"You say that like it's possible for anyone else," Finn said. "In this world, nothing is impossible for me."
Jiraiya opened his mouth.
Then he closed it.
Because when he thought about it with any rigor, it was difficult to argue with. Wood Release was a bloodline limit — he understood that much from what the First Hokage's legacy had established — a specific combination of water and earth-natured chakra woven together at a cellular level. He had never studied the mechanism, had never been close to Konoha's classified research on the subject, had only the broad outline of how rare and structurally improbable it was. He didn't actually know how hard it was to develop.
Against that vague understanding, set the fact that he was standing on a rain-soaked rooftop watching a man with no sacred training ground affiliation complete Sage Mode on his own initiative.
Comparatively speaking, Jiraiya thought, with some resignation, Wood Release might actually be the more believable one.
"Fair enough," he muttered, mostly to himself.
He was still working through this when he noticed that Finn had gone quiet. Not relaxed-quiet — tense-quiet, the kind where someone is exerting effort on something that isn't cooperating. His jaw was set. His eyes had gone inward. His arm was raised, the green of the wood still vivid against his sleeve, and he was clearly trying to do something with it that was not happening.
After a minute, Jiraiya asked, carefully: "What are you doing?"
Finn didn't answer. He kept trying. The branches didn't move.
Another minute passed. Then two. Then Finn's expression shifted from focused to bleak, and he said, with the specific flatness of someone who has arrived at a conclusion they didn't want to reach: "Damn it."
"What happened?"
Finn raised the arm fully and looked at it. The branches had not retracted. If anything, they appeared marginally longer. "I can't bring it back in."
Jiraiya stared at him. "You can't... control it?"
"I can feel it taking root," Finn said, frowning at his own arm with the expression of a man reviewing a structural problem in something he built himself. "I can feel the Wood Release establishing itself in my body. But whenever I try to retract the growth — pull the branches back in, reabsorb them — nothing happens. It doesn't respond. It just keeps doing whatever it wants to do."
This was, Jiraiya had to acknowledge, deeply strange. Bloodline limits operated by instinct. Once the genes encoded the technique, the user could access it with the same naturalness they accessed their own heartbeat. He had never heard of a bloodline limit that activated but refused instruction. It wasn't how the system worked.
"Your branch," Jiraiya said, studying it, "has it gotten longer since we started talking?"
Finn looked. "Yes."
A pause.
"Is it possible," Jiraiya said, with the careful tone of a man not wanting to be the one who says the next thing, "that if this continues unchecked, you might..."
"Turn into a tree?" Finn said.
"I was going to say 'have a problem,' but yes, that's the endpoint I was approaching."
"It can't be ruled out," Finn said, staring at the branches.
Before Jiraiya could respond to this — and he had several responses available, none of them fully adequate to the situation — a maid appeared at the rooftop door and spoke quietly through the gap.
"Lord Finn. Sasori-sama asked me to inform you: Lord Orochimaru has completed his research."
Finn's expression changed immediately, the arm problem temporarily re-categorized. "Excellent timing," he said, and he meant it. "If anyone in this building can give me an answer about what's happening with this Wood Release, it's Orochimaru." He was already moving toward the door. "Come on."
Jiraiya followed, with the particular alertness of someone who has been waiting three days for this.
The hydraulic elevator brought them to the seventh floor. Orochimaru's laboratory occupied most of a long corridor, and its door was open. Light spilled out into the hall.
From around the corner, before they reached the door, two figures appeared carrying something.
Kakuzu had the upper body. Biwa Juzo had the legs. What they were carrying was limp, pale, and dressed in Orochimaru's clothes — the pale yellow with the purple rope, unmistakable. The face was Orochimaru's face. The body was completely without tension, completely without life, draped between the two men like cloth.
Jiraiya's mind had not caught up with the situation before his legs were already moving.
He crossed the distance between them in three strides and stopped Kakuzu and Juzo with his body. He didn't ask them anything. He crouched, pressed two fingers to the side of Orochimaru's neck, felt nothing, moved to the wrist, felt nothing, and then pressed his hand flat against the sternum.
No heartbeat.
Jiraiya's face did something that Kakuzu watched with mild, attentive interest. It went through several states in rapid succession — denial, recalibration, a sharp inward collapse — and then, from somewhere deep in the chest, something that had been held in place for a long time let go.
"Why," Jiraiya said, his voice coming out strange, "did you have to die? Why did you have to die??"
Juzo opened his mouth. Kakuzu turned to him with a very slight shake of the head. Then Kakuzu set down Orochimaru's upper body, gently, and stepped back with the expression of a man conceding the floor for reasons he considered privately amusing.
