Great Lakes & Expectations chapter 14

He only let her lay that way for about ten minutes before he gave up. 

“You’re really gonna live in the tax shack?” He asked, voice nearly cracking at the end. 

Oh no. She may have broken him. 

She rolled over and opened one eye. “Is this not your house, the house in which I, your daughter, am expected to live?”

He squinted.

She huffed, and sat up. “Why wouldn’t I want to live in such a luxurious estate, so rich in…” she looked out one of the many cracks, and couldn’t reign in the look of disgust, “nature.” 

God. There were definitely mukade and venomous snakes in there. Yike yike yike.

“It’s like camping. Every day,” he agreed, definitely now catching on that she was giving him shit. 

She gestured emphatically. “My very favorite thing! I’m very hardy, you know. Hunting and killing animals, living in the dirt…”

“Yeah, that does sound like you.” He leaned forward, reaching for his vest. 

She clutched it tighter and made eye contact. 

He backed off, hands raised. 

“Should we actually find you a place to live, then?” He asked, scratching the back of his head. His long hair shook. 

“That would be good.” She didn’t move. 

He squatted and was evidently in thought. 

“You mean this was actually your plan for housing me?” She asked. “Or was there another option?”

He grunted. “No, of course not. You’d die in a week. This thing isn’t even meant to be lived in at all. Tsunade-chan and I built it to avoid the extra taxes like… twenty years ago.”

“You can tell, by the craftsmanship.”

He looked defensive. “We were really drunk. Sober, it would be way better.”

She doubted that at least a little. Competent, they were. Master builders? No. Tsunade-sama’s specialty seemed to be in destroying homes, not building them.

He sighed. “Looks like I have to finally build a house.”

“Why do you even have this?” She asked. It was weird. Like, he obviously didn’t live in town. He traveled. But to have literally only a tax shack as a shelter in his home country seemed…

Well. It was really fucking sad, is what it was. He obviously didn’t want to be here, and didn’t make any effort to leave something here he’d want to come back to.

Why did he and Tsunade want her to live here, again? They obviously longed for the freedom of being literally anywhere else. 

He shrugged. For a second, he looked a little vulnerable. 

It made her mildly uncomfortable. 

“Thought I’d have a family someday, bought the land after the war.” He looked around, and pulled a weed out of the dirt floor. “But I didn’t get married, so…”

Oh no. That was profoundly sad. 

Regina eyed the door, hoping for an opportunity to escape feelings. 

He sat quietly for a second, then straightened his shoulders. 

“I didn’t know I had such a cute little daughter then!” He launched forward. 

Regina had to make a choice. Protect her hair, which he was doubtless going to tangle and ruin, or continue to hold onto the vest- which was mostly her prize for dealing with him. She couldn’t even wear it. The shoulders were way too big. She just wasn’t gonna let it go.

She chose the vest. 

He obviously did not anticipate that choice, moving for the fabric on the floor before diverting to ruffle her hair with way too much relish. 

He laughed- it was loud. So loud. 

“Good kid.” He scooped her up into his chest. 

“I’m an adult.” She said, into his shoulder. “I’m over twenty years old.”

“A baby,” he soothed, “just a little baby with beautiful hair like her father.” He rubbed his horrible face into her hair, evidently smelling it like her parents used to.

“Christ.” She groaned. 

He obviously understood the tone. He bounced her a bit. 

Then he put her down. 

“Are you really gonna keep that?” he gestured to his vest, obviously wanting to grab it. 

“Maybe.” She folded it up and held it to her stomach. “We’ll see.”

He walked her all the way out of the very ritzy district in which Jiraiya had built his snake-infested tax shack and back into the administrative area of the city. They were fairly close together, which made some sense. She noted that the apartment buildings and other housing were all in a circle around them, quite far from their bougie area. Some areas were more obviously run down than others.

“Oh, great. I wonder if there’s also gentrification in Hell Japan.”

She followed Jiraiya to an unassuming office near the Hokage tower, where someone registered his presence and immediately sprinted behind a door. 

They took seats in the lobby. Jiraiya examined a magazine, commenting on the articles. Regina took the opportunity to write in her journal- she was working on a short story. Having very little to read and no one to speak to in English was soul crushing. What was the point in having gotten so good at it, if she couldn’t use it?

“Rejina-chan. Reji-chan. Reji. Reji. Hey, Reji,” he needled, elbowing her gently. 

Dear God, he was really good at being annoying. She put down her notebook. 

