Chapter 35
Is this real Training?
-
Naruto swallowed hard and looked around the room at the gathering of adults who had, somehow, become the arbiters of his romantic future. The tatami creaked when he shifted his weight, and the pressure of so many expectant eyes made the walls feel like they were leaning in toward him. Finally he exhaled and threw his hands up.
“So… how are we supposed to do this? Are you elders just going to decide everything?”
He directed the accusation squarely at his father.
Minato raised both hands in immediate surrender, blond hair catching the lantern-light like he was haloed.
“Who you decide to court is entirely up to you. Truly. I’m not here to make choices for you.” His eyes softened, guilt around the edges like old bruises. “I’m just here in case you want help negotiating with Hiashi… and to explain things I would have explained ages ago had I been around.”
He looked like he had several explanations stacked behind his teeth.
Before Naruto could push on that, Jiraiya cleared his throat dramatically and produced a slim, leatherbound journal from inside his robe like a stage magician revealing a dove.
“BUT FIRST,” he announced, “we need to figure out what you want.”
Naruto blinked at the journal and promptly felt the blood drain from his face.
“Hey, that’s mine! Where did you...give that back!” He lunged, but something unseen pressed him flat to the floorboards with humiliating force.
Tora flicked her tail lazily from her place atop the futon cushion, one paw glowing faintly.
“Gravity seal. Sit still.”
Naruto felt the weight of an unseen Akamichi press down on him and he was obliged to fall to the ground. Flattened as he was on his apartment floor, he could see a sealing array drawn on the wooden boards.
“You cat devil! When did you have time to set this up?!”
It was a rather dumb question. For all he knew, they'd been here all day.
"Discussions on courtship can get heated. I come prepared." said Tora. "As you were saying, lord Jiraiya?"
Jiraiya flipped open the journal, ignoring him completely. He cleared his throat like a man preparing to deliver an important speech.
“Let’s begin,” he said cheerfully, and started reading aloud.
He opened to the first marked page.
“Entry… uh… unclear date. Handwriting’s atrocious. Ahem. I'm starting to think Hiashi's threat of sicking matchmakers on me was serious. The problem is I don't know if I wnat to - Date? Court? – Hinata or Sakura. Or even if I should right now. I'm not exactly well off enough to provide for a wife and children."
Naruto lunged again, but Tora's seal held.
Hinata made a tiny squeak.
Jiraiya continued, delighted:
"I'm thinking about talking to Sasuke or even my dad about this stuff. They know more about clan politics and how the marriage thing is done. Respectively. Maybe Itachi's a good bet? No. He's been a fugitive for so long, for all I know he's never dealt with stuff like this."
He turned the page.
"Oh hey! He can organize his thoughts. Side by side pages comparing his options." Jiraiya boasted.
His dad, who had been reading over their sensei's shoulder, took over.
“‘Okay, so if I marry Sakura, that means we fight together, we’d raise strong kids, but she’d probably punch me a lot, which is fine, I guess, because she’s really strong and also smart and also— it seems he didn't finish his thought.’”
“‘But Hinata… Hinata is soft. But strong-soft. But also soft-soft. She believes in me even when I don’t believe in me. And when she looks at me my stomach does that thing—’”
Hinata was now covering her entire face. Even her ears were red.
Jiraiya smirked and moved on.
“‘Am I supposed to marry for politics? If so I think Hinata would be a good political choice too. The Hyūga are important. Everyone says so. If I marry her it keeps peace with the clans, maybe? I did promise Neji to help do away with the caged bird thingy, and being the next clan head would help me keep my promise."
"All very good points." Hiashi hummed, though his eyes were firmly affixed to the ceiling.
Jiraiya took over again with the next page.
"Am I supposed to marry for their family? Hiashi is cool. Scary cool. But Sakura's parents are nice, and fun. Hilarious, honestly. But if I’m supposed to marry for love, then I don’t know what to do. They’re both amazing. They’re both kind. They’re both beautiful. They'd both be amazing wives and mothers. I don’t know how to pick. If I choose the wrong person I’ll ruin everything forever. Am I supposed to think about politics, family, or love?’”
