Disappointed
“Man who the fuck is this guy?!”
Kidomaru seems absolutely indignant at this assault on his pride as he nudges Tayuya with his foot to make sure she’s still alive.
“Old buddy’s student,” Jiraiya answers, a bit flabbergasted.
Kakashi apparently does not like not being taken seriously. He howls in frustration and finally manages to break free, sending blood and bits of snake guts flying everywhere.
Maybe out of blind rage, or just because Jiraiya is the closest to him, he lashes out at him first.
A blinding light and a deafening sound like a thousand birds all chirping at once pierces the air. Jiraiya dodges it by millimeters, feeling his hair stand on end from the static in the air.
“Hey just calm down for a sec-”
“Oh like hell I’ll calm down!”
He turns to strike again, but there’s a thud as the bottom of a heavy cast-iron pan connects with the back of his head, dropping him to the ground like a sack of potatoes.
Shizune brandishes it as if it was a proper weapon, looking more offended than anything.
“You’re a very rude boy,” she huffs, though Kakashi can’t hear her.
Tsunade snorts, unable to help herself.
“Nice sneak attack. Not what I woulda gone for but points for creativity.”
Shizune turns pink in the cheeks, holding the pan behind her back.
“Thanks?”
“How the fuck did he even get here?”
“More like how did he get here without you noticing him.”
Jiraiya stammers, unable to come up with any explanation other than carelessness.
Just as Orochimaru is about to ask where Naruto ran off to, the boy tackles him from behind, clinging to him and whining.
“What the hell is goin’ on ttebayo ?!” he demands. “Who is this guy? Why’s he care about me? Why’s he wanna take me back so bad?”
The three adults glance at each other, silently figuring out how they want to explain things.
“He’s a friend of your dad’s,” Jiraiya decides to explain it. “I imagine he wanted to figure out where you’d gone because of that.”
Naruto squints as Tsunade hauls Kakashi over her shoulder and Shizune mumbles a string of apologies at him.
“I’ve never seen this guy before in my life,” he says, an adorably confused look on his face.
“Not surprised. He had a bad time when your mom and dad died. I mean, he had a bad time before but-”
“-Ey, watch it!”
-Jiraiya doesn’t get to finish the thought, as Tayuya has returned the favor of being woken up by vomiting all over Kidomaru.
“Fuckin’ hell you’re disgusting!”
Despite him being so livid, Tayuya doesn’t even really seem to hear it. She rolls over onto her hands and knees, coughing and groaning as she tries to get her bearings again.
Shizune runs over to her to tend to her, asking her questions that she’s too dazed to properly answer.
Naruto still clings to the hem of Orochimaru’s shirt, little hands trembling, little brow knit in worry.
“You’re not gonna make me go back, are ya?” he asks, his voice suddenly very small.
Orochimaru pets his messy blond hair.
“Don’t worry. I wouldn’t let anyone take you somewhere you didn’t want to go.”
“Unless it’s a bath,” Jiraiya grumbles, noting the dirty handprints he’s leaving on Orochimaru’s shirt. “What the hell have you been getting up to?”
“Oh Sasuke was hangin’ around with his brother so I got bored. Kimimaro n’ I were diggin’ holes to see if we can grow some stuff before I heard noise. He’s still up there, I think.”
Orochimaru either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care about the mess, but his shirt is probably never gonna really come clean.
Tsunade pokes her head back in, gesturing for the other two to follow.
“Why don’t you go wash up while we sort this shit out?” Jiraiya asks. “You’re filthy.”
“Nah I’m gonna go back n’ help Kimimaro dig holes ttebayo! ”
“Are you ki-”
Before he can finish, Naruto’s already darted back off and out of sight.
“Leave him be,” Orochimaru says. “It keeps him out of trouble.”
They step into the room Tsunade leads them to, where Kakashi is thrown haphazardly in the holding cell in the corner, locked up so that if he wakes up he won’t get any ideas of trying to fuck with them again.
“What do we do with him?” she asks, folding her arms under her sizable bust and glaring at the pair of them.
Orochimaru squints at him, the gears in his head turning as he ponders the situation.
