Jiraiya's fingers drummed against his leg.
He'd been pacing until a minute ago, wanted to be pacing now, but Biwako had just sent him such a cutting look he'd all but frozen in place.
Beside him Gamabunta huffed quietly, his giant toad eyes flickering across the garden.
Sensei and his wife were sitting on their porch, a tiny chittering monkey popping in and out of the realm beside them. Sensei had wanted to search his summons' realm himself, but they'd assured him they could do it quicker, better.
Gamabunta had sent his best to search the toads' lands too.
All of Konoha's allied summons had, actually.
Jiraiya still remembered—
He still remembered being a stinky little genin.
He still remembered that horrible C-rank gone awry, the insane grin on Orochimaru's (then very sane) face as the snakes accepted him, rejected Jiraiya.
He'd known that Orochimaru had just been happy about being accepted, hadn't cared about Jiraiya's rejection at all—
But that's not what it felt like.
Especially when Tsunade refused to let him even try to sign her slug contract.
He still remembered being back in Konoha, a pit of burning jealousy roiling in his stomach, rising up whenever least convenient so that he had to fight to keep the impulse down, fight to stay genial, jovial.
He still remembered Sensei letting him stay at his house that night, not wanting the poor little orphan boy to be alone.
He still remembered sneaking into Sensei's library.
It hadn't—
At the time it hadn't seemed so dangerous.
Oh, sure, there were warnings all over the page—'some realms are entirely underwater', 'most realms are so expansive your body may never even be found by the inhabitants', 'some summons have no wish to enter contracts'…
On and on the warnings went.
Jiraiya had ignored them all, convinced of his own indomitableness.
The ritual had seemed so easy, too, especially given the reward.
He really hadn't thought of the risk at all.
He'd lucked out.
Landed right in front of a group of toads.
They'd been more than willing to take him on—had heard through the grapevines of the benefit of summoners, they said; and he seemed 'an interesting challenge.'
And then he'd—
He'd been back in this very garden.
And Sensei had been there, sobbing.
Grabbing Jiraiya, squeezing him so tight it felt as if he'd puke.
Orochimaru and Tsunade hugging them both, shouting and screaming and happy and angry and so very relieved.
And that's about when it had dawned on Jiraiya exactly how much danger he'd been in.
Sensei—Sensei had promised, after that, that he'd bury that stupid book in as far away a corner as he could get it.
One idiot teenager stumbling upon it was enough, he'd muttered.
Jiraiya had agreed, having spent weeks learning about just how many shinobi had gone missing over the years as they reverse-summoned into a summoning world without a contract, reaching out to the universe and hoping to get lucky.
Every single existing summoning contract was a success story.
There weren't all that many summoning contracts.
When Biwako had alerted everyone to what happened—first ANBU, then telegram and radio and everything else—every summoner had immediately asked their summons to begin the search.
At first, they'd thought it was just Sensei's son, Asuma.
Then—
Two signatures, ANBU said.
Sakura had arrived first.
Jiraiya had stared at her, hoping against hope that she'd come up with the solution he hadn't.
She'd stared back, hoping for the same.
Juro came armed with so many medical supplies he was a walking hospital.
He'd set up in a corner of the garden. If either child did manage to get back, he was going to make sure that, no matter what condition the child was in, the child would live.
Shin had arrived sometime after that.
Jiraiya's stomach had dropped when he arrived.
Shin had come from the Capital, and while time hadn't exactly passed linearly since hearing Sensei sobbing—
The Capital wasn't close.
The boys had been gone long enough for Shin to return to Konoha, to sit in the garden next to Sakura and clench and unclench his hands while she tore page after page out of her notebook.
He thought of following her example, but—
Where to even begin?
He'd considered it before, a way to track those who'd reverse summoned blindly.
Gamabunta hadn't had any suggestions then, and he didn't have any now.
Jiraiya couldn't even come up with a way to track people in his own realm—Orochimaru was still missing, still no doubt committing… acts.
And Jiraiya—
The point is this: if he could invent a seal to find people he would.
But he already knew he couldn't.
So instead, he drummed his fingers and—
The ground rumbled.
A massive ape—the kind whose chest was as wide as the average adult man was tall—appeared, but that wasn't what anyone focused on.
"Asuma!"
The boy was buried in relatives—in his mother, and father, and the various aunts and uncles and in-laws that appeared from beyond the fence—in seconds.
"I'm so, so sorry," Asuma started. "I'm so—I don't know what came over me. I just—"
"It's okay, it's fine," Sensei said, shushing his son as he ran his fingers across the boy's perfectly unharmed head. "You're safe. You're safe."
"I just—and the next thing I knew I was in—I am so, so sorry!" Asuma cried. His voice had been coming out faster and faster since he'd arrived, and now every word was tripping over the next in the rush to get out, his breathing heavy as the risk he'd just survived crystallized.
Jiraiya stared at him.
Asuma wasn't done speaking. "It's all my fault," he said. "I was an idiot," he cried. His hands wrapped around his mom and dad, and they kept trying to hush him, trying to focus on the positives—on his clearly unharmed body.
Above them, the ape's voice boomed, "The boy was a bit further afield than any of us usually live, but he knew enough about our realm to head in the right direction. Smart boy. We talked with him, agreed to carry on the family summoning contract with him."
Jiraiya rather doubted Sensei was listening.
He knew he wasn't.
He was looking around, eyes snapping from one section of the garden to the next, but he hadn't seen it earlier and he didn't see it now.
He looked, then, to the ANBU—on alert, but not yet having realized what Asuma's words meant—then the Research Head—
Hands clasped with her genin team's, carefully not looking at Asuma.
"I'm so, so sorry," Asuma repeated, yet again. "Tell Ibiki I'm sorry, too—I didn't mean to scare him!"
Jiraiya's ears had begun to ring.
"Where's the book!" He shouted.
He'd forgotten to make it a question, but that was okay.
What was less okay that no one was answering him.
"Where's the book?!"
Jiraiya looked around, but the book didn't appear. He went to dash into the library—Sakura followed.
Together, with Shin and Juro close behind, they tore apart the library.
They'd already gone through the entire room once—tore entire shelves of books off the wall—when Sensei and his wife appeared behind them, Asuma still right between them and many of their family members following closely behind.
"What are you doing?"
"You hid the book! After I made the mistake! You hid the book!"
Sensei blinked, then turned to look at his wife.
She unsealed the book—a sealing tag on her person, Jiraiya should have guessed that—and handed it over.
He and Sakura—they'd worked together before, she knew how his mind worked—cracked the book open, working from opposite ends.
They realized at the same time.
"It's the spine!"
Someone—Orochimaru, he already knew, already could feel in his bones—Orochimaru had torn out every page of the damned book and written the seal on the spine, then glued every page back on, hidden the seal behind the bookmaking process.
"I sealed it in my personal library," Sensei whispered. "It shouldn't have been in this library at all. But…"
"Orochimaru." Jiraiya finished. Sensei had, after all, given all three of them personal access following their jounin exams.
No one stopped the Research Head or the Ambassador as they tore the book apart. No one stopped medic-nin Akimichi as he used a yin-technique to burn off the extra glue, leave the seal clearly visible.
Jiraiya had never seen it before, but the writing was easy enough to interpret—the book was meant to act as a lure, draw unsuspecting nin into its pages and into performing the ritual.
"I found it a week ago," Asuma whispered. "I couldn't stop thinking about it. I should have—I should have told someone."
Biwako hugged him.
Sensei looked old.
Jiraiya—
Jiraiya remembered Orochimaru's grin as he'd gotten the snake contract, Orochimaru's tears soaking into his shirt as they hugged following Jiraiya's first return from the summoning realm.
His best friend was driven mad years ago, that much was clear.
It still felt like losing him all over again as Jiraiya realized the snake summoner had deliberately targeted Sensei's children.
.
The first thing that Ibiki did was take a deep breath.
If he couldn't he'd be dead soon anyway, and if he could then he'd need it.
Thankfully, he could breathe.
The next thing Ibiki did was open his eyes.
Summoning realms, Ibiki knew, were massive—entire continents on their own, each continent filled with every ideal habitat for the summons that inhabited it.
And that was why blind reverse summoning was so discouraged, to the point that the only time he'd ever heard of it was when he asked what happened to Clan Head Inoichi's Great Uncle.
He died, apparently.
Almost everybody died.
But Ibiki was alive.
He wasn't underwater, he wasn't suffocating in volcanic fumes or anything else.
He was in a field, near a forest.
He could hear a stream nearby.
This brought him to problem number two: Ibiki had no idea how to un-summon himself without a summoning contract, or if doing so was even possible.
So, he had to find this world's summons.
And hope they were friendly.
And, most importantly, find them before he starved to death, because each summoning realm only naturally held the summons.
Ibiki's stomach growled, and he ignored it.
There was no sign of any creatures in any direction, and even the sky looked different, so he decided to follow the stream.
What else was there to do?
Hours passed.
The forest never got incredibly dense, never disappeared.
Fields were common.
Water never took over, but it was never far away.
Ibiki missed home.
He hoped Asuma was okay.
He hoped—
Well, best case, Asuma would end up with the monkey contract.
Several of his family members had, and it was his great-great-whatever who had first blind-summoned and gotten the contract, so it was possible.
Likely.
Hopefully.
If Asuma was in the monkey realm, he'd be rescued.
That was good; Ibiki might be a bit pissed at his friend right now, but he couldn't be too pissed—he'd done the very same thing.
There still weren't any visible animals.
Ibiki kept walking.
He wondered if anybody would come get him.
He doubted it.
If it were easy to get someone who blind-reverse-summoned, it would be a lot more common to attempt.
The sun was beginning to set.
Ibiki's eyes began to droop, but he couldn't stop—maybe when it was entirely dark, if this world didn't have enough moonlight to walk by.
He only had a few days before he starved to death, and he needed to find wherever the summons lived first.
And then—
He thought he imagined it, the first time.
The second, he thought he was hallucinating.
Could hunger do that?
Fear?
Except—
He'd been doing pretty good, keeping calm. His Yamanaka training had come in handy there.
He had a plan, was keeping with the plan.
It wasn't stars—stars didn't move—but he wasn't imagining it.
Ibiki stopped.
Stood.
Looked around.
And almost as if on cue, the whole world began to glow.
"Fireflies," Ibiki whispered. He knew his voice was awed, but of course it was—he'd never seen so many at the same time. The entire world was alive with them—waves of light starting at one side of his vision and ending at the other, thousands of tiny insects responding to each other's presence.
As he watched one of the fireflies—one of the flying ones, not one of the many on the ground, flew up to him, settling on his finger as he held it out.
The firefly's voice was so soft as to barely be audible; and if the entire world had any more noise, Ibiki knew he'd have to strain to hear.
"You're a human."
"I am," Ibiki said, keeping his voice as low and quiet as possible.
"You've come to us."
"I have. By accident, but—you're—this is beautiful."
"We are," the voice said. The firefly on his finger was joined by another, who sat beside him for a moment, then disappeared. "You cannot leave without a contract?"
"I think so."
"We've not had a summoner before. Let us discuss; we will find a way to help you without risking ourselves."
Ibiki made to bow, then froze. Given that he was carrying the one he was bowing to, grand movements seemed a bad idea.
He nodded instead.
"Let's."
