A/N: Italics in large clumps denote flashbacks.

Tagline: (Timeskip) After an ambush from the Akatsuki sends Naruto to the hospital, Jiraiya is forced to examine where he went wrong. Can he make amends with his life, himself, and the man who betrayed them to save Naruto's life before it's too late?

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Murder Mysteries

a Naruto fanfiction
by Pridefall

Disclaimer: I own nothing except what is mine.

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Chapter 2 – Sons of a Battle Cry
Fear? I know not fear. There are only moments of confusion. Some of them are deeply stamped on my memory and a few will haunt me forever.

- Hunter S. Thompson

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Sarutobi Jiraiya’s Notes from the field, Day 1

Day uneventful after meeting w/ Tsunade. Couldn’t get any ‘work’ done b/c I’m on thin-ice as it is (sic: 1 screw-up certain death) so I tried to get some n-fo about the Steel before calling it a night. Got some clips of interesting rumors on the state of things since the village was established, but aside from the fact that it’s demilitarized there isn’t anything glaringly important there. Rest of night uneventful.

Scratch that. I woke up to the same nightmare this morning, though this time it wasn’t Orochimaru killing the old man on top of the Hokage’s monument. It was me. Not going to put too much thought into it or the ramifications b/c I probably had too much to drink last night anyway. Wish I could blame Tsunade for it even though I know I can’t.

Though...

Shook the guilt off around mid-morning and caught a Bullet-Trans heading towards Steel at noon at Tsunade’s b/hest (as in: she thought that it’d be best if I leave as early as possible. (At the threat of a 1-way route of pain, no doubt)). When I tried to say goodbye she wouldn’t even speak to me, so. Yeah. Things aren’t good. Shizune says she’ll forgive me eventually, but only if I get my behind to the Steel (her words, not mine.)

Damn, does Tsu really want me out of the village that badly?

Probably.

Tried call her on the phone while in transit. It didn't go well. She's mad, I know, but...I’ve never heard her use so many old-tongue curses at someone who wasn’t…You know what? Nevermind. It's best no to dwell on it.

…From what I hear, the Steel is one of the few villages in the region that's advanced enough in recent years and stayed uninvolved with the political civil-wars of the other villages to have Steam as a viable power source. What this means for the surrounding country-side and city itself, I have no idea yet, but the ride there was…interesting, to say the least -- especially after the Daimyo started complaining about how fast we were going.

(Note: Normally, on a good day the trains have to stop twice to cool down, which makes the trip last from around 4 hours to 6. Today not a good day, and some of the D.s got uppity around the 4th forced stop.) It looked like a fight would break out – which woulda been fuckin’ hilarious – but the tech-heads had enough sense to tell the Ds "Either we stop or they explode. Easeh choice ta make, realeh."

Easeh choice indeed.

I couldn’t sleep when I tried since the train was in transit, so I wondered what exactly Genzo could be doing alive in another part of the country. That Akatsuki member (Xexu? Zenon? Can’t remember) lobotomized him during the Third Secret War, so I’m pretty sure he should be dead, right?

Could he be alive?

Don’t think so.

Maybe.

Stranger things have happened…

We arrived at the Steel at around 10 (maybe 11?) and right now I’m busy doodling a little “I’m Sorry” picture for Tsunade as the rest of the passengers file out.

I’ll guess I’ll send it w/ my report and see if it helps any.

I hope it does. I mean, I know it won’t, but I hope.

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Though it looked bigger from inside of the train, as soon as Jiraiya took his first steps down the large granite ramp leading from the train station and into the town, he was immediately hit by the fact that The Village of Steel, quite-surprisingly, was not the bustlingmetropolis he had pictured in his mind.

“Well…” he started, stepping over a man sleeping on the middle of the sidewalk. “…Fuck me sideways. Technology lies about its own grandeur.”

From what he could tell from what he saw of the city from inside the train, the Village of Steel was divided into four large, asymmetrical levels. The tallest buildings, most of them iron spires that spewed black smoke into the sky or high-rise apartment complexes that punched into the sky, comprised the factorial and higher-residential districts of the city, while the lower buildings that supported them formed the other districts.

Jiraiya guessed that these gargantuan spires were the richest sections of the city by the way they naturally towered over everything else around them, standing clean and immaculate while overhanging and under-hanging what, if he could read the signs and posters right, appeared to be shopping malls that stuck out from their midsections like odd-shaped ticks.

“…Strange.”

He craned his neck as he walked, trying to take in the sights like some kind of tourist while he pondered what madman could have planned such a city. The almost rustic look of the ground-floor buildings was endearing, at first, but the further he went into the city, the more it clashed with the way it was built.

‘What’s the point of having such tall buildings? This is the River country, right?’

Most of the ground-floor buildings didn’t even reach higher than a story or two, but the way they were placed in relation to their neighbors made each seem larger; bigger; more menacing when they towered over him; more innocent when the light that came from inside spilt out onto the street and cast the reflections of those inside everywhere the light could reach.

It was almost artistic, in away -- distracting and not structurally sound, of course, because the lowlands were known for having earthquakes and flashfloods; but artistic all the same.

“Madman or genius, I suppose.”

On some level, part of him admired the crazy amount of ingenuity it took for someone to think like this. Cities built such as the Steel could just keep building up and up instead of outwards, opening up hundreds of different possibilities for over-populated countries or island-cities.

Another part of him, however, and this was the part of himself that he hated, had a headache.

If the city had no boundary but the sky, then who, or what, dictated who lived where?

‘Okay, so following the laws of pompous bastards, naturally we have the nobles living high, high above me and middle-class…Well, they might live slightly lower, but even then that’s still just as high…So…where would the red light district be?’

The way the buildings were grouped together gave the Steel a rather…uneven look; a mixture of both strength and weakness. Nothing seemed situated by any real design, but by need and space, and intermixed between the two predominant build-types – spire and complex – were, what seemed to Jiraiya, the only buildings in the city that weren’t planned for when the Village was first built.

‘Well lookit that.’

Shanty towns.

The mark of big business, a growing economy, and an amount of prosperity that wasn’t available for everyone else.

‘Okay, so now that we’ve located the out-of-luck men and women who live here…’

He made his way through streetlamps that cast shadows on the sidewalks, haloing passerby while neon signs and signposts bathed everything in a greasy, almost darkened glow, casting an even more uneven illusion on the the ground-floor of the city, everything was different -- darker, even though there was light; dirtier, even though not twenty feet above them stood marvels of architectural genius.

‘…So where is that blasted red light district!’

Dingy hovels and honey-comb shaped tenements lined the streets flanked by open markets and alleyways that spread away from them like crooked, grime-covered veins in every direction. Jiraiya grew dizzy trying to map them inside of his head and began to stick to the main roads after a fashion, trusting his sense of direction more than his luck.

As he walked through (and found himself in) what seemed to be the poorest district yet – while both suppressing his urge to summon a toad and just breeze his way on through it and thinking all the while about how on earth the entire ground floor of a city could be a single district -- Jiraiya felt the hairs on the back of his neck suddenly begin to rise.

‘Okay, wait. Common sense, tingling.’

He turned around – slowly, so as to not look like a moron – and was greeted by the sight of soot-covered men and women trying to hide the fact that they were staring at him, from him.

‘…Okay, if I’m not mistaken…’ Jiraiya took a look at his surroundings and then frowned. For all of its major facades and polishing, the Steel was still a small town on the verge of becoming a city, and like every small city-town, its people were very suspicious of new-comers. Meaning that if they weren’t playing at pretending he didn’t exist, then they just outright glared at him and wished he would leave. ‘I am not wanted here.’

Sensing, perhaps imminent danger – or at least more discomfort if the people grew violent enough to want to physically hurt him -- Jiraiya quickly retreated down a promising road to his left (even though he didn’t actually know where he was going) and hurriedly marked down somewhere in the back of his mind that the southern half of the city was not a place he wanted to be in.

‘…Well I suppose even the most advanced of places can have a poor district they want to hide, in retrospect.’

‘Floor. Street. Whatever.’

‘Just means they gotta have a red light district too.’

‘…’

‘Okay, so I’m lost.’

He walked towards an apparently homeless man lying down on a half-broken tatama-mat in the middle of the street and presented him with three Ryou. “Can you tell me the way to the nearest tavern?”

The man hiccupped, took the Ryou, and then gave Jiraiya an entirely too hostile gaze. Jiraiya kept his mouth shut, and squared his shoulders.

“…Who’re you? A shinobi? Neva’ seen yer kind about these parts.”

Jiraiya shrugged and gave the man three more Ryou. “I’m just stranger.”

The man grinned a crooked, holey smile. “Best to keep it that way, mate. With the way things are goin’ around here…Well…” He considered his next words and then pointed down a street to Jiraiya’s left, shaking his head: “Nevermind. Tavern’s that way. Move along.”

Jiraiya did as he was told, filing away what he had just learned. Even if the village wasn’t all that large, part of him could already see that the Steel was on its way to becoming like every other big city in the world – a whorehouse where everyone was a slut that belonged to a differently priced room.

‘Speaking of whores, though…’

As he reached the end of the street, he caught sight of the (apparently) vibrant night-life of the city; spotting drug-abusers and whores standing side-by-side with nobles and teenagers looking for an easy fix, all of them outlined in dull, red light.

He’d arrived.

‘Okay, either that girl is inspecting that guy’s belt-buckle for deficiencies or I’m getting closer to where I want to be now.’

The red light district, and a rather newly set-up one at that. ‘Yakuza near the lights, gangs in the allies, and people on the streets like fish surrounded by sharks. S’good to be home.’

He stopped at the steps of the tavern he would be staying in for the night and looked towards the horizon; his eyes reflecting the last vestiges of sunlight leaving the world until the coming dawn. No one had tried to rob or approach him as he walked, but he knew that everyone was watching him.

‘…Well, better get to work.’

He could smell the sea far off in the distance, and though as a child he loved the sea, right now, tired as he was, it wasn’t as comforting as he thought it should be.

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He can smell the sea in the distance.

Gamakichi leaps headlong over the cliff, his arms failing for stability as a blast of steaming water from (…his partner has called him Kisame?) threatens to overtake the seventeen foot tall toad-nin in a deluge of H2O that parts the trees, parts the ground, and sears the air as if it was heated by the fires of hell itself.

The Nuke-nin who created it rides the wave like a professional, rising up through the swell and cutting through the break of the wave. He makes hand symbols Jiraiya can’t see, and opens his mouth as a torrential hail of water-shaped bullets is suddenly expunged from his throat.

Sickening but effective.

Naruto stumbles tail-first after his summon, curses and kunai flying as both toad and rider go down in metaphorical flames. The Mist-Nin rides his jutsu towards the edge of the cliff, laughing and roaring a sound somewhere between water crashing on rocks and steam escaping a sulfur vent, his face a smirk of animalistic pride, his mouth open in a tight snarl, and his mummified sword raised high for the killing strike.

“MEGALA-”

Jiraiya may have been slow react to danger, but he would not let Naruto bear the brunt of his mistakes. Gamabunta lands in the clearing with just enough time to intervene, his tongue bursting through the tidal wave of water directly beneath the Mist-nin and splitting it in twine. Jiraiya launches himself off of the Boss-Toad’s skull once he gets his footing, lands on top of the suddenly inertia-less Mist-Nin’s raised sword and stamps an explosive-note on it all in one fluid motion, not even pausing to see what happens as a column of fire blossoms behind him and pushes him forward even faster.

“GRAB ON TO SOMETHING!”

The explosion gives Gamakichi enough leg-room to maneuver from off the side of the cliff, but it doesn't give Naruto the second he needs to find his feet again. Instead, Jiraiya watches, horrified, as the blast pushes him off the cliff.

“NARUTO!”

Jiraiya is falling, his hand outstretched and his mind racing. Naruto is screaming, forcing air from his lungs faster than he can fall, and Jiraiya knows that if he does not reach him in time that the fall will kill the young teenager.

“NARUTO!”

The blonde snaps out of whatever fear was holding him and tries to swim up through the air, his fingertips barely brushing against Jiraiya’s…

“Heyheyheyhey there mister!”

…And then the third Akatsuki member, the one he couldn’t sense because, fuck, he didn’t know why, makes his appearance with as much subtlety as a baseball bat to the face; coming right for Jiraiya by vaulting up the cliff instead of falling down it, his form little more than a multitonal blur as he grabs Naruto and launches himself off the blonde and towards Jiraiya.

“I got somethin’ for ya!”

The spiral-masked Nuke-nin is fastAbhorrentlyso. And just as Jiraiya completes his Doton jutsu and a boulder-sized chunk of the cliff-face dislodges from its resting place to reform as a protective wall in front of him, several birds slam into the side of the cliff and explode with the force of a small bag of hand-grenades going off. Jiraiya is left blinking through the dust and debris, half-blind and deaf, as a boot crashes its way past his promptly made-and-then-destroyed earth-shield and slams into his chest with enough force to send him skyward.

“Ofh!”

“Byebye!”

He coughs out blood somewhere between soaring ten feet upwards (backwards?) and catching a hold on the side of the cliff again. The Nuke-nin is falling down backwards, waving at him with a gloved hand and gaining ground Jiraiya does not need him to gain.

At this rate, he’ll reach Naruto first. At this rate, Jiraiya will fail the child again.

‘Keep smiling twerp, I’ll fucking rip your eyes out.’

It doesn’t matter. OnlyNaruto matters. Jiraiya leaps off the cliff-face hoping that gravity is faster than whatever infernal bloodline propelled his opponent – no one that young-sounding should’ve been able to move that fast. No one. – and his quick decision-making is promptly rewarded.

“Get the FUCK away from me!”

Albeit in an unexpected way.

There is a flash of light and the sound of an unraveling sirocco. Naruto’s Rasengan catches the spiral-faced Nuke-nin just as the running shinobi nears him, and even though from the angle he’s at Jiraiya can’t exactly see what happens between them, it only takes millisecond for the Nuke-nin to stop so abruptly that every bone in his body has to break.