“What?” 

He gestured to an article in the magazine. He was obviously beaming. “Look- there’s a review of my new book. They said it was a literary triumph.”

“That’s really good!” she said. He obviously thrived off positive reinforcement. “Who wrote it?”

“A fan.” He said, looking fond. “A very good fan.”

“Is it only a good review when they’re your fan already?” She asked. 

His bottom lip puffed out. “No, I get many good reviews. I’ve also gotten good notes on the book about you.”

She blanched. “Please don’t make it gross if it’s about me.”

“Never!” he clapped his hand on her shoulder. “I write only the most respectable and romantic adventures. What kinds of things do you think I write?”

“Tsunade said it was porn.” Regina said carelessly, opening up her notebook again. “And that your main love interests always look too much like her.”

He was quiet. Still affronted, but a little taken aback. 

Tsunade hadn’t said that last part. Regina doubted she’d ever read the damn things. 

A very stern-looking man came out to greet them and beckoned them back into an office. On the table was what looked like a floor plan. 

“Jiraiya-sama, Jiraiya-hime.” The man bowed deeply. “My name is Kamata Hiriyoshi. My apologies for the wait- we had to locate your house plans from the files.”

Jiraiya nodded. “Thank you very much. My daughter and I would like to see them again, and contract some builders, I think.”

Well, that was surprising. She thought they were waiting to like, rent an apartment. Evidently the tax shack was still the plan, it was just going to be a garden shed?

She examined the plans in front of her. It was fairly big, by Japanese standards. But very utilitarian. There was no real entryway for a tokonoma or greeting area. The kitchen was small and suffocating- it was essentially a hallway. There were four tatami rooms, measuring in 8 tatami per room. 

“Can we… change this?” She looked at Jiraiya. “Just a little.”

He cocked an eyebrow.

“The kitchen, for example, is smaller than I would like.” She directed that at Kamata-san. “I would like it to be bigger, with stone flooring.”

Jiraiiya was looking at her oddly. 

“Wood is ruined when it gets wet.” She shrugged. “I don’t like soggy floors.”

Kamata-san sat down immediately and pulled out another set of drawing paper, laying it over the original. 

“Is it ok?” She asked Jiraiya. 

He huffed and winced. “You’re the one that’s going to live there, but...”

“-I will pay for it.” She said. “I think I can.”

He looked a bit mystified, but nodded. 

They spent hours there. She put in a greeting room with a big tokonoma (which Jiraiya seemed to like- he seemed to aspire to fanciness) near the genkan and entryway, and added a second floor. She asked for privacy options, and Kamata-san produced options on door and window covers. 

“I would also… like for it to be up higher.” She stated. Damn, she was demanding.

Kamata-san took it in stride. It was fairly common for Japanese houses to be elevated, due to flood risk. “How high?”

She thought about the measurements, converting feet to meters to shaku. “About...ten shaku?” she asked, counting on her fingers. Shaku seemed to be about ⅓ of a meter. Or around a foot. 

Jiraiya choked a little. She patted his back. 

“...I don’t like snakes. They can’t scale stone, right?” She said, by way of explanation. 

“Unfortunately…” Kamata-san said, about to crush her hopes and dreams of a mini castle with no snakes in it. 

“-That’ll be expensive, but it should be good. A good idea.” Jiraiya cut him off. He redirected masterfully. “You see that, Regina-chan?” He pointed to a weird little circle on the map. 

“Yes.” 

“That’s why I bought that land.” He said, like he was confiding a great and powerful secret to her. “It has a natural hot spring on it.”

Her spine shot up straight.

“I want to go to there.”

He giggled. It was odd. He was so big. She didn’t think a man as big as a truck could giggle.

“So we elevate that to here…” he gestured with a pencil, “and attach it to there. And over there, by the bath.”

“Ohhh. Sugoi.” She marvelled. 

He was on a roll now. “I think we need a tea house.”

“For what?” She ventured. She didn’t drink matcha and she sure as shit wasn’t going to impress anyone with her manners. 

He shrugged. “For important people. And because we want one. We’re fancy.”

“We are fancy.” She agreed, slowly. “Can we get one of those kotatsu that is sunk into the floor?”

“A whaaat?” 

His eyes were wide. 

“They’re, um, like a slight layered pit in the tatami floor. It’s tatami at the bottom, and the table  can go in the deepest part. You can sit on the bench like a chair, and your feet are under the table. It’s supposed to be warmer because…” she tried to remember why. “Oh. Less air moving? It stays really warm.”

