The Undesired Second Chance

Chapter 30: The Notebook

He had already flipped through the entire notebook he'd snagged from under the register last week, and, while fascinating in its own right, it was all basically completely useless to him; a natural consequence of not actually being able to read it. Yet he remained totally convinced that it would be worth the effort he'd put in to grabbing it.

Jiraiya turned a page back and forth, as if hoping for some kind of last minute revelation to suddenly reveal what the lines of unintelligible text meant. There were a few sketches—which were quite interesting, especially the few snippets of sealing arrays he'd seen—but otherwise the entire journal was written in that weird other script that he just couldn't figure out. He'd managed to weasel some tidbits about it from Minato, after some convincing, but those tips weren't quite as useful as he might've expected.

This code, if it even was a code, would be a hard egg to crack.

Which was why he was here, in the empty back alleyway, waiting for Orochimaru to open the darn door so he could pester him into helping.

"I know that you know I'm here," he said, flipping the book shut and tucking it away again.

Pacing back a few steps, Jiraiya gave his teammate his best smile... or at least, he gave that smile to the concealed door of his teammate's personal laboratory. He was pretty sure that Orochimaru was inside, and he knew for a fact that his extra-paranoid friend had something set up so he could see who was outside. Not that he ever had many (any) visitors, of course. The only four people who even knew this place existed—let alone where the door was—would be the members of their old team. As far as he knew, anyway.

"Open up, already!" Jiraiya knocked on the nondescript brick wall again, right on a worn out poster advertising the dango shop around the corner. "I have something I want you to take a look at!"

No response.

Okay, time to bring out the heavy weapons.

"Oro-chan!~" he called, voice singsong and at least half an octave higher than usual. "Let me in!~"

Still no response.

Well, alright then. If that level of annoyance wasn't enough, time for—

Behind him, there came a click as a section of bricks pushed into the wall and shifted aside with a nearly inaudible hum.

Jiraiya turned around, smile still in place and definitely not at all embarrassed that he had been knocking on the wrong wall the whole time. It had been a few years, after all.

From the newly made doorway, Orochimaru gave him a very disgruntled look. His completely disinterested expression might have made it seem like he wasn't, but he was: sure, Jiraiya hadn't seen his old teammate much in the past few years, but he still knew the little ticks that meant he was one wrong sentence away from having the door slammed in his face.

"What do you want?"

"Oh, don't be that way, Orochi," he scoffed, walking up to his teammate with the confidence of a man who totally hadn't been knocking on the wrong wall for the past ten minutes.

Crossing his arms, Orochimaru stepped in front of him to bar his way inside. "Jiraiya. What are you doing here?"

"Well, a few days ago I got my hands on something rather interesting," he said, enunciating each syllable in the word with the particular precise cadence he knew his teammate tended to use. It was undoubtedly the most dramatic way to say that word, after all.

Honestly, Jiraiya may be the most openly out-there member of their team, but he and Tsunade had always known who the true drama master of their little trio was: theatrics had always been Orochimaru's thing.