"...Ow."

It takes less than that for his entire body to rotate to the left, hold somewhere in the center, and then spiral out towards right in a flash of sapphire erubescence that leaves Jiraiya blind for the second time since the fight began.

When he can see again, Jiraiya’s eyes widen.

The Nuke-nin doesn’t so much as explode, but vaporize.

‘Holy…’

His eyes meet Naruto’s.

The blonde smiles. Raises him a victory sign.

Then, his eyes flutter close.

‘FUCK!’

Jiraiya runs as fast as the steepness of the cliff will allow him to – half-sprinting, half-leaping. The rocks at the bottom of the cliff are getting closer and closer, stabbing upwards out of the sea like the teeth of some infernal demon hungry for the prey about to fall into his mouth.

If he doesn’t make it…

If he doesn’t make it…

Fuck that.

He would make it.

Jiraiya smiles a grim smile as he can feel his desperation take hold of his legs and make him move that much faster. He's close now, and can see Naruto's falling form. Can almost reach his foot and grab hold. He’ll save him. Goddammit he would save the idiot

‘Just a little farther. Just…a little…farther…’

He stretches out his hands, he's so close.

‘Damn you kid, don't you dare die on me!’

“Hey, what you did to Tobi wasn’t cool, hn.” And then the infuriating voice of another Akatsuki brat crashes around his eyes and everything goes to hell. Something whirls by him faster than he can blink, a blur of orange and crème who’s speed buffest him sideways. Jiraiya has no time to stop the newest Akatsuki member. He can only put as much chakra as he can into his hair and hope that it’ll stop the attack he knows is coming.

“Let’s try to remedy that, eh?”

Something explodes at his chest, searing heat and numbing cold reaching through the tendrils of his iron tresses all at the same time. Jiraiya tumbles forward, losing his grip for only a moment, his eyes locking on the Nuke-nin as its mount rounds about and makes its way towards him for a second run.

He unfurls a scroll in one fluid movement, making sure that as it opens its directed away from him. There is a moment where he thinks nothing will happen; that this delay will cause him to lose Naruto and lose the fight, but then the Akatsuki member rushes straight into Jiraiya’s trap and his scroll explodes to a satisfying cry of: “ARGH! Shit! Shit!”

Hundreds of fireballs stream towards what Jiraiya thinks looks like a children’s rendition of a bird, peppering its underside and burning through its false-flesh; hopefully buying Jiraiya enough time.

“Get the FUCK out of my way you worthless little cunt-stain!”

His sandal collides with the thing’s underside, cracking what feels like hardened clay as he pushes himself through the fake-bird using its neck for quasi-leverage. With a colossal groan, he breaks throughit and out the other side; only a small part of him registering that the Akatsuki member isn’t riding its steed anymore.

Fuck it. He’s almost lost Naruto twice now and he isn’t going to let anyone else get in his way.

“KID, WAKE UP!”

The rocks keep getting closer.

"NARUTO!"

He's not gaining any speed.

'Nonononono.'

Jiraiya won't have it.

"NARUTO!"

Claws the size of his arm clamp down around his waist and pull him skywards, and Uzumaki Naruto slips forever out of his reach.

“No. No! GET THE FUCK OFF ME!”

He keeps rising. Rising, and rising, and rising faster than he can speak.

Naruto becomes nothing more than a speck of orange and black surrounded by blue; then disappears amongst the waves.

“Oh well, yeah?”

There's nothing else he can do.

No one else he can protect.

‘Kid…’

The realization will hit much, much harder later, but now.

‘…Kid I’m sorry.’

Now nothing else matters.

Nothing.

At.

All.

He charges chakra into his hands…

“Hold on tight old man. I’m gonna drop you nice and hard, yeah.”

…and rams them into the fake-bird’s legs.

“Hey, hey! You can’t do that!”

Jiraiya free-falls as the Akatsuki member’s ride careens into the tree tops. Gamabunta catches the Sannin without fanfare, and then stonily says: "There will be time to mourn, my friend.”

Jiraiya nods, his heart in his throat, and leaps off of the toad-boss's head. “There always is, isn't there?”

Gamabunta says nothing.

Jiraiya, chakra screaming through his veins, slides into a fighting stance as the Akatsuki members surrounded him. ´…No more mourning,’ he thinks, his eyes locking on to the darkening horizon as chakra twists and lashes at the sky and the ground, lacerating the earth like zanbatou cutting through soft, malleable flesh.

‘…This is where I stand, and this is where they fall.’

He would make sure that the four Akatsuki members remembered how brightly the Rasengan shone on that night until the very day they died. Of this, more than anything else in his life, there would be no compromise.

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To Be Continued

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