“Love,” Minato said firmly.
“Love,” the Daimyo’s wife echoed, as if declaring a royal decree.
“Definitely love,” Hiashi said with the severity of a death sentence.
They all answered at once, almost before Jiraiya finished reading aloud Naruto's internal question.
Naruto, still glued to the floor, whimpered.
Jiraiya leaned down and tapped the journal.
“Kid, I gotta hand it to you. This is some quality emotional meltdown.”
Naruto wanted the earth to swallow him. He chanced a glance at Hinata and found her still covering her face, shoulders trembling. He couldn't tell if she was laughing – he couldn't imagine she would be, she never laughed at other people's misfortune – was trying not to cry of if she was fighting the urge to flee and hide forever.
Mercifully—shockingly—Jiraiya did not read the last section. The part wher he wrote down his insecurites about sex, fatherhood, and the increasingly intrusive fantasies that had been chasing Naruto’s brain like feral dogs for weeks. Including one he knew would remain a fantasy, the one about marrying both of them.
Jiraiya simply snapped the journal shut. Tora released the gravity seal, and Naruto shot upright, face red, fists clenched, looking one second away from summoning a thousand shadow clones just to dig himself a crater to live in.
“Well,” Hiashi said, tone diplomatic but layered with granite. “It seems courtship is off the table until we settle these issues.”
He gestured vaguely to the journal as if it were a diplomatic incident.
“And I am certain you would prefer to resolve such matters without an audience.”
Naruto nodded so hard he nearly bowed.
“Then I leave you in the capable hands of these four.” Hiashi inclined his head toward Minato, Jiraiya, Tora and the Daimyo’s wife. “My door is open to you, Naruto. A privilege I do not extend lightly.”
He turned with the grace of a man exiting a battlefield. Hinata, still pink to the ears, whispered a tiny “bye” before following her father out.
The door slid shut and silence descended like a falling shuriken.
Jiraiya clapped his hands.
“Okay! We can solve this!”
Naruto stared at him. Jiraiya continued with renewed bravado:
“With Tora here—a master of romance—and me, the undisputed master of seduction, you are in the best possible hands.”
Naruto and Minato's heads snapped in unison towards one another for instant eye contact. They both burst into laughter. It was the kind of laughter that bent them forward and made Jiraiya puff up indignantly and Tora flick her tail in disapproval. The father and son nearly fell over and had to support each other to stay upright.
"Master of seduction he says!" Minato cried.
"Perverted peeeping Tom lives too much in his books." Naruto added.
Their cheer was interrupted when Madam Shijimi stood gracefully, smoothing her robes, and cleared her throat.
“When the choice is made, I will begin arranging proper dates. Suitable venues, appropriate traditions, symbolic offerings.” She bowed with courtly precision. “I will leave the… emotional chaos to the gentlemen who have experience with such.”
She exited with all the serenity that the rest of the room violently lacked.
Naruto rubbed his face with both hands and groaned.
Jiraiya patted his shoulder.
“Don’t worry, kid. By the end of this, you’ll definitely know who you want to marry. I'll have something wipped up by tomorrow. Just gotta combine my head with Tora's here.”
Right. The cat was still here.
-
Jiraiya waited outside the quiet academy building, hands tucked into his sleeves and hair stirring in the mild morning wind. The place looked almost unnatural without the usual stream of children racing between classrooms. Weekends always made the courtyard feel hollow, but today that emptiness served his purposes well. He had, through some combination of negotiation, persuasion, and outright gambling on Hiashi’s surprising sense of humor, managed to pull Minato and Iruka into this scheme of his. Tora had been the one to tip the balance. It was difficult to refuse a creature who could glare with such imperious expectation.
Naruto finally arrived, dragging his feet like he was approaching an execution ground. His shoulders hunched low, and the look he shot Jiraiya made it clear the boy would rather have faced another chakra beast than this so-called training.
Jiraiya greeted him with a cheery wave he absolutely did not feel.
“Before we start, let me make sure I have this straight. You handled the four-tails transformation on your own?”
Naruto crossed his arms and nodded, still suspicious.
