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It took some time for Jiraiya—at the time called Ji, written as boy—to remember his first life. That was, in retrospect, probably for the best, even if the path could have been easier now and again.
Life in the orphanage is—complicated. Ji doesn’t know much history, but something had happened, which means there are now a lot of orphans around. The Clans claim their own, the wealthier merchant families are responsible for theirs up to the fourth degree of separation. The rest—well. There are too many to feed and too many to discreetly eliminate. Killing them, Ji understands, would be bad for morale. The same is true for feeding them. The more food they eat, the less food there is for the part of the population of actual worth.
So they are left alone for the most part. Food is provided when possible, and the rest of the time the kids forage. The orphanage is conveniently built where the three big forests meet: The Great Hashirama Forest, the Northern Hashirama Forest and, creatively named, Southern Hashirama Forest. Sure, the Southern Hashirama Forest is full of crazy Chakra animals, but that’s, if anything, a boon. With enough kids working together, they can get some proper traps going, and meat from Chakra beasts is gold for Chakra-capable kids.
It’s not a bad life, honestly. Or wouldn’t have been if Ji was a regular kid. In environments like that where a pile of kids are dumped to fend for themselves, a hierarchy will quickly get established. In this case, the kids atomised into groups of three-to-six, the meanest, strongest group automatically taking charge of the whole herd. Typically, the leaders would all be Chakra-capable, which means the hierarchy itself will have to get reset every few years because the Chakra-capable kids will have gotten shipped off to the Academy. Until then, they are a valuable resource to secure for your group. If Ji wasn’t—as he was—he’d have easily been picked up by a mid-to-upper level group. He was bigger than the norm, physically way ahead of the curve and his raw Chakra potential was off the charts.
On the other hand, Ji couldn’t access most of it, he was functionally mute and was, by and large, insane. His speech is awkward; he struggles with focusing; he is always endlessly confused about everything and is unable to explain what could be so perplexing. Generously, he could be called an idiot-savant. Pragmatically, he is a waste of resources.
Surviving is touch and go for a while. He’s big and needs a lot of food, but doesn’t have a group to forage and hunt with. The other kids don’t bother him but don’t interact with him either. Overall, he’s easy to overlook.
The inexplicable depressive episodes complicate things further. He would lose time, now and again, struck with a heavy weight of wrongness and loss and grief. When they can be bothered to pay attention to one random struggling kid, adults scoff that it's abandonment. Unlike most people, Ji remembers his mother a little. She had silver hair, he distantly recalls, and a steady Chakra. He was just old enough to remember her dispassionate expression when she left him in a tall metal bucket, next to the garbage heap behind the orphanage. Warm hands and a pretty voice are all well and good, but being thrown into the trash kind of overshadows the rest. The obvious fact is that she was—or still is—a Hatake remains unaddressed. Ji doesn’t even consider changing that, considering how wide a berth the Hatake Clan is giving him.
So, abandonment is one solution, but he doubts it. Whenever he claws together enough focus to look inward, he doesn’t feel all that torn up about it. Abstractly outraged, maybe, but not in any real way. In truth, he finds it difficult to think of any of this as ‘real’. That is kind of the main problem. The feelings of displacement and anxiety apply to everything, not just his biological family.
Still, he manages to survive long enough to enter the Academy at six. By then, his potential Chakra pool has grown so much that some of it is even available for manipulation. Not much, not often, and not consistently, but enough that the is allowed to attend.
It baffled years away from his instructors. One moment he would be channelling, and the next something would click in his mind and all the Chakra would just get sucked up as a sponge. That, coupled with his choppy speech, inexplicably accented words and stark tendency to forget the beginning of a thought as he was thinking it, means they weren’t all that keen to keep him. He understands that his future role is to be a battering-ram sort of frontlines Taijutsu expert if the instructors can think up a way to beat the knowledge into him.
To their dubious credit, they try. The Academy has a steady stream of injured Chūnin and Jōnin who teach when they aren’t fit for the field. Something about Ji’s placidity and, well, insanity, inspires them to give it their all. Maybe it looks like he isn’t trying? Maybe they’re irritated by how often he spaces out and loses focus? Whatever it is, an unprecedented amount of attention is afforded him when usually he’d be shunted away to fend for himself.
The isolation, however, strengthens. He isn’t built to withstand that much aggression that consistently. He doesn’t understand why—Why any of this. It’s all wrong and strange and he isn’t—He is—Why is—Who is—
He comes across the tiny, insane child on a random night, on one of his nightly walks. He walks a lot, does Ji, both to avoid the other children in the barracks and to work out extra physical energy.
