The line at the Hidden Rain Village gate was longer than it had any right to be.
Jiraiya stood in it, arms crossed, white hair catching the drizzle, watching the inspection checkpoint process people at a pace that suggested the ninja manning it had decided that thoroughness was its own form of power. In Konoha, a hundred people might pass through a gate in an hour. Here, the number was considerably lower, and the people waiting knew it and adjusted their expectations accordingly. The crowd pressed up to the wall and spread along the road without the usual forward surge — everyone had already done the math.
He had expected tight security. What he hadn't expected was the specific flavor of it — the paperwork, the passes, the way each person was recorded before they were allowed through. It had the character of a system someone had designed rather than inherited.
Orochimaru, he thought, or possibly Finn. Probably Finn.
He waited. An hour passed. Another twenty minutes. Finally, his turn.
The gate ninja looked up at him with the neutral assessment of someone who had done this several hundred times today and planned to do it several hundred more.
"Name."
"Toad Sage," Jiraiya said.
The ninja stared at him.
"No titles," he said, with the particular flatness of a man who had heard every variation.
Jiraiya winced internally. "Right. Myoki Bunta."
The ninja wrote it down without further comment. Whether it was real or not was not the point — the form required a name with the structure of a name, and this one had that structure. Whatever happened after entry was a different department's problem.
"Purpose of visit."
"I'm a writer," Jiraiya said, with the practiced ease of someone who has used this particular cover story before and found it useful. "Best-selling novelist. I travel to collect material — local color, regional folklore, that sort of thing. I heard the Hidden Rain Village has a distinctive atmosphere. I wanted to experience it firsthand."
The ninja nodded, noted this down as folk song collection, and reached for a pass to fill in.
Then he paused.
"Do you have representative works?"
Jiraiya blinked. The question seemed to come from genuine curiosity rather than protocol — the slight forward tilt of the ninja's posture, the way the question had arrived as an afterthought rather than a procedure.
"A title called Make-Out Paradise," Jiraiya said, mildly.
The ninja's expression changed completely.
"That's you," he said. "You're Jiraiya."
Jiraiya went very still.
The situation was immediately clear to him and immediately uncomfortable. Make-Out Paradise— published under a pen name, specifically because Make-Out Paradisewas the kind of work that a legendary ninja and one of the three great Sannin of Konoha could not have his name attached to without consequences. The separation between Jiraiya, decorated shinobi and the person who wrote that had been maintained carefully and at some cost to his vanity. He had friends who knew. He did not have gate guards of foreign villages who knew.
And here, apparently, he had one.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Jiraiya said, with immediate and total conviction. "My name is Bunta. I'm from Mount Myoboku. Not affiliated with any of the Three Sannin of Konoha. If you're planning to suggest otherwise, I will look into what the defamation statutes look like in the Land of Rain."
"I didn't say anything about the Three Sannin," the ninja said, looking slightly confused.
"Good. Keep it that way." Jiraiya straightened. "Are we done here?"
"One moment." The ninja's expression shifted from confused to professional. "We have standing orders. If someone matching your description presents credentials that match your known works, we're supposed to report it." He lifted a hand to signal someone further down the wall. "Please wait. Someone will be with you shortly."
Jiraiya did not bolt. He considered it — assessed it with the reflex of someone who had been in and out of difficult situations for forty years — and decided against it. He was not here to fight anyone. He was here for Orochimaru. Fleeing from a gate before getting inside the village would not improve anyone's opinion of him, and the people inside almost certainly already knew he was here. The whole inspection apparatus had his description in it. Running would just be embarrassing.
I wasn't even trying to infiltrate, he thought, with some residual dignity. I stood in line.
A team of Akatsuki ninjas arrived from inside the village within minutes. They were wearing the black cloaks with the red cloud pattern — the Yorozuya's mark, running through the organization's ranks — and they looked at him with the specific quality of respect that people apply to someone they know is dangerous and are determined not to give any indication of being nervous around.
"Jiraiya-sama," the lead one said. "Please follow us. The masters of the Yorozuya are expecting you."
Of course they are, Jiraiya thought. He fell into step behind them.
The gate area had been crowded. Inside the wall, the Hidden Rain Village was the opposite — quiet, functional, moving. People went from one place to another with the purposefulness of people who had somewhere to be and a system that tracked whether they arrived. The rain fell on all of it with a steady, indifferent sound, the same rain that had been falling on this village Jiraiya's entire adult life, the same rain that had been falling when he had trained three students here decades ago in the middle of a war.
He looked at the buildings, the drainage pipes, the metal of everything, the infrastructure laid over older infrastructure. The village was not bleak exactly — it was functioning, clearly — but there was something absent from it that he couldn't immediately name. He kept looking as they moved deeper in, trying to locate the quality he was missing.
By the time they reached the entrance of the tallest building — the Rain Courtyard, he registered the name on a sign — he had it.
Warmth. Not temperature warmth. The other kind. The kind that comes from people who feel at ease where they are, who have made somewhere into a home. This village moved. It did not breathe. Every person he had seen was busy in a way that had no playfulness in it, no spillage, no wasted motion. Like a clock that ran precisely and expressed nothing.
Konoha, for all its problems, did not feel like a clock.
He filed this away without arriving at a verdict and stepped into the building.
The elevator was hydraulic. He noticed this and found it unexpected. He rode it to the top floor without comment.
The doors opened, and from down the corridor, before he had even fully registered the space, a laugh came toward him — broad and warm and carrying the specific quality of someone who is genuinely glad to see you.
"Ahahahaha! Jiraiya! You actually came." Finn was walking down the corridor toward him with the unhurried gait of someone who had known for at least an hour that this visit was happening and had decided to enjoy it. "What's the occasion? You're not here to find a bathing spot to observe, are you?"
Jiraiya felt the tension in his shoulders dissolve before he had consciously decided to let it go.
He had been worried, in the abstract, approaching this meeting. Finn was not a man to be careless around — Jiraiya knew this with the same clarity he knew his own combat capabilities — and walking into Finn's controlled territory on Finn's terms was not a position he had specifically chosen. But the man coming down the corridor had the face of someone who found this encounter pleasant, and Jiraiya had spent enough time reading people to know that this was not a performance.
They were, in some genuine sense, friends. They had drunk together, sparred, shared information, disagreed on several things of consequence, and arrived at an understanding that persisted despite all of it. Whatever Finn was going to do in this world, Jiraiya was not on the list of things he was planning to do it to.
"I'm collecting folklore," Jiraiya said, with dignity.
Finn raised an eyebrow. He had arrived close enough now that Jiraiya could see the specific amusement in his expression — the slight elevation at the corner of the mouth, the tilt of the head that said I know exactly what you're here for and we both know you know I know.
"Folklore," Finn repeated. "Is that right."
"It's a legitimate cultural pursuit." Jiraiya glanced around, then lowered his voice slightly. "Orochimaru. He's here, isn't he?"
"You don't waste time," Finn said.
"I've found that circling around things with you is an inefficient use of everyone's time," Jiraiya said. "So."
"Fair point." Finn put a hand on his shoulder in the manner of someone who has decided that the conversation has graduated to the comfortable register. "I respect that. Yes, Orochimaru is here. I assume Konoha's intelligence gave you the general shape of it before you came."
"Enough of it."
"Then I won't elaborate on what you already know." Finn walked alongside him now, directing him further into the building without making it feel like being directed. "He defected from Konoha, and now he's with us. That part is accurate."
Jiraiya's expression settled into something darker. "Why? What was his reason? He never gave Konoha a real one."
"I don't know," Finn said, and the tone was guileless enough that Jiraiya believed it. "I have guesses, but I don't know. And honestly, it's not something I spent much time trying to understand. He came. He's useful. The arrangement works for both of us."
"I want to see him."
Finn made a small gesture that was neither agreement nor refusal. "He's in seclusion. He's close to completing something he's been working on for a long time — something critical. He estimated his own timeline at roughly now, so he should be surfacing soon. If you're not in a hurry..." He turned and looked at Jiraiya with the easy expression of a host making a reasonable offer. "Stay. Wait for him. When he comes out, you'll have your conversation."
Jiraiya was quiet for a moment.
He had come a long way to have this conversation, and the answer wait a few days was not what he had been hoping to hear. But Orochimaru in the middle of a critical research breakthrough was Orochimaru at his least interruptible — Jiraiya had known him long enough to understand that — and forcing the meeting before he surfaced voluntarily would accomplish nothing except convincing Orochimaru that Jiraiya had no patience.
"Fine," Jiraiya said. "A few days."
Finn smiled. "Excellent. I'll have someone show you to a room. And I'll have someone find out whether the Rain Country's local culinary culture constitutes folklore, since you're here to collect it."
"That's not what—" Jiraiya started.
"I know," Finn said, and kept walking.