“Yeah. I did.”
“And you did it by keeping a few clones on standby, each holding a positive memory to snap you out of it?”
Naruto nodded again, less confidently this time.
"I didn't exactly plan it that way, the clone spontaneously decided to do that in case I needed morale. He didn't have the four tails transformation in mind when he did it. But it worled." the boy explained.
“Well then,” Jiraiya said brightly, “today we are going to use that same principle. Except we’re going to refine it. Right now I just need two clones.”
Naruto raised an eyebrow but created them without protest. The two copies stood blinking in confusion, but neither had time to ask questions before Jiraiya seized one by the shoulder and steered him toward the building.
He pushed open the door to Mizuki’s old office, where Minato waited with his arms folded behind his back, every bit the composed father. The clone stumbled inside, and Minato offered a warm, steady smile.
“Hello, son,” he said. “It is time I told you everything about your mother.”
Jiraiya shut the door before the clone beside him could hear anymore.
Recognition dawned in the clones expression and Jiraiya could tell his apprentice understood his plan. Or at least part of it.
Jiraiya marched him down the hall to Iruka’s old office. Inside, Sakura and Hinata sat at opposite ends of a short couch, both stiff-backed, legs crossed, arms folded, and facing anywhere except toward each other. The tension between them hovered like a guillotine suspended by a thread. It was, in Jiraiya’s professional opinion, exactly what the exercise required.
Naruto stepped through the doorway and stared at them with dawning horror.
“I thought this was going to be nine-tails training. Not more of this romance trouble.”
“It is both,” Jiraiya said, tapping him on the back to force him forward. “Trust me.”
He could tell Naruto did not trust him. At all. But he shuffled toward the couch anyway and sat between the two girls like a man lowering himself into a pit of snakes. Sakura’s foot twitched. Hinata’s breath hitched. Naruto’s eyes darted desperately toward the door.
Jiraiya ignored all of it. He placed a large sealing scroll on the floor with theatrical care and unrolled it.
Naruto opened his mouth to ask what that was for.
At that exact moment both girls leaned in toward him and kissed his cheeks at the same time.
The poor boy froze. Then he melted into a sputtering, incoherent mess, hands floating in the air to land on his cheeks as if his brain had simply disconnected from the rest of his body. Sakura giggled without restraint. Hinata laughed too, though hers came with frantic blushing and both hands pressed over her mouth.
Naruto turned to Jiraiya, eyes wide and wet, as though pleading for divine intervention.Jiraiya gave him two cheerful thumbs-up.
“I am so proud of you, kiddo.”
With a flare of chakra, he sealed the clone into the scroll. The paper glowed briefly, and the memory was captured.
Sakura leaned back with a triumphant exhale.
“You were right, that was fun. But isn’t this going to confuse him even more about the two of us?”
“That is the entire idea,” Jiraiya said. “To snap him out of rage in a transformation we need a memory that is both calming and overwhelming, pleasant but utterly bewildering. You two just created exactly that. And we will probably only get away with it once, because I doubt I can convince either of you to get any more… adventurous with a shadow clone.”
Hinata shook her head so quickly her hair bounced.
Sakura shrugged thoughtfully.
“I mean… maybe if you separated us and gave us each a clone… a little make-out session could work just as well.”
Hinata choked and threw both hands up to reject the idea. She was shaking her hands in front of her like she was trying to dry them off without a towel. That was a new way to say no. He was starting to see what Naruto saw in the girl. She was adorable.
“The princess says no,” Jiraiya said with a sigh. “And if Hiashi ever found out he would kill me. If Naruto wants more than what you gave him today, he will have to marry one of you.”
He left out the part that he suspected Sakura of having a competetive streak, and would do more to the shadow clone than just make out with it. Using the advantage of knowing Hinata wasn't brave enough to do so.
There was a knock at the door.
“We’re done in here,” Jiraiya called.
Minato entered carrying a scroll identical to Jiraiya’s.
“That was fast,” Jiraiya said, genuinely surprised.
“I used genjutsu to show him my memories of Kushina,” Minato replied.
Jiraiya whistled softly. That was efficient. For a brief moment he considered whether Sakura’s idea might be workable through genjutsu as a compromise, but the thought vanished immediately. Some boundaries existed for a reason.
“All right then,” Jiraiya said, waving Sakura and Hinata toward the exit. “You two are dismissed. Minato and I will take the boy from here.”
-
Naruto followed Jiraiya and Minato out past the outskirts of Konoha, far enough that the roofs of the village shrank into warmth-colored shapes behind them and the wind carried only the rustle of the training field’s long grass. The sun sat low enough to stain everything gold, which did nothing to calm the anxious knot forming in his stomach. He could pretend this was ordinary training, but nothing Jiraiya did was ever ordinary, and Minato’s quiet seriousness only confirmed the suspicion building in his chest.
A lone figure stood in the clearing ahead, half-shadowed beneath the branches. He wore the porcelain mask of the ANBU and did not move until they came close. Naruto recognized him as the wood user from the Ork war.
Then, with a deliberate motion, he lifted the mask away.
“I am Tenzo,” he said, bowing with a reserved politeness that contrasted entirely with Naruto’s memory of a silent, faceless operative. “It is a privilege to assist.”
Naruto blinked at him.
“You’re the wood-style guy?”
“Yes,” Tenzo answered lightly, “and more importantly, I am here to keep you from leveling this training ground.”
Jiraiya clapped his hands together as though this were all a festive gathering instead of an exercise in controlled disaster.
“All right. Today we are going to tame your four-tailed state. Not suppress it, not dance around it. Tame it. You are going to enter that form, and then we’re going to test the new method for pulling you back out. Tenzo and I are here for emergencies, but ideally you won’t need us at all.”
Naruto rubbed the back of his neck.
“And what does this have to do with… you know. The other stuff.”
“Because,” Jiraiya said, as if announcing the weather, “we are going to kill two birds with one stone by sorting out your feelings toward Sakura and Hinata.”
Naruto felt his face heat, not with embarrassment this time but with real irritation.
“Last time I transformed like that was when Gamabunta died! And it changed me permanently!” He pulled off his goggles so they could see his eyes clearly, the crimson that still lingered like an afterimage of rage. “Look at this!”
Minato stepped forward and placed a hand gently on Naruto’s shoulder, the touch so steady it almost hurt.
“Your eyes will fade back in time,” he said quietly. “Changes like this are not permanent.”
“That wasn’t even my point,” Naruto muttered, pulling his shoulder away. “My point is I don’t have anything like that to set me off. Nothing that strong.”
“You do,” Minato said.
Naruto frowned. “What? I don’t—”
“You do,” Minato repeated, voice still soft, still unbearably kind. “It’s me.”
Naruto stood very still. Even the wind seemed to pause.
Minato held his gaze without flinching.
“You have a great deal of resentment toward me. You have every right to it. I died before you ever knew me, and I left you alone with terrible responsibilities to shoulder. I left questions you carried for sixteen years. I left a hole a father should never leave.” He took a slow breath. “And before we can build anything between us, you need somewhere to put all of that anger.”
Naruto swallowed hard, throat tight. He wanted to speak, but couldn’t.
Minato gave him the smallest, saddest smile.
“And since I am already dead, I am in the perfect state for you to take out your aggression.”
Something inside Naruto snapped loose. Chakra welled up like a tide rising from the ocean floor, hot and feral and immediate. The air thickened, humming with red light. His vision sharpened until every blade of grass seemed carved from glass, and the familiar burn of the cloak wrapped around him as easily as breathing.
He did not remember deciding to reach for that power. It came to him the moment Minato’s words fully registered.
As the first tail of the chakra cloak flared around him, spilling heat across the clearing, Naruto realized that his father truly did understand him. He certainly knew how to motivate him. Perhaps that was just trait he had as a good leader?
-
This side story for comedy and romance is not something I'm enjoying. I really want to get back to the action and horror myself, and I will soon, I promise. But I kind of have to get this stuff out of the way.
I'm actually tempted to delete half of the second arc, rework it into a more condense story, and ditch all the superfluous stuff. Rewrite from there.