The boy is—
Ji’s mind shrieks, tugging him in several directions. Fear and panic are at the forefront of the flood. Confusion and hatred are next, which is not ideal, especially with how evenly they are matched. It’s only the oddly detached, grown-up part—typically the cause of most of his grief—that manages to snap out of it enough to notice the boy is—
He is tiny, skinny and alone. The twist of his Chakra is—Whatever it is he is trying to do, it’s not working, and it’s sending him further and further into insanity. On and on, the boy is gathering what Chakra he has—less on each try—and every time, the technique sputters and dies.
It’s breaking him, he can see. For some reason, this small, well-dressed Clan-brat is half a step away from a complete mental breakdown, and Ji can’t for the life of him figure out what the fuck is going on.
But, well—It’s a kid in distress. A small, Clannish kid with sunken, slitted eyes, bony wrists and Chakra screaming with so much focused misery, it’s kind of making Ji uncomfortable.
He’s not great on the Chakra front, but—
“Here,” he says, focusing. Blended channelling is the first thing they taught them. Chakra transfers are messy and inefficient, but pair-channelling for a specific technique is easy.
The boy-child sneers at him, lip curled to reveal small, curved fangs that, one day, won’t be as small and cute as they are.
He rolls his eyes. The kid is adorable and tragic and important somehow, but not so much that he’d force himself to talk more than he has to. “Here.” Even that one word sounds weird, all gloopy and slow and round.
Because the kid is insane, he accepts the Chakra, fails to do the technique and bites him—!—before fleeing. It’s, objectively, adorable, and he accepts the fever from the kid’s venom as the necessary price. It only lasts for an hour or so, too, so that’s not a big deal.
He makes it a part of his routine. The boy doesn’t try to seek him out—and thank fuck for that because most of the time, Ji is surrounded by adults who are incredibly comfortable with violence, and that’s not something he wants to expose the boy to—and he doesn’t stop petulantly biting, scratching or squeezing him when he fails to do whatever it is he wants to. On the other hand, he throws gear at Ji’s head and refuses to take it back later. High-quality gear tailored to him, even. Snake-boy is about half his size and a sixth of his volume, even if they’re about the same age give or take a year or two. The body armour is new and made to Ji’s measurements. It’s all very wholesome.
Ji may be becoming a little territorial about the kid. As weeks and days and months go by, he truly integrates him into his life, as a nice, stress-free part of his day. A sort of reward, even, or a shield against a difficult time ahead. Snake-boy never talks, he is about as wild as he’s seen a human be, he is crazier than Ji is by a mile, and still, he manages to survive. If being in normal society is this difficult for Ji, it has to be a hundred times more difficult for him, and still, he gets up every day and forges on, no matter what.
It’s good. It’s cute. It’s about the only thing keeping him together because his mind is well and truly splintering. Whatever it was that began to happen is coming to a close.
In another world, it’s possible he’d graduate the year he turned eight. Politics aside, everybody knows he’s at least half-Hatake. He looks it, too, considering the malnutrition in his early childhood didn’t prevent him from being easily a head taller than his age mates. The village didn’t get to where it is by not maximising the return on its investment. That said—
The otherness in his mind has been shifting since the get-go, but recently, shift feels more like grow. It is difficult to pour all those disparate bits and pieces of insight together, but recently—Ji’s mind likes analogies. It likes comparisons. It likes the idea of things fitting together; of universal laws, applicable to all things. Where this notion came from is one among the many mysteries, but what it means practically is that he is trying to apply his understanding of the world in a fundamentally unknowable situation.
How do you rationalise going insane, because surely that’s what’s going on? Before, insanity had the good grace to stay in his subconscious. Now, it’s grown enough to creep up and up and up, into his conscious awareness. The tendrils of other are potent, complex and concrete in a way that makes them, well. Valid. As valid as any other thought he has, which is probably not much, considering.
The whole thing is making him spaz out even more than usual. The instructors, such as they are, aren’t happy with his insanity racking up and do their best to drag him back to the straight and narrow, as it were. It’s not all that successful. After a few weeks, he can’t even understand their instructions, much less follow them. A few weeks more, and he doesn’t even notice them. When they kick him out completely, he figures it’s well-deserved.
Things don’t become easier, after. The boiling in his head is—Well, colloquially, he’d call it unbearable, but he bears it somehow. A big part of why he survives, he thinks, is that his mind gave up most of its higher functions such as forming memories, telling time, or interpreting the sensory data it receives. On the negative side, how he managed to find and consume food is a mystery. In rare glimpses of passing lucidity, he thinks he sees the snake-boy around. That is, overall, extremely unlikely, especially when the hallucinations are taken into account.
Time passes, probably. He has no awareness or interest in how long it was. Whatever metamorphosis is happening to him is nearing the crescendo, he’s pretty sure. His Chakra hurts, which is not something he would have thought to associate with energy but there it was. It feels like he’s asking too much of it, or like he’s not asking the right things, or something, because it’s turning on him. It’s—He’s pretty sure it’s changing him; how trippy is that? Why would it do that? He’s not telling it to.
Well, so. To be fair, maybe he’s crazy, and he is telling it to do it? That, honestly, seems like a valid explanation.
The how’s of his survival are matched with the why’s. It’s not obvious to him why he should subject his sorry self to this comprehensive and bizarre sequence of terrors, but he does. Why? Is it just the inborn instinct to survive? He doubts it. He’s a suicidal little shit, always has been. Plus, he doesn’t buy all the usual fears about suicide—how it was immoral and a curse and a shame on your family line or whatever the fuck. He’s worryingly certain that the only thing that happens after you die is that your soul goes and joins all other souls in a place that’s not but also is and you just—Yeah. You just.
That said, there is the snake-boy to consider. He’d like to see what it is that he was trying to do so hard. There’s also the distant possibility of one day booking it out of this weird fucking village and settling down to raise abraxa—To raise what? Birds? Horses? What?
James Potter wakes up in a strange place, in the body of a seven-year-old orphan boy called Ji. Well, kind of. James Potter is Ji. Somehow, that is a distinction he is both aware of and is comfortable with. Comforted by, even. He is Ji, now. His soul in James Potter’s body is a different whole from his soul in Ji’s body. This is, empirically, true.
Alright. So. He is Ji and Ji is him and he is not James Potter of House Potter. He is Ji.
Alright, Morgana’s tits, that’s enough.
This is going to be a strange fucking ride, he can already tell.
His snake-child—and he finally understands why he has always felt so parental about the mite—is watching him with his usual deranged intensity. He looks like he’s been crying, maybe, and definitely like he’s been digging long cuts into his upper arms.
Poor kid. Looking back, it’s clear he came looking for him when he disappeared and had kept him alive, somehow. Took him to his Clan Compound and everything. Ji certainly never saw the inside of a building this fancy this time around.
He flashes the boy a half-smile and tries to centre himself. Alright. So. You are—You are Ji. You have one (1) child. You have no money, family willing to accept you, resources, skills or contacts. You and your child are stuck in a violent, terrible place where tiny babies are left to starve in the streets or, if they are strong, to a murder school where they will learn to murder people. For money. Unquestionably. Because Will of Fire.
Alright.
He looks inwards and finally has something good to learn. All that Chakra? All that inaccessible mental space and effort and fog and insanity? His brain was trying to cope with having an adult mind shoved inside. Now?
He’s got oodles of it. Easily a grown man’s worth.
He waves the boy over and focuses, so used to the technique by now he is genuinely surprised when the usually sputtering glow is bright and fierce and faintly red. Huh. Maybe not Hatake, then? They should have white Chakra or some shit like that.
Irrelevant.
Because his snake-child has a truly one-track mind, he sneers at him but allows the distraction and goes for it—
—
—
—And succeeds. Summoning, The little fucking idiot was trying to summon at age fucking zero. The suicidal foetus has been trying to summon a Noble Spirit what the fuck—
The serpent takes one look at him, at Ji, back to the snake-boy, and transports all three of them to wherever the fuck Summoning Serpents go.
Merlin fucking wept.
“So.” What. How? Where. Why? “Ah. I mean. Goodness me, what a to-do.”
“Interesting,” the serpent replies. Kind of a serpent. A very bold, fuck-off version of a serpent fond of pipes and cushions, so. Not that much of a serpent at all. “Not a two-spirit, then. Just very, very unlucky.”
Hey, now. “Hey now.” Right, Potter, pull yourself together. You’re better than this. “That’s not fair. I think I’m very lucky.”
“Do you?” The serpent dismisses him with great poise, as it turns to look at James’—no, Ji, get it together Potter, fuck, no—Snake-child. Said snake-child is weeping, almost completely obscured from sight by a wiggling mass of serpents, some larger than others. It’s very upsetting. “You brought our son to us. We are grateful.”
Well. “You say yours,” he says because he’s never once given up his claim after he had made it. “But, I mean. The kid has been mine for a while.”
“Yours?” Serpents, James learns, are great at scoffing. “And who are you?”
Ah. “Well played,” he says. “I would claim it doesn’t matter who I am. I am me. And I as me have claimed the kid.” Boy, your syntax is a disgrace. “So, y’know.”
“I don’t.”
Fucking—
“The important thing is that I didn’t bring anyone anywhere,” he says, voice as firm as he can make it. “My kid wanted to come here, and I helped him. That doesn’t say anything about my commitments to him or willingness to leave him alone with Spirits I don’t know from Modred.”
“Interesting.”
Fuck you, too.
Because that’s how these things go, James’ snake-child’s tragic backstory comes out in fits and starts and it’s even worse than he imagined. Apparently, his family got ambushed by someone or other, and the kid was the only survivor. Somehow, he made it to Konoha and spent every moment awake trying to connect to his remaining family.
“Fuck, kid,” he says helplessly. “That’s—” He shivers. Last of a Noble House? Familiar. “Yeah.”
“You are the Orochimaru, now,” the purple-gold snake says. Declares. “Whatever you would have been before, you are Orochimaru now.”
His kid—Orochimaru—nods. “I know.”
Lovely.
“And you,” the purple-gold snake says. “You’ve shed your skin and with it the slave name. Which do you claim now?”
“The what?”
James blinks at the furious boy-child, who accepted the loss of his identity easily as anything but has a problem about a nameless orphan not coming with a meaningful name. “Slave name is a bit on the nose,” he says slowly. “But I was called Ji. Boy.”
“That is not all you were called.”
He rolls his eyes. “I was also called James. Upon reflection, the fact that it meant supplanter or replacer, is also a bit on the nose, but there we are.”
“Before,” Orochimaru says, blinking. “When?”
“Before I died.” He cocks his head. This will be interesting. “I was alive before this life.”
“Reincarnation is not a novel concept,” the purple-gold serpent says with every marker of long-suffering tedium. “What is different is that you remember it.”
Yeah. “I wouldn’t recommend it, personally.” He really wouldn’t. “It’s very disorienting.” Hah.
“Is that why you were—” Orochimaru pauses, frowning, visibly searching for words. “Strange.”
Well. “In part,” he says honestly. “I am also very strange, y’know. Overall.”
The serpent snorts but relaxes. It seems his willingness to be straight with the kid has won him some points. Cool. Cool? Cool.
“What were you before?”
That is a very, very good question. He sighs. “Something similar to what we are now,” he says, see-sawing his hand. “Kind of. If you saw me, you’d not know I was a different species.”
“But you—were,” the kid replies, squatting his eyes a little. James considers, for the first time, that his kid is some sort of genius, most likely. He’s a tiny baby who already summons and can understand concepts like a rebirth, death, and multiple universes. “How did you die?”
Ruthless little snake. “I was killed,” he says easily enough. He isn’t all that fussed about it.
“Why?”
“A—” He’s about to say bad guy and he hesitates. That sort of thinking was and is appropriate for England and Earth but not for Elemental Nations and Konoha. Giving the kid ideas about good and bad in a world so overwhelmingly ruthless will only end in heartache. “My enemy wanted to kill my baby. My wife and I died defending him.”
Orochimaru’s already wide eyes glint with admiration. “That is a good reason to die,” he declares.
“I like to think so.” Kind of. It’s difficult to say. “We succeeded, too. Sprang a trap and killed the bastard, and he didn’t see it coming for a moment.”
Orochimaru nods. The idea of traps would suit what James had come to understand of his character. “Good.”
“I like to think so.” You’re repeating yourself. “So—”
“Formalities must be observed,” the big white boss snake says. “The naming ceremonies.”
James nods. Done, right? The kid already picked a name, didn’t he? It was all sorts of meaningful and emotional. So they can—
Oh. Ooh.
Oh, for him.
Not being an idiot, he refuses to take part in the ensuing circus. Names are names, he doesn’t care much. Names are for people, and he’s not all that sold on the idea of being a human these days. In fact—
Orochimaru names him Jiraiya, and he has to laugh long and hard when he explains the kanji. What a cynical little monster, honestly. Where does he get it from?
“Cheers, kid,” he says, smiling. “That’ll do.” It might even be better than James, honestly. His old name doesn’t feel right, here, but it was better than the straight-up boy.
“It suits you,” the old white snake. “Misleading and silly, hiding your monstrousness in plain sight.”
Jiraiya rolls his eyes. “As opposed to hiding it in—what?”
The snake whacks him with the tip of its tail and continues as if he hadn’t spoken.
“Now, Jiraiya-kun and Orochimaru-kun, we decide where you go next.”
“Where we go?” Orochimaru cocks his head in a way that highlife the similarities between birds and reptiles. “Konoha, where else?”
Jiraiya wouldn’t stop the frown that wants to form even if he could. “Yuck, Konoha. Ew. Pfui.”
The gold of Orochimaru’s eyes hardens. “You want to leave me?”
Merlin wept. “I never said that,” he says as patiently as he can. “I just hate that place. It’s so—fucked up.”
“I will be a great Shinobi and I will understand the secrets of the world,” Orochimaru says, possibly apropos of nothing.
“I’m sure you will, bunny,” he says. “But I don’t like violence and killing and lying. So. I think I’ll stick to what I know.”
“And what is that?”
He re-settles his shoulders, a smirk touching his lips. “Chaos, mostly.”