“Yeah, we need that -for reasons.” Her spirit dad said, pointing to the room off the kitchen. “Not in the entryway, that’s fancy. In the living area.”

“Yes.” She nodded. 

Kamata-san was scrawling frantically. When he was finally done, he held it up.

They inspected it. 

Jiraiya made a lot of changes and specifications for the onsen area- evidently it was going to be a three-pool affair. Then he looked at her, his face drained of all color, and immediately added a fence around the property, with a secondary aesthetic privacy fence around the onsen. 

She was getting a sense of a theme. It was suspicious as hell. 

“And a pretty garden, around here.” He gestured. “Around this area, and next to the decorative tea house.”

Oh, wow. He was *into* this. 

He had almost as many demands as she did- then he took her modifications and seemed to modify them. The kitchen island she’d asked for changed into a more aesthetic shape. The fancy room became a few jo bigger. 

Then something occurred to her.

“How hot or cold does Konoha become?” She asked, dreading the answer. 

“Really hot in summer, really cold in winter.” Jiraiya answered blandly. 

She frowned. She looked at Kamata-san. 

“Have you heard of… insulation?” She asked. 

He looked fearful. She liked it. 

When they went out to the front part of the office, the sun was starting to set. Of course, that only meant it was about 5 pm. 

“So, with these changes…” Kamata-san tapped at a calculator, as an assistant listed off charges and a team of people took the plans off to the finalized and printed. 

Jiraiya whistled, soft and low. 

The amount of money was large, for sure. Regina still had very little concept of the scale of the economy here, but it seemed like between her gambling winnings and what Jiraiya had given her, she always had so much left over. And she hadn’t even touched what Mifune-sama had given her. 

Regina pulled out her little magic papers and got out her bags of money. She handed them to Jiraiya, one after the other. Oh, hey, she’d gotten the purple bag back in Hot Water Country. That had been a good time. She wanted the bag back. 

She counted the bills out carefully, in stacks. 

Kamata-san looked uncomfortable, just staring. 

“Is something wrong?” She asked Jiraiya, emptying another bag. She was about half the way there, by her count. 

“No.” Jiraiya reassured her, dutifully holding an armful of bags. 

She finished counting and barely broke into her money from Iron. Damn, Tsunade was a hustler. It was unfortunate that her luck was so catastrophically bad.

Kamata-san took the money and sent an employee to put it away immediately. 

“Of course, furnishings are not included.” He said, sounding mildly apologetic. 

“Of course.” Jiraiya said, clearing his throat. He helped Regina put the rest of her money back into her magic paper. 

‘This is genuinely more money than I thought I would ever have in my life.’ Regina marvelled, not for the first time. She just hadn’t realized she had enough to build her own house. That was a scale she hadn’t comprehended before. 

“Does this cost include a genin team?” Jiraiya asked. “They usually do this work, right?”

Kamata-san paused in his scribbling. 

“We have our own tradesmen for the actual building and special work.” He allowed. “You are, of course, welcome to hire a genin team for the strength-based aspects. The first part of building would be creating the foundation, which without a genin team would take at least a month.”

Oh, her ten foot tall foundations. Regina probably could have foreseen that that would take time.

Well, you live and you learn. Plus she wanted her little castle. Speeding it up didn’t appeal, as long as she had somewhere to sleep in the interim. 

Which was a pretty important thing that she hadn’t considered. Surely, Jiraiya or someone had thought of that, since no one reasonably expected her to live in a drunkenly-constructed fire hazard.

They left the office, and Jiraiya took her back to the Hokage building, where they evidently filed a request and paid for what he called a C rank mission. The ANBU in the room looked just as creepy as ever, standing stock still in corners. 

The secretarial staff waved goodbye when they left, and Regina waved back. 

“Hey, um,” Regina paused. What the hell was she gonna call Jiraiya? Anything but Dad would be incredibly weird. 

She decided to avoid that conversation for now. 

“Where am I going to live while the house is being built?” She asked, drifting behind him. 

He shrugged. “Same place as now, probably, the diplomatic house. It’s not for that long, maybe a month or two.”

“And they won’t throw me out for a guest?” She asked, curious.

He snorted. “There’s more than one. And if that happened, Sensei would move you into the Hokage Mansion. He’s not going to let you disappear or something.”

That was mildly reassuring. And supported her earlier assessment of her being too important for one of those clan heads to murder without a problem. 

Ugh. