“Hmp. If I was going to make someone a jinchuuriki I think I’d damned well make sure they had a good reason to fight for me. It isn’t that hard. Hell, if they’d known how dangerous he is half the girls in the village would have been chasing him instead of Sasuke. But maybe I’m asking too much. None of the villages even seem to think it’s a problem that their best people keep going nuke-nin.”
“I know what you mean,” Tsunade said sympathetically. “But how do you know so much about it? You can’t possibly be the Sakura who used to be his teammate.”
I sighed. I wished I could tell her, but she’d just think I was crazy.
“You’d be surprised. There was a time,” I said, “when I was the best infiltration specialist in Konoha. I know who all the players are and where the bodies are buried.”
“Why did you leave, then?”
“Like I said,” I replied. “I know who did what and where they buried the bodies. Root, the Uchiha, the Hyuuga, Naruto’s ancestry and the politics around his treatment… just because the other villages are even worse doesn’t make it right. Eventually there came a time when I couldn’t convince myself I was working for the good guys anymore.”
Tsunade gave me a speculative look. “I never heard of you, and I worked with ANBU for awhile.”
I grinned. “Like I said, I’m the best. I had a transformation technique that I could use to turn into anyone, and a sweet false-memory genjutsu, and after a few years I was a ghost with no past and no real identity. No one knew I existed unless I wanted them to, aside from the Hokage. The transformation is actually what led to my medical breakthrough. Once I got good enough at building quasi-stable chakra matrices to mimic living bodies I realized I could go all the way to full stability.”
She gave me a look that said she’d noticed the diversion, but was going to let me get away with it anyway. “That’s impossible. I’ve tried it before, and so has anyone else at our level, but there’s just too much detail to mimic. There has to be more to it than that.”
“Want to trade?” I asked her. “I’ll show you how it works, if you two will show me how to make a summoning contract. Throw in that chakra-storing seal design of yours and I’ll even show you how to reverse old age.”
She blinked in shock. “Reverse… you’re putting me on!”
I smiled sweetly, and reverted to a fifteen-year-old version of myself. “See for yourself,” I said. “This is one hundred percent real, and so is the form you first saw me in. I’ve never tried to teach it to someone else, but if anyone can learn it you can.”
She insisted on scanning me thoroughly in both forms, but in the end she was convinced.
I don’t know why Jiraiya ever thought combining spirit frog essence with his own body was a good idea. Oh, sure, it probably did all kinds of great things for his resilience, but it made healing his injuries a bitch. It took easily fifty times more chakra to transform him than it would a normal person, so I was forced to regenerate his arm in stages over the course of a week instead of all at once. Jiraiya thought my frustration was funny.
“I’m amazed you can do it at all, little lady,” he reassured me. “I won’t be good for much until I’m over this chakra exhaustion anyway, so don’t push yourself.”
I found myself admiring his chiseled abs and blushing when he patted my arm, and caught myself with a frown. Some part of me was thinking of a night I’d half-forgotten, and wondering what a repeat would be like. Maybe if I was helpful enough…
I shook my head with a laugh. “Good god, Jiraiya, I never even realized you’d done it. You are one smooth bastard.”
He gave me a quizzical look. “Have we met before? I think I’d remember such a beautiful face.”
I glanced at Tsunade, who groaned theatrically. “Tell me he didn’t,” she protested.
“Oh, yeah, he did,” I giggled. “I wasn’t wearing this face at the time, and I wasn’t nearly as good at scanning myself. What is that, some kind of ‘fall in love with me without realizing it’ genjutsu? But it’s been years, so how is it still running?”
Jiraiya looked a bit shame-faced. “No, it’s a shiatsu technique. It convinces the subject’s subconscious that she’s completely head-over-heels whenever she’s in close proximity to the user, without having much effect the rest of the time. But I only use that on enemy agents,” he insisted.
Tsunade frowned at him, but I waved her off. “It’s ok, I can see why he’d have thought I was a spy at the time. And I’m not going to tell you who I was, so don’t ask.” I split off an aspect, and set her to tracing the subtle trail of emotion through my subconscious. Damn, I’d never realized that kind of thing was even possible.
“Alright, but he’s still going to take it off you,” Tsunade grumbled. “Damned perverted techniques.”
“No, I’ll do it myself,” I insisted. “I’m a bit of a hentaijutsu expert myself, so I want to make sure I know how to deal with it if it ever happens again.”
“It better not happen again,” she growled. “Why aren’t you upset over this, anyway?”
I shrugged. “Do you get mad when someone tags you in a sparring match? This was back when I still believed his perverted idiot act and thought I could lead him around by his hormones, so it’s not like I didn’t have it coming. Besides… ah, there we go. Tricky, if I couldn’t aspect myself that little ‘what am I doing, I like being in love!’ thing at the end might have stopped me. Anyway, it’s not like he was trying to hurt me even at the time. I’ve mind-walked a couple of his agents before, and they’re usually pretty happy.”
Jiraiya raised an eyebrow. “Have you, now? So you’re really a Yamanaka?”
I grinned at him. “No, I just seduced their clan secrets out of one. You don’t really need a bloodline to learn their techniques. You just need to be… flexible.”
“Oh, really?” Jiraiya wiggled his eyebrows at me. “Tell me more.”
“Perverts,” Tsunade sniffed.
I frowned at her. Why was she so grumpy about a little harmless flirting? Jiraiya protested weakly, and they feel to bickering like… my god, it was like watching me and Naruto, if we’d never grown up. But how could a man like Jiraiya possibly have that much trouble with a woman? When he’s not being a goofball he can be quite attractive, and with his techniques he could make a statue fall in love.
“Why is someone with your kind of talent wasting her time with that nonsense, anyway?” Tsunade grumbled at me. And suddenly, it all became clear.
Many ninja are afraid of anything that resembles mind control, especially something as seductively appealing as the erotic arts, and Tsunade must be one of them. Maybe someone had tried to control her that way in the past, or maybe she just had a vivid imagination, but either way she one of those ninja who think that that if they ever let someone use hentaijutsu on them they’ll end up as a mindless puppet.
She had nothing to fear on that score from Jiraiya, because he was just the kind of man who’d see using his techniques to seduce her as a betrayal of their friendship. It was obvious to me that he had feelings for her, and I doubt they were entirely unrequited. But she didn’t trust him, and she knew about his skills, so she’d never be able to believe that anything she felt for him was real.
How sad.
“Honestly?” I replied. “I started because the basic techniques are a lot of fun, and I was kind of a slut when I was a teenager. I kept with it because I wanted to know how to defend myself, especially since certain incidents in my past have made me paranoid about mind control. But I made an important discovery along the way.”