“The safest thing to do would be to kill him,” he says, flatly. “He’s Anbu. If he goes back and tells them about this place it will be trouble. And when he wakes up he’ll probably still be hell-bent on taking Naruto-kun with him.”
Tsunade shrugs, not terribly invested in the boy’s fate one way or the other. Jiraiya, however, bristles up at the thought.
“We’re not killing him.”
They look over at him, waiting for him to elaborate.
“I mean- he was probably sent here on orders, right? It’d be more useful to try to get some kinda information outta him at least before you decide whether you’re gonna off him, right? Why not give that a shot before jumping straight into uh, murder?”
It’s not an entirely unreasonable proposition. They might be able to get some sorta information about things that he wasn’t able to get before he got so angry he had to leave.
Orochimaru shrugs, seeming ambivalent about it one way or the other.
“I suppose if we do that we’ll need to take care of that head injury of his. He won’t be any good when his brain’s scrambled and Shizune hit him pretty hard.”
“Yeah, she cracked his skull. Maybe gave him a concussion. He won’t be having a good time when he comes back around, but he had it coming.”
“We’ll call it even for what he did to Tayuya and Kidomaru, then. And for frightening Naruto-kun.”
So, no murder today. Ah well. It’d be a pain having to get rid of a body anyway.
All three of their heads jerk upward when the door opens, on edge just in case somebody else had followed Jiraiya home.
Fortunately, it’s nothing like that, so they all visibly deflate in relief.
Itachi walks- well, more accurately, hobbles- in, puzzled at what he’s just come in on.
“...Is that Kakashi-senpai?” he asks, hoarse and barely there.
“It is.”
Itachi squints at him, cocking his head in his usual birdlike fashion.
“What is he doing here?”
“That’s a long story. More importantly, why are you out of bed?”
Itachi shrugs.
“I heard noise. Sasuke’s asleep and I wanted to check out what was going on.”
He peers through the bars of the cell as Tsunade enters it so that she can see to his injury.
“How did he find us?”
“That’d be Jiraiya’s fault,” Tsunade snaps, not looking away from her work.
“I didn’t know he was following me!”
“How the hell did you not notice a whole-ass person following you?!”
Itachi stands there quietly, mouth pressed into a tight line while he waits for the adults to stop bickering.
When they finally trail off- perhaps because Itachi watching them got too awkward- he clears his throat so that he can speak more clearly.
“Did Danzo-sama send him, or did he come on his own?”
“Dunno yet. Hopefully he’ll tell us when he wakes back up.”
Itachi folds his arms, squinting as though he can’t quite get his eyes to focus.
“Well. I’m gonna have a cup of tea or something.”
“You do that. Don’t go around lifting anything too heavy though.”
“A kettle isn’t very heavy…”
“Keep being a smartass and see what happens,” Tsunade snaps at him, though everyone gets the feeling she’s not really that annoyed.
She pulls away when Kakashi groans and splutters, body heaving like he’s going to throw up.
Once he’s fully awake, the real fun will start.
“What do you want to know then?” Sarutobi asks, looking so utterly defeated.
“I want to know the truth. What the actual fuck has been going on while I’ve been gone?”
Hiruzen looks like he’s in a lot of pain. Maybe he is. This can’t be easy for him to handle, but Jiraiya can’t afford to tiptoe around this issue.
There’s a tense silence while his old mentor paces around his office, looking at everything in the room besides him.
“It sounds like you’ve spoken to Orochimaru already.”
…it’s probably best to get that particular elephant out of the room as fast as possible.
“Yeah. Well, he found me, anyway. It’s a long story, I won’t bother you with the details.”
“But what did he want? After all that time, why would he reach out to you now?”
Jiraiya decides the best thing to do in this situation is to lie.
“Oh, he’d just gotten himself into trouble and needed someone to bail him out. I guess he couldn’t think of anyone else he hasn’t burned bridges with.”
He leans against one of the walls, putting more distance between him and his former teacher.
“I just wanna try to make sense of everything. I know I’ve been gone for a long time, but I didn’t expect to come back to some civil war bullshit. Especially with the guys who make up most of the police force.”
