Spoilers for recent manga chapters, specifically Ch.367 and a bit of Ch. 371, if you squint real hard. As usual characters and setting belong to their respective owners.
by: i Mel-chan i
“You okay?”
Jiraiya looked down at his pupil for the umpteenth time, still not receiving one word from him. The young blond held a white rag over his nose, spotted with red blood stains from a damaged nose. His left eye was half closed, watery and slowly dulling to a nasty prune color. “So are you going to tell me what happened, Minato?”
The younger boy said nothing, preferably shutting his mouth even tighter. Instead he shifted the icepack gently on his swollen face.
Jiraiya sighed, sitting next to him in the grassy meadow. It was a nice cool day in the Whirlpool Village, breezes blowing gently on the landscape and clouds scattering over the blue sky above. The village was small and not too well known, but it still made an excellent site for training.
He’d been doing research when he left his three students instructions for the day’s training. After a few shrieking ‘perv’ and three slaps across the face, Jiraiya came back to where he left his students, only to find a crowd gathered around and Minato dead in the center, barely conscious with blood down his front. Panicking, but still able to yell out instructions to his other students, Jiraiya managed to get an ice pack, an antiseptic and within a few minutes wake the boy.
God, he would have had a heart attack, right then! When crystal blue eyes peered up at him, he could have just cried out in joy. There was no really damage, it was all completely dramatized in his part; so after shooing away the crowd and telling his other two students to go scurrying along and finish their training, and reassuring them that he had everything under control, (really he did! It was just something in his eye!), pupil and master were left alone. Jiraiya told himself he had everything under control, but that was two hours ago, and Minato was just as tight lip as ever.
“You know I can just ask Konan.”
Minato sighed, muttering something before taking off the cool icepack. His handsome face sure looked distorted almost making the older man wince at the bloody damaged. “Someone hit me.”
“What?” Jiraiya asked more astound than anything else. Namikaze Minato was a genius and just about good on everything he set his mind on. His speed was incredible, and he was still building on it, amazingly enough. Few people could actually touch him, much less sent him such a crushing blow. Indeed, if someone managed to hit him that hard than that was certainly a person to fear.
People would call him the “Yellow Flash” in a few years to come, but until then he was just the talented student of one of the Legendary Sannin.
“By who?”
Minato fidgeted for a bit, playing with the tip of his shirt, but not answering his question. “It… was a… girl…” he muttered more like a whisper than anything else.
Jiraya’s eyebrows raised high by his student’s embarrassment. He didn’t believe the entire male dominance (Tsunade had squashed that out of him), but still a girl managed to sock Minato that hard? Here he was thinking it was enemy nin, but a girl? Half the girls were usually fawning over him, much less hitting him. He must have done something really upsetting, something he would do. “So… what y’do to this girl?” He asked conversationally.
“Sensei... it’s not that big of a deal!” He said standing up, but was pulled back down.
“Surely, Minato, I didn’t think I would get an assistant in my research.”
“Huh?” He asked turning around, but when he saw the suggesting eyebrows of his sensei, his face turned red, except for his bruised eye. “It’s nothing like that sensei!”
The toad sage laughed loudly, while Minato kept turning just as red. He was trying to loosen up the tension, get the boy to laugh and forget about this whole situation. “So what really happened?”
“Well,” he said sighing. “She was playing with a bunch of boys… but I didn’t know she was a girl… because of that stupid haircut and that ugly orange jacket….”
“And?”
“I called her a boy…”
Okay.
“…three times.”
Ouch.
If there was one thing Jiraiya picked up from the female species it was definitely that none of them like to by called a boy, no matter how much they act like it. No wonder that girl had hit him so hard, but really with such a nasty eye maybe it wasn’t too off to have mistaken her for a boy.
“I mentioned if she was sure, and the next thing I knew I was lying on the floor, seeing stars over my head.” The blond was quiet, probably humiliated to what his great teacher thought of him. Perhaps he was expecting the great barks of laughter from his teacher, yelling out something along the lines of “a little girl beat the crap out of you?" But he did no such thing,
Jiraiya smiled at him, putting an arm around the boy’s shoulder, shaking him a little, to help ease away the embarrassment he was under. Minato had always sent Jiraiya a sort of parental pride to him for his determination and incredible speed to learn any jutsu. Right now, the boy must be feeling humiliated that he had for once said the wrong thing, and that a genius such as himself could get beat that easily. And right now the boy needed someone to tell him that it was alright that these things happened, sort of.
“Don’t worry about it, girls are just weird like that… too touchy about their femininity and all that crap.”
“I guess.”
“So a girl socked you. I’d be lying if I say a girl didn’t beat me once. Tsunade, now that girl could punch! One time she broke both my arms, six of my ribs and punctured several of my organs. I was this close of dying,” he demonstrated by putting his index and thump finger a few centimeters apart.
“Anyway there’s no rule saying that boys have to be stronger than girls or anything like that, so don’t let it bum you out, kay?”
“Alright,” he said grimly.
Jiraiya sighed, and then grinned brightly. “How ‘bout I take you out for ramen? My treat.”
That seemed to have cheered him up, and in a few hours they sat down the stools of a local ramen stand, and slurped down salty noodles and broth soup. The black-eye around Minato’s right eye was still just as bad, but he didn’t seem to be bothered by it now that he was enjoying ramen. “Jiraiya-sensei, you’re not going to leave me with the bill are you?” he asked suddenly his eyes narrowing suspiciously, and stopping his slurping mid way.
“Ha, when have I ever done that?” He answered laughing off the matter, while ordering another bowl.
“Every time.”
“Bah, kids, they don’t know what they’re talking about. Anyway,” he asked noticing that his student was in a much better mood, so it would be alright to ask him anything. “What was that girl’s name?”
“Huh? Kushina. Uzumaki Kushina,” Minato said thinking to himself how much the bill was going to tally up.
"You should apologize. Get her gift or something. Trust me you don't want to deal with a female that had a grudge against you."
"She was the one that hit me!"
Jiraiya just shrugged. "Just saying."
The blond rolled his eyes that was probably the worst advice his master ever gave him. Namikaze Minato told himself, then, that he’d never ever want to cross paths with that tomboyish red head.
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