

"What are you doing looking at him, I'm a better ninja than he is!"

"You don't even have a forehead protector," she grumbles.

"I am such an amazing ninja I don't need one!"

Sakura scowls, and touches her forehead protector protectively.

She bites into her finger, and starts to sign her name in blood, one thumb-stroke at a time. "I'm gonna be stronger than you, and I'll keep wearing my forehead protector."

Jiraiya smirks.

"Yeah, yeah, tell that to me when you actually get stronger than me, brat."

A moment later, Sakura appears out of a leaf behind Jiraiya, and he grabs her by the back of her dress with one hand and pitches her back in front of the scroll.

She glares at him as her body crashes through her clone, dispelling it.

"Finish signing your name," Jiraiya orders.

"Not even a real ninja," she grumbles.

"I trained the Fourth Hokage!"

She bites each of her fingers, and then finishes the contract.

The contract blazes with light under Obito's Sharingan for a moment before going back to just being paper, once more.

"Okay, okay, okay, show me. How do I summon a toad helper?"

Shima jumps up, rerolling the scroll and tossing it back to the toad Jiraiya summoned, who Jiraiya dispels with a twitch of his neck, as Shima lands lightly back on the ground.

"Sakura," Shima interrupts. "Don't forget what I've told you."

Sakura looks down at her and then nods.

"Boy, our work here is done, send us back."

They vanish, and Jiraiya catches Sakura by the back of her dress when she makes another attempt at his forehead protector from behind him. He tosses her onto the ground before him.

"Watch," he says, biting his finger and slamming it into the ground. The massive frog reappears.

For the record, you don't get your chakra back when you dispel your summon.

Jiraiya just has a literal ocean of chakra.

"Again," Sakura says, and the fucker does it again. Two more times after that for good measure, because Sakura is nothing if not thorough.

When Sakura bites her thumb, Jiraiya catches her hand before she slams it into the ground.

"Don't think about what you want to summon. Focus on how much chakra you're willing to give up. Understand me?"

Slowly, Sakura nods.

He releases her, and with a bit less vigor, she places her hand on the ground.

Seals unfurl around her hand, and a partially molted tadpole pops into existence before her.

The loss of chakra required still visibly staggers her. She'll get a bit more chakra with age, but for now this is likely the best she can do.

Sakura, however, does not appear disappointed, and gives out a ear-splitting squeal.

"Who are you!" she squeals.

"Gamami," the tadpole squeaks, as Sakura gathers it (her?) up in her hands.

"You're so cute!"

"I'm not cute. I'm strong. I can beat you up," Gamami responds, flapping her tail and stomping her arms on Sakura's hand. "Who do you want me to kill."

"No one! Can you ride on my head?" Sakura puts Gamami on her head without waiting for an answer, and winces only a little when Gamami scrambles and grabs fistfuls of pink hair in each hand.

Sakura bounces over to the pond, and squeals at her reflection. She poofs into Ino, much to Gamami's very vocal consternation, and squeals some more.

Jiraiya makes his way to Kakashi's side, one eye on Sakura. "Looks like I can finally go back to The Land of Hot Water, where everyone is naked, all the time." Jiraiya sighs wistfully, before turning a meaningful glance at Kakashi. "You okay?"

"I'm fine," Kakashi says. "But before you go, I have a favor to ask."

Jiraiya turns to him with a raised eyebrow. "I think I could stay one more night," he says, looking Kakashi up and down evaluatingly, and—

Well, that hadn't been what he'd meant, but hell.

"You're insane," Jiraiya says, when he steps into Kakashi's apartment. Against every wall are papers, each one with a variation of a single seal drawn upon it.

"It's nothing Minato didn't do," Kakashi says, pushing the door closed behind Jiraiya.

"Minato was fucking insane, and I told him so when he came to me with this stupid-ass idea. Maybe I was wrong to group you into the group of us normal ninja," he says, glancing at Kakashi sideways.

Jiraiya was definitely wrong to put himself in that category, but hey.

Kakashi moves further into his apartment, until he reaches the living room he's totally cleared out, now almost entirely filled with a single seal, twenty feet on a side.

Jiraiya stops at the edge of the living room, and takes a deep breath.

"How does it look?" Kakashi asks.

"You're still insane," Jiraiya says, kneeling carefully down at the edge of the seal, and letting his eyes trace over the full, glorious expanse of it. "But this is well drawn. It won't vaporize you."

That's comforting.

"But it's also not the hard part," Jiraiya says. "And man doesn't that say something about how ridiculous this stupid technique is. Not the one hundred seal activation that kills if you fuck it up, not the twenty foot seal array that also kills you if you fuck it up."

Jiraiya's right, of course. None of this is the hard part. He's tried, a couple hundred times, never gotten it quite right. But he thinks he understands now.