“You don’t understand-”
“Enlighten me then. I’ve got all day.”
Jiraiya feels close to throwing up from disgust. It’s getting harder to keep his composure the longer Sarutobi gives him the runaround.
Hiruzen sits at his desk, motioning for Jiraiya to do the same- which Jiraiya declines. He stays standing, staring him down as though he could figure the situation out just by looking.
Well. He’s not being particularly forthcoming so it looks like he’ll have to encourage him.
“Who was Shisui?”
Sarutobi looks stunned- obviously he didn’t expect that name to come up.
“...What?”
“I thought I was clear. Uchiha Shisui- who was he? More importantly, why’s he dead all of a sudden?”
Sarutobi rubs his forehead to stave off a brewing headache.
“If you’re asking, I assume you’ve already heard.”
“I have. But I wanna hear it from you.”
Another sigh.
(This isn’t going very well.)
“...Things have been tense between the Uchiha and the village for as long as I can remember. After the uh- incident with the Kyuubi- after Minato died- well, it got worse. A lot worse.”
Jiraiya nods, gesturing with his hand for him to keep talking.
“I hoped that we could come to some kind of agreement. Shisui was very bright- we had hoped that he and Itachi would be able to be the bridge between their clan and the village.”
“They’re kids.”
“I know that. It wasn’t fair to place that burden on their shoulders, but we weren’t left with a choice. The adults in the clan aren’t willing to work with us anymore- not when things went so sour after the attack.”
Sarutobi runs a hand through his thinning hair, slumping over the papers scattered across his desk.
“He and Itachi were…well, different. They wanted to help calm things down. Especially Itachi- it wasn’t fair to rely on them, I know that. We simply didn’t have another choice.”
“Didn’t have another choice, or didn’t wanna look for another choice?”
“What-”
“-I find it really hard to believe that you really didn’t have another choice besides throwing this shit on a couple of kids and saying hey you, fix this. ”
Hiruzen is beyond irritated now.
“We had been trying for so long. Things were actually going well until the attack happened. We hit a stalemate after that, and none of the adults of the clan were willing to speak to us after that.”
“Why though? What the fuck happened that you couldn’t get a single person over sixteen to work with you?”
“You don’t understand the position I’ve been put in. It was a desperate situation, and they were the only ones we could rely on.”
“Seems like it worked out real well for you,” Jiraiya says, more sarcastically than he meant to.
Sarutobi elects to ignore that.
“In the end, I suppose it’s understandable Itachi ran away. It was a lot to place on his shoulders, especially after Shisui died.”
“You still aren’t telling me how a teenager wound up dead outta nowhere.”
“His clan seems to believe Itachi had something to do with it-”
“Yeah yeah I know the story. I wasn’t asking about that. I was asking about what really happened.”
Jiraiya is pretty sure he already knows- and Hiruzen’s stubbornness is just confirming his suspicion. But he wants to at least get his side of things first. At least then maybe he can understand the thought process. Maybe.
“Am I right to assume he was murdered- but not by the kid?”
“I-”
“-Am I right to assume Danzo had something to do with it? And that he’s pinning the blame on a convenient scapegoat so that nobody looks at him too close? Would that be an accurate assessment of the situation?”
Sarutobi looks like he’s been slapped across the face, which tells Jiraiya that he was right.
“What the hell happened to you?” he asks, unable to comprehend what he’s walked into. “How could you just…sit by and let this happen? You had to have known. You fucking run this place, there has to have been another way!”
When he’s again greeted by a stubborn silence, Jiraiya turns on his heel, figuring he needs to leave before he does something he might regret.
“I’m disappointed,” is the last thing he says, before he leaves the office.
Before he slams the door shut behind him, he thinks he can hear Sarutobi say something along the lines of so am I.
He’s heard about enough. And he’s done about everything he’s planned on getting done anyway. It’s best to see himself out before he catches a nasty case of falling down the stairs. Or maybe the dreaded mysteriously hung himself despite not actually being suicidal at the moment.
He'll figure out a better line of communication later. For now, this village isn't safe anymore.
For anyone.