Chapter 10: Of forgiveness and political differences

Minato really had the disappointed-dad-look down. I'd rather he didn't use it on me though.

We were sitting in silence at the living room table. I was nervously shifting on my seat as I was watched.

Finally, Minato led out an exhausted breath and lowered his eyes to his hands on the table.

"Just, why?" he asked, sounding so small and deeply hurt.

And fuck, if that wasn't worse than the disappointment. It wasn't quite enough to make me regret anything. It did make me feel plenty of guilt though.

I sighed.

"You might as well get the people on the end of that bug here to ask their questions as well," I said.

Minato might have caught me off-guard through the particularity of his crippled chakra network. However, I was still a shinobi. And I knew how Minato operated.

There was no 'gotcha' moment, Minato just nodded and a minute later we were joined at the table by Orochimaru, Jiraiya, Kakashi, Gai, Tsunade and Dan. The last two were a surprise for me, admittedly.

I felt a bit like I was before a jury and was doing my best to not look at Gai. His reaction I was honestly most scared of.

"Rin knows too, she is with Naruto," Minato answered my question before I could ask.

"Ah, right."

"Want to start now?" Orochimaru asked snidely, leaning back in his chair to cross his arms.

"Yeah, but just to clarify: Do they all know about Isobu?"

I looked at Minato and I could see his hesitation. He shook his head subtly.

"Well, I don't care a lot for village secrets anymore, so here goes: when I went out and saved Rin, I came back a Jinchuuriki. Of the Sanbi. His name is Isobu by the way," I said and set back my hoodie, letting Isobu's head poke out.

"Hi, nice to meet you officially!" Isobu chirped, untouched by the strained atmosphere.

A fist came down on Minato's table, making the wood creak and splitter. Tsunade let out a growl. A very angry and very pregnant Tsunade. Dan, already in damage control, immediately pulled her into side-hug that seemed to quell her violent tendencies. Either her self-control had improved or that was a very sturdy table. Color me impressed.

"And they just let you run around? Without a medical check-up? Did someone at least check the damn seal?"

I suppressed an eyeroll.

"You mean like, say a med-nin? Or a Fuuinjutsu master? Or maybe a specialist in both?"

I non-so subtly gestured to myself.

"Well, apparently, that wasn't enough. Considering you threatened the Hokage and became a traitor shortly after!" Tsunade bit back.

"Oh, come on. That had nothing to do with me!" Isobu protested.

"Actually, we don't know how much your frustration could have impacted me through your chakra…" I tried to argue.

"Do you want me to bite your ear? I will bite your ear if you try to push this on me!" Isobu threatened.

"Fine, fine!" I laughed nervously and held my hands up.

"Can't blame a guy for trying," I added under my breath.

"At most, the Jinchuuriki situation made me feel just more trapped than I had already been feeling," I admitted.

"Trapped? I knew you had your gripes with certain members of the council and how much better you felt about Minato being Hokage but still," Guy said in an unusually serious tone of voice.

"In the meeting you blew up, the Third was explaining how Jiraiya would succeed him when things clamed down. Him reclaiming the seat of Hokage was never supposed to be a permanent solution," Minato tried to explain.

I snorted.

"Well, 7 years is certainly an interesting definition of 'not permanent'."

"Maybe, having you nearly blow up the Hokage tower would have helped in stabilizing Konoha sooner. Maybe, having another Jinchuuriki would have helped. Maybe, if you hadn't run away, we wouldn't be in this situation!" Tsunade shouted heatedly.

"Oh, come on, you can't be that naïve," I laughed incredulously.

"Danzo has gotten worse again, hasn't he?" I asked Orochimaru before Tsunade could start letting more of her anger out at me.

Orochi, who had been mustering me with curiosity ever since hearing of Isobu, sighed.

"Yes. He has been awfully persistent. And because of the old man's blessing, I've had to keep him satisfied with a couple of smaller projects," he admitted, grimacing at the thought.

"Projects that probably have to do with grafts of some sort, right?"

He looked at me surprised.

"Yes, actually."

"There. Oh, and let's not forget how many of Konoha's problems with its stability have been deliberately exacerbated, if not completely and solely been caused, by Danzo and his shadow army. What a coincidence that the tension within the Uchiha clan is heightening now that Danzo is making progress with his research into grafting," I was full-on ranting now.

"But don't worry. I'm not saying without Danzo everything would be peachy. You know why? Because I fucking hate this system! Absolute power corrupts absolutely. To think that one person, the most powerful person on the battlefield, always knows best, is frankly ludicrous! To lay judicative, legislative and executive power into one person's hand is a recipe for disaster! Oh, I know, technically there is the Daimo, but we all know Daimos don't do shit- And you can't even talk about any of this stuff because every-fucking-person has been brainwashed since infancy to not question authority!"

Heaving with built-up emotion, I leaned backwards in my seat, glad to have finally been able to get this off my chest. There was a beat of silence.

"In conclusion, while I like the majority of people in Konoha, loved living her most of the time and missed many of you dearly, I could not continue whither away in a place that would have me silence myself for its own convenience. Not without Kushina here. Not even to if it means missing out seeing my nephew grow up."

There, all of it out there. It felt freeing for sure. And I was emotionally exhausted.

I sighed as I looked around and was confronted with poker faces. Damn shinobi.

"Look, the long and the short of it is this; I was always compromising on what I believed in because I did not want to lose my family. Put if compliance couldn't keep my family safe, well then why was I still putting myself through this? I can't fight for and from within a system I fundamentally disagree with."

In some ways, arguing with a bunch of ninjas was actually easier than arguing with a civilian. Mainly, shinobi were trained in interrogation tactics. Meaning, they let you talk yourself into a corner. Which didn't sound that great unless your other option was never getting your side out in the open in one piece.

But then again, civilians didn't usually resort to violence to solve their problems either.

I was pulled from my attempt at distracting myself through going over the pros and cons of arguing with whom in what way when Minato sighed. He dropped his head into his hands and rubbed his face tiredly.

"So, there is no chance of you coming back?" he summarized quietly.

I blinked, momentarily stunned into silence by a question that hadn't even crossed my mind. Not in almost seven years.

"No. I'm not hostile towards Konoha, hell, I'd still fight for this village if it came to that, but I can't imagine living here again," I confirmed.

"You know, he isn't totally wrong," Tsunade spoke up, her tone almost casual.

"Tsunade!" Dan exclaimed.

"What? It's true, there were quiet a few points I find myself agreeing with. And that's impressive considering, you know," she gestured back and forth between me and her.

"Considering you hate my guts?" I asked drily.

"That," she confirmed, eliciting a groan from her husband.

"He's still a traitor," Jiraiya reminded her halfheartedly.

"Not unless the old man actually labels him one – which he still hasn't. And I thought that was just because he didn't want to piss Uzumaki off in fear of his seals. Turns out it is because he is a Jinchuuriki on top of that! No wonder…" Tsunade trailed off.

"Oh, well, it's nice to know that I am not technically a missing-nin yet."

…

"Wait, what excuse did Sarutobi use for my extended absence?"

"That you are on a long-term mission to find and eliminate whoever was behind the Crush," Minato interjected.

"Huh, it is sort of true in a way," I thought out loud.

Any trace of tiredness was gone from Minato's face.

"You know who was behind the orange mask?"

Well, that still sounded a lot like Obito. Though I doubted it was an Obito anyone on this table would recognize. I had no idea what Madara and Zetsu had done to the boy to break him.

"I have a good guess. I'd rather not share until I am sure. More so, that same guy has been working on getting a group together. A mercenary group called Akatsuki. This was actually my last stop before going after them directly," I explained as honestly as possible.

Orochi frowned at me but stayed silent.

"You have a guess?" Minato focused in, emotions openly flashing across his face.

I had to suppress a grimace. The way he lost his composure at the mention of the masked assailant was giving me the impression that I had made a mistake by admitting even as much as having a guess.

But I sure as hell couldn't tell him about Obito.

I rubbed a hand over my eyes and exhaled a small sigh.

"Believe me, you wouldn't believe me, and I don't have any proof," I assured him.

He didn't look convinced but relented with visible hesitance.

"Got to say, I had expected there to be a whole lot more screaming involved in this conversation," I blurred out without thinking. Stupidly so.

"Well, saying that is good way to get them going," Isobu commented as I flinched away from the bouquet of glares I received from around the table.

"Haha, no, please don't. I just, I thought you'd be a lot more apprehensive about some of my more uh traitorous convictions…"

Glares turned to raised eyebrows and amusement. Gai let out a bright laugh.

"Ha! My friend, you've never been very subtle about less than youthful opinions. I think even the Hokage knows of your nickname for him and his council," my friend in green explained.

Oh. Well. That was a fair point.

The embarrassment of realizing that my cover hadn't been nearly as good as I had believed it to be, was buried under the overwhelming relief of Gai still calling me his friend.

"Now, that doesn't mean that you can get away with disappearing for years! At least not without one hell of a lecture!" Tsunade scolded me.

I shifted in my seat nervously.

Oh boy.

It was almost dawn when Dan took pity on me, and the group disbanded. Not without prying a seal from me that allowed us to stay in communication. And promises to send Tsunade regular shipments of my medical seals.

I collapsed into an exhausted heap on the top of Hokage mountain, overlooking the village as I'd give my brain a minute to recharge. At least that was the idea.

"Well, that better than I'd thought," I told Isobu, who hummed.

"I agree," came a smooth voice from behind me.

"Fucking hell, Orochi," I cursed as berated myself for letting him sneak up on me.

"And this is why I find your goal to search out this Akatsuki organization alone quite troubling," the smug bastard said as he sat down beside me. Just with much better posture.

I rolled my eyes.

"Believe it or not, I actually learned a lot while I was away. And I was hard to kill even before that."

Orochi just raised an eyebrow at me, clearly not believing a single word. He let it go regardless.

"I looked into treatments for both Minato and Kushina," he changed the topic abruptly.

"Minato too? I know his chakra network won't ever truly recover but he did not look as physically fit as I expected him to be."

What I had expected was that Minato would more or less become another Gai. A Taijutsu specialist. But his gait did not scream muscle behemoth. Or of a very agile fighter. It was just … controlled.

"Pain. He is fighting against chronic pain. His mangled chakra network tries to push through normally, setting his nerves alight with debilitating pain each time he moves. There is nothing physically wrong with his body. But medication only helps so much," Orochi explained.

Okay, okay. A pain suppressor should do it. A permanent seal keyed to Tsunade's chakra to turn it on and off? Doable, but only half the deal. Knowing where and what pain you were feeling in a fight was valuable info. And an uninformed shinobi was a dead one.

So. A seal similar to the one I had developed for tracking Rin's state of health? Yeah. Connected to an abbreviated version on maybe the palm of his hand (to let him know if he has been poisoned and such) and a longer version for Tsunade's hands to keep Minato under control-

Thoughts racing, I scribbled down my ideas furiously.

"Good to see that this won't be a problem much longer," Orochi commented drily as he lent over my shoulder to read my notes.

"I think. If I could actually read the abomination you call notes sometimes," he muttered under his breath, rightening his back again.

"But, that was not my main concern. Rather, this is," Orochi said and rolled out a familiar looking scroll.

Our work on the makes-you-very-hard-to-kill-seal. I should probably come up with a better name for it, I thought absentmindedly as I wrote on.

"I suspect this is the solution to healing Kushina."

My scribbling stopped. My mind froze. Anxiety started crawling up my back and all of a sudden it got harder to breath.

"He doesn't react well when people mention her," I heard Isobu gently warning Orochimaru.

One breath in. One breath out.

She was still alive. They-, I-… We would find a way.

"Yes? What about it?" I croaked out after a minute of silence.

"Tsunade and I worked on different treatments. They seem largely fruitless. But I am convinced that Senjutsu could heal her. It would counteract the corrosive nature of the Biju chakra and because it is already all around us, if we introduce it slowly and heighten the nature chakra level carefully, her network shouldn't lash out," he explained with an excited glint in his eyes.

"But?"

Orochi sighed.

"I couldn't get it to work yet. I struggle to even recreate the experiments you did with nature chakra. It usually ends in a disaster. And the so-called Toad sage, Jiraiya, has not been any help whatsoever. He barely seems to know what he is doing half the time when it comes to his sage mode," he ranted, frustration written in his face.

Okay.

"Okay. I can work with this," I said quietly.

"Oh hell no. We are doing this together. No more running out on me in the middle of projects," he refused vehemently.

I frowned at him.

"That project too. Remember?" Orochi said testily and nodded at the seal laid out on the ground before us. I fought the urge to feel the tattoo one on my back.

"Huh?" I asked eloquently, still distracted by my almost panic attack.

"You left for your training trips each time before I could get mine."

The glare he sent my way made clear that he was less than impressed by my inconsideration.

Oh. Oh! I was such a dumbass.

"My sealwork is not good enough for this. And I don't trust Jiraiya with anything permanent. Or things that could turn me to stone."

"That seems sensible," Isobu spoke up.

"It does," I admitted.

"I'm sorry," I added after a second. "Though it might get difficult to get all this done before I leave. I didn't intend to stay long."

I had wasted enough time as it was.

Orochimaru snorted, which had me looking twice.

"Please, as if I'd let you go off alone. You are liable to get yourself killed. I'm coming with," he stated.

"Errh… But, you can't," I objected lamely.

"Why not, this seems like a good idea," Isobu chimed in cheerily.

"It's already cleared with the old man. Mostly. And this will get a nice break from Danzo, which is dearly needed," Orochi explained his reasoning.

My mind blanked.

I guess?

"I am ready to go," Orochi said. "So, where to?"

I shook my head to clear my thoughts. This night had been such a rollercoaster of emotions.

"First? To Mist. Well, no. To Kusa, actually."

Orochi threw me a look that told me that he was questioning my sanity.

"What a delightful choice of destination," he commented drily.

"Oh, I don't think it is the destination you'll mind. You haven't travelled with the Turtle Duet yet," I grinned broadly, just imagining my friend's expression when I got out the guitar.

"We'll workshop that name," Isobu said skeptically.,

"Yeah… The Isobros?" I asked cheekily.

At Orochi's aghast look we both started laughing.

I hadn't felt that light in years.

AN

This chapter was brought to you by Apple Music Classic. Because, if I had to write while listening to one of my favorite Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto recordings in subpar sound quality on Youtube, only for it to be interrupted again by a fucking ad (yes, yes, I don't use an Add Blocker, how could I :P), this chapter would have taken me another week.

For some reason, this chapter kicked my ass. Just, the conversations? Don't know. Anyway.

What did ya like? What not? Did you also listen to Opera recordings growing up?

Cause I gushed to a coworker about my whole classical music situation, and she was looking at me with bewilderment. Apparently, these recordings of famous Operas that were made for children with a woodworm and a moth explaining the plot every now and again, were not as well known as I thought they were.