He takes a clean sheet of paper and carefully inks out the seal. Jiraiya is silent as he works, and when he completes it he can feel the rightness of it.

It is Kakashi, in seal form. Get it even a little wrong, and even if you get everything else right, the universe will tear you apart, trying to make you into something you're not.

It's what will bind Kakashi into the fabric of the universe, make him a beacon for every Hiraishin seal he'll ever lay.

He turns to Jiraiya, and shows him the seal.

What the seal had been missing.

It'd been missing that dream he'd forgotten about.

Burned out of him by Obito's death and Rin's death and Minato's death and the damn war and the whole damn village hating the boy that saved their sorry lives.

Peace.

A better way.

Kakashi will drag the world kicking and screaming with him, if he has to.

Jiraiya shakes his head and smiles a little broken smile.

"Don't go and get yourself killed over some pretty words, Kakashi," he says.

"It's the truth."

"Yeah, that's what he said, too." Jiraiya sniffles and wipes at his eyes. "Fucking kids. Go finish your damn seal."

Kakashi finishes his damn seal. That seal that is himself, drawn two feet across in the center, where Kakashi will be kneeling when the whole thing activates.

He jumps back to the edge of the seal to let his blood ink dry, and Jiraiya is silent beside him.

"Let's get this done, then," he says. "I'd threaten not to help you, but then you'd just go and try and do it by yourself, wouldn't you?"

"I would," Kakashi lies. He's not stupid. He's not going to draw a seal on himself that'll kill him if he screws up a stroke.

But Jiraiya doesn't need to know that.

"This is not how I was expecting to get you naked," Jiraia says, stripping off the massive scroll from his back, and then pulling the outer layer of his yukata off, and tossing it away as well.

"First time for everything," Kakashi says, pulling his flak jacket from his shoulders, and Jiraiya snorts.

"You have some extra ink, I assume?"

Kakashi bites his thumb, and unseals his blood ink from the storage seal he'd left on his kitchen counter. Blood ink doesn't keep, and someone can do horrible things to you if they get enough of it.

"Smart," Jiraiya comments drily, picking it up and pulling a brush from nowhere.

Kakashi pulls off his shirt, leaps into the center of the seal, and then kneels there, his hands on its two activation points.

Jiraiya re-adjusts the long bench Kakashi had used for drawing the seal without having to walk through it, and crouches behind him.

As Jiraiya paints the distressingly warm blood ink over Kakashi's shoulders and down his arms, he says, "He loved you, you know."

Kakashi doesn't move, can't move.

"I know," he says, without moving his lips.

"I still think this is insane, but—" Jiraiya finishes Kakashi's right arm, and moves to his left, "—he would have been proud."

Kakashi says noting, just closes his eyes.

"He would have wanted to have been the one to do this," Jiraiya says, as he finishes Kakashi's left arm, and then moves on to his back.

Down his back to his waistband, then finally returning to the center point of the whole seal, a second instance of Kakashi, right there on his back. Binding him to the seal array, to the hole he's about to tear in the universe.

Jiraiya stops, leans back. He jumps away, and Kakashi hears him drag the bench away.

"It's done," he says. "Don't you dare go dying on me. When I finally see him in the next life, he'd never let me hear the end of it."

Kakashi takes in a breath. He channels just a spark of chakra into his hands, and he watches as it works its way through the whole array before coming back to him—some to the seal beneath him, so bright he can feel the warmth on his bare skin, and some up the lines Jiraiya drew in his skin, and to the second seal on his back.

It—hurts.

Kakashi would rather not dwell on the pain. He's been trained to endure worse, and he does. Never moving, just breathing.

In and out, in and out, as the seal array unravels from its outer rim, folding in towards him, up his arms and his back until there are only two seals left: the one under him, and the one on his back.

The two Kakashi seals.

And then Kakashi feels it—

From somewhere beyond the world, up through the the seal beneath him, and into his back.

There is pain, and then there is pain.

Kakashi passes out.

He wakes to Jiraiya's face.

Jiraiya smiles.

"You did it, kid. You're officially the third user of the Hiraishin."

Kakashi pushes himself to his feet shakily, and can hardly believe it. But he lowers his hand to the wood floor of his apartment, and his chakra leaps to the task eagerly, burning a—white fang—into the wood.

The Will Of Fire, written in white characters in the shape of a fang.

Well, they can't all be as single-minded as Minato. Four characters—

Some kids are fucking monsters, straight to the bone.

"Well, I'll be damned," Jiraiya says, looking up at him. "The White Fang lives again."

Kakashi can't help but smile back.

Two minutes and one hundred and twenty three agonizingly precise seals later, Kakashi travels five feet without travelling any of the intervening space.

Kakashi performs the Flying Thunder God technique for the first time.