Juzo stared at Kakuzu. Kakuzu maintained his expression of total neutrality. Juzo, correctly reading the situation and deciding it was more interesting than he wanted to admit, also set down the legs and stepped back.
Jiraiya gathered Orochimaru's body against his chest and pressed his palm flat to the sternum again, chakra rising in his hand, searching for something — anything — that could be reached, reset, restarted. He found nothing. The body was empty in the particular way that bodies are empty when the thing that made them a person has left entirely. Not injured. Not unconscious. Vacated.
The grief that had been compressed for three days of unresolved waiting, plus however many months of following footprints across the ninja world while the person he was following got further away, arrived all at once.
"You couldn't die so easily," Jiraiya said, to the face that was no longer responding to anything. "Of all the ways to go, you couldn't just—" His throat closed. He tried again and couldn't. Two tears ran down his face, tracking along the red lines of his markings, and dropped.
"Orochimaru," he said, and it came out as something between a name and a shout.
From behind him, near the door of the laboratory, a voice said: "What would you like me to do about it, Jiraiya?"
Jiraiya's first instinct was to answer the voice, and he started to before the second instinct arrived — the recognition instinct, the one that knew whose voice that was.
He stopped speaking mid-syllable.
His body went very still.
The voice came again, dry and faintly amused: "I don't think I've seen you cry like that since Tsunade turned you down. What was it, the third time?"
Jiraiya turned.
Orochimaru was leaning against the laboratory doorframe with his arms folded, watching him. Same pale yellow clothes. Same purple rope. Same precise posture, the slightly lordly tilt of the shoulders that had been the same since they were seventeen years old.
Different face.
Not Orochimaru's face — similar structure, same coloring, but the specific arrangement of features was wrong, like a very good approximation by someone working from a description. As Jiraiya registered this, Orochimaru raised one hand and drew it from forehead to chin in a single pass, and when the palm lifted, his face was his face.
"I'll admit," Orochimaru said, "I didn't expect it to affect you that much. I'm almost moved. Almost."
Jiraiya looked down at what was in his arms. He looked back up at Orochimaru. He looked down again.
"What," he said, "did you just do."
"I transcended the constraints of life and death," Orochimaru said, and the pride in it was open and unashamed. "I completed the technique. The oath we made in front of that memorial stone, years ago — mastery over all ninjutsu, understanding of everything this world contains. You can't do any of that if you die. So I arranged not to." He looked at Jiraiya with something that was almost warmth, filtered through Orochimaru's particular inability to express it without a layer of condescension on top. "I achieved immortality, Jiraiya. The real kind."
Jiraiya looked at the body in his arms. Looked at the man standing in the doorway. Put together what he had just observed — no heartbeat, no chakra, no soul remaining in the vessel — and arrived at the conclusion.
"You transferred your soul," he said.
"You're not entirely hopeless," Orochimaru said.
"You—" Jiraiya's face went through several things. Grief had become embarrassment, embarrassment had become anger, anger was looking for the right shape. "You absolute — how could you — this is — playing with souls and manipulating death is not—" He ran out of structured sentence and switched to simpler vocabulary. "You're insane."
"I prefer 'liberated from conventional limitations,'" Orochimaru said pleasantly. Then his attention shifted. His eyes moved to Finn and sharpened with something more focused. "Is that the Sage Dryad Mode? An original development?"
Finn had been standing slightly to the side throughout this entire encounter, watching with the expression of a man who has orchestrated nothing and is enjoying everything. Now he turned the arm with the branches visible and said, in a tone stripped of all performance: "I'm in trouble."
Behind Jiraiya, Kakuzu's voice arrived with the particular flatness of a man who has decided that the comedic potential of the last thirty seconds has been fully realized and commerce should resume.
"Jiraiya. If you're finished with Orochimaru's previous body, we'll take it back. Or you can purchase it. Either works."
Jiraiya blinked. He looked down at what was still in his arms. "Purchase—"
"Orochimaru is one of the Three Sannin of Konoha," Kakuzu said, without any indication that he found this sentence unusual. "The specimen has significant collector value. We have a process for this kind of material."
"I—" Jiraiya stared at him. "You're going to sell it?"
"We were going to sell it," Kakuzu said. "You're in the way."
Jiraiya set the body down on the floor very carefully, stood up, and spent approximately four seconds looking at the assembled group — Orochimaru smiling from a new face, Kakuzu waiting for an answer about the body, Juzo grinning at the wall so as not to laugh openly, Finn standing nearby with branches growing out of his sleeve.
For a brief moment, he genuinely considered the reverse summoning technique. Mount Myoboku was quiet. The elder toads were uncomplicated. Nothing there tried to sell Orochimaru's body to him.
"Three days," Jiraiya said, to no one in particular. "I've been here three days."