Three

Hanae

A day and a half and, so far, nothing. She'd taken Tsunade's tip-off and run with it–quite literally–and still she'd failed to catch wind of anything. She was tired, and she was cranky, and she was starting to feel that familiar despair clawing its way back into her mind.

A drink. A drink would do her good.

Hanae curved into the first town she saw and made a beeline for its only inn. She dropped coin down on a first-floor room in the corner, easy enough to get in and out of while remaining firmly tucked away. It was just a bed. Green sheets, green curtains. Just a nightstand and a door separating her from the rest of the world. But it was enough. Hanae slung her pack off her shoulder and dropped it onto the bed. Right now all she wanted to do is to grab that pillow and scream herself silly into it. But she shouldn't. It would be more productive–healthier, too–but Hanae didn't particularly care about doing the healthy thing. She was a trunk, after all. Ancient, withered, jaded, and guarded by bark and bone and brittle. She was the kind of sturdy that most people never would be–kicked off of, chopped down, carved, and somehow still regal and poised even in death.

She made an oath to her friend. A promise to her grave.

And Hanae would be damned if she didn't keep it.

So she didn't scream. She didn't shout, or cry. She just inhaled through her nose, tilted her neck until it popped, and drifted out to the bar.

The neck of her glass had warmed, condensation pooled above her hand and drained in rivulets down the side of the cup. Her free hand studied the wood, ruminating, thinking of the death underneath her hand and the grim prospects ahead of her. All that searching, all that itching to lay the dead to rest. If she closed her eyes and focused on the way the bar felt around her, the echoes in the wood, she could picture those ripple effects spreading out, root over root, to the place where her target stood.

"…throat ripped out."

Hanae stilled. Opened her eyes. Her fingers stiffened, thin sheaves of wood hardening in the tendons of her hands. Ready to heed her call at a moment's notice.

The speaker in question was a man three stools over. He spoke to a man between himself and Hanae, in voices that ought to of been lower than they were. The liquor thickened their ears and pitched the tenors of their tones louder, drifting over the wooden bar to where she sat. "Shit, man. Did they find the killer?"

"Nah. Put a mark out to see if anything popped up. Best we got is that he was serving two cloaked men in a teahouse last anyone saw him."

A sprout cracked its way out of her knuckle and popped up past her skin. Her heart skipped a beat–

and then she caught the way the corner of the bar, where two people sat so still she'd assumed they were just an extension of the inorganic wall, pulsed.

By the time she'd whipped her head around no one was there.

A flash of orange, a barbed jab of white, and Hanae's attention was focused on the newcomers who'd just arrived. She'd recognize the Sanin anywhere: Jiraiya was every bit as unmistakable as her mother. The toad sage clopped in with all the hearty pervasiveness a man of his station was no doubt due, and then a bit more beyond that. He dragged along a little blonde kid in an orange jumper. The poor boy looked miserable to be affiliated with the man who kept leaning over the check-in desk to flirt with the front desk staff. His boisterous laugh soared through the air, head tilting.

They made eye contact. Even from here she could read Jiraiya's lips as he bent to murmur in Naruto's ear, handing him his bag and sending him on his way up to the room. That sober expression of his was hidden away the second he was facing the kid, Jiraiya was all lecherous smiles and over-exaggerated expressions until the kid's dragging feet rounded the corner. When the Sanin approached her all humor was gone from her face.

The rigid set of her wooden fingers remained.

"Jiraiya," Hanae acknowledged, waving down the bartender to make sure she'd get liquor flowing through him in a second. "Nice to see you."

He grunted and slipped into the seat next to her without ceremony. The two she'd originally been eavesdropping on decided to relocate.

Hanae's relationship with Jiraiya was…echoes. It was the way she looked like the spitting image of her mother. It was the way that Jiraiya had tried to look over her whenever he was in Konoha, until he saw the way she changed after she'd made that vow. He'd tried to pull her away from it. To make her see what he thought was reason. She'd fought back with all the viciousness of a girl in her teens, those days.

"See your trip is over already."

She exhaled sharply through her nose. "Probing so soon?"

"Figured I'd cut to the chase." They fell into silence as the new bottle of sake was brought over. Hanae poured. "She's nearby, isn't she?"

She shrugged. The sprout between her knuckles brushed against the lip of the cup as she poured for herself again. Hanae pinched the bud between her fingers and snapped it off. "Who?"

"Funny." Jiraiya drank. Set his cup down with a clack. "The Leaf needs her."

"Do they? Nice to see they finally miss having her around." She can feel his scowl boring into the side of her skull, but she ignored it. It wasn't exactly a secret that she made visits to Tsunade every now and then. But beyond her correspondence with Hanae, the slug sage generally refused to make her whereabouts known to the Hidden Leaf Village. "Glad that leadership is shaping up at last."

"Hanae," he warned. She took a sip. This bottle was dry and bitter. It stayed thick on her tongue, robbing her mouth of any moisture.

She sighed and leaned back. "I'm not telling you where my mother is, Jiraiya."

"The village needs a Hokage."

Hanae's head snapped so fast it hurt. "And the elders picked her? She's not going to come back just for that." And then…Jiraiya didn't meet her eyes. That same sense she'd had earlier–pounding wood, bark-backed tendons–surged up at once. "There's more than that. Isn't there?"

"It's none of your concern."

She thought back to the kid he came in with. He was certainly no Shizune, but to see Jiraiya traveling with someone else was a big deal. More so when it was a genin as noticeable as Naruto. She'd kept minor tabs on him because he was Sasuke's teammate, and any information about the people nearest to her target could make the difference between tracking him down and hitting yet another dead end. She'd been out of town chasing a long-shot lead in the Land of Lightning (which yielded absolutely no results) when Orochimaru invaded the Chunin exams. Part of her felt nothing but guilt for not being there. The other part was irritated: her target's younger brother had been marked by a curse seal, and she hadn't been there in the forest to see if Itachi had made a secret appearance to check on Sasuke.

"Does it have to do with Uzumaki?"

Jiraiya opened his mouth–and then froze. "Ah, shit." He puffed away a second later–but not before Hanae felt that same pull, that pulse of chakra rippling through the wooden inn.

Killing intent.

The explosion sounded out an instant after that. Second floor.

She was up and on his tail a second later, following the red ripples of his cloak. He flickered around the corner and she knew it was bad when he didn't bother trying to get her off his back. Actually–Hanae ground to a halt. Turned around. And, methodically, walked to her room on the first floor. Sending feelings through the wooden floorboards she closed her eyes, focusing on the wood. Four upstairs. The two from earlier that she sensed in the corner. Two lighter pairs; the kid, definitely, was one. And Jiraiya on the way.

Hanae pulled her hands back and severed the roots from where they'd been shooting out of her nail beds. She was nervous. She was anxious. But eager. Clear headed. Within her grasp, so close–she was no Sanin. But she could sure as hell wait until the man who was one had worn her prey down just a bit first before she showed up.

A/N:

Sorry for being gone for a week! I was in Nashville, but I'm back now. And so excited to keep working on this story! As a quick note, I realize now that Itachi is supposed to be 19 in this spot and 21 in shippuden and I fucked up a bit on the ages. I'm too lazy to change it so fuck it we ball