"I could never hate him. Alvarcus is my favorite student, even to this day. Ask me again in a month and the answer will be the same. Ask again in a year, a decade, a lifetime and my answer will always be that I could never hate him."
...
"Alvarcus would love to hear that from you." Shirokumo says happily. "Could you write him a letter? It doesn't have to be all of that, but please? Alvarcus is... he's not the same anymore. You've seen him, he's changed. He knows it too and it's breaking him. So please? Write to him."
"I can't." Kakashi says. "The Hokage herself has specifically forbidden me from writing to him, she is very insistent on cutting him off from Konoha. She's taken him holding the other gennin hostage very harshly. At first I thought it was strange but then I realized something. Tsunade started to see him as more than just a shinobi, she started to see him as a nephew."
"Don't you mean grandchild?" Shirokumo smirks. "News flash: She's old."
"Nope, definitely meant nephew. There's no way I'd risk her hearing me call her the 'o' word, even indirectly." Kakashi trembles in fear. "Anyways, she took his leaving hard. She's lost a long list of people, and on the day Alvarcus left it grew longer. Then he was back, sort of, and she was so happy. But his actions sealed the deal, she's disappointed in him. Severely. This is his punishment."
"That's nice and all, but why won't you write to him?" Shirokumo asks again. "Kakashi he needs something, anything! Even if it's something as simple as 'I don't hate you!' That's all I'm asking for!"
"I can't, orders of the Hokage." Kakashi smirks. "But she can't order you around, can she?"
"I'm not following." Shirokumo is slightly confused. He can't figure out what Kakashi's angle is.
"She holds no sway over you, none at all. So what is stopping you from telling Alvarcus all about this conversation? I can't write to him, but you can talk to him in my place. Tell him what we talked about, tell him everything I said. The good, the bad, everything. Leave nothing out."
"Ha! I like it!" Shirokumo chortles to himself. "That's great!"
"It'll only work the once." Kakashi sadly says. "I have to report that you were here, I can spin this as me trying to lull you into a false sense of security so I can CHIDORI!"
Kakashi's hand glows blue with electricity as he lunges at the spider. His attack is so strong that it blasts right through the floor of his apartment, leaving behind a fist sized hole to the room beneath.
Shirokumo was long gone before the attack even got close to him.
"There." Kakashi dusts himself off as he prepares to leave for the Hokage's Tower. "I kept my honor to my Kage and my student."
...
"He said all of that?" I shakily ask again. "He doesn't hate me? Even with everything I've done?"
"He never could." Shirokumo gladly clarifies. "He cares about you too much."
"Thank you for doing this Shirokumo. Really. I feel so much better knowing that." I'm not lying. The only reason I didn't want to know is because I knew how much it would crush me to hear that he hates me. I knew that should he say those words, I couldn't take it. It wasn't worth the risk to me.
"Think nothing of it. It's the job of the Summons to look out for their Summoner, just like how it's the Summoner's job to look out for the Summons. It's a two way street."
"Thank you. Again." I softly say, then my voice's tone changes. It's not soft and thankful, it's harsh and gravelly. "Don't do something this important without consulting me first. It worked out this time, but we can't know for sure about the next time."
"Yeah no." Shirokumo waves me off with a pair of legs. "You come first to me. If I can do something to help you then I'm going to do it whether you want it to happen or not."
"Dammit." I heave out a huge sigh. I'm not winning this argument. "Can't blame me for trying?"
"Sure I can! Now go sleep. You look like hell. Did you sleep at all last night?"
"Nope. I was up all night working on something ridiculous."
"Typical." He vanishes in a cloud of smoke.
...
The Next Day
"Alvarcus." Orochimaru heaves out a long and loud sigh.
"Yes, Orochimaru-sama?" I innocently respond. It's time to play the ignorant fool.
"What happened to my training field?" Orochimaru asks as he lifts his gaze up from me to stare out at the trashed field. We're at the one where I went a little bit seal crazy. In other words: it's broken beyond normal repair. There are craters of every sized, cracks along the walls from various projectiles – which was me a few times – and a whole lot of destruction.
"Well I if I had to guess, I would say that someone took to their training a little bit too enthusiastically." I offer up an innocent shrug with a happy smile. "I wonder who it was."
"Yes." Orochimaru levels a skeptical look at me. "Who ever could it be? Perhaps one of the only three people here that can cause such widespread destruction? That narrows it down to myself, Sasuke and you."
"Really? Just us? Couldn't Jirobo do this too? He's pretty strong in his own right." I ask in an attempt to throw off Orochimaru.
"You're correct of course, but Jirobo would need to go to the second level of my Curse Seal and then he'd require medical attention for keeping it active long enough and abusing it past it's intended limits to cause all of this. Since I know he wasn't in the medical ward recently I can effectively rule him out. Hence, the three I listed earlier."
"What about... wow. I don't really know that many people here." It seems that Orochimaru has done a good job of keeping Sasuke and me hidden. Although I have traumatized some guards recently.
"Yes. And I know that I did not do this, I have much more important things to do than trashing one of my own training fields. On to Sasuke next, while he is capable of this it is not his style. He would have to push himself far, much farther than he usually does, to cause such widespread damage. That leaves..."
Orochimaru pins me in a yellow stare.
"Me?" I say in obviously faked shock. "I would never! Well unless I was pretty mad and decided to channel that anger effectively and work to improve myself by covering up one of my glaring weaknesses by trying to recreate a seal that's way out of my league and that is something I would never do unless I wasn't in sound mind and sound body."
Orochimaru heaves out another long and loud sigh.
"What am I going to do with you?" He mutters to himself. "Just fix it. It'll be a good lesson for you. Instead of focusing on wild and uncontrolled -"
"Hey this was totally controlled!"
"- destruction you can create. It'll take focus and care. Consider it today's lesson."
"Come on! Can't you make one of your minions do it for me? I have better things to do!" I whine. Hey, he calls me his child so I'm going to act like one every once in a while. "I've barely scratched the surface of time-space seals and I'm pretty sure that I'll need to base the sword off of them to make it work correctly! Well more of space than time, I'm trying to seal away countless people. I can't have a limit on how many I can seal so I've got to tweak and mess around with space a bit. So I made a seal that deals with a large emphasis on space. Oops. Uh... forget I said that?"
"You tried to recreate a time-space seal without my supervision?" Orochimaru hisses out in anger. "ANSWER ME!"
"No." I meekly squeak. "I didn't try."
"Don't you dare lie to me!"
"I succeeded."
"I will not lose you to a seal malfunction – come again?" Orochimaru's voice does a complete 180 degree turn from livid to surprise. "You... succeeded?"
"Well yeah." I cower before the enraged Sannin. "That crater that looks perfectly spherical is the result of a success. It's why I stopped. The sad thing is I'm still not done with it, it's just a piece of a side project I'm working on."
"You continue to surpass my expectations for you!" Orochimaru let's out a hearty laugh. "Kukukuku, a time-space seal already! You are just wonderful!"
"Uh... thanks?" I think it's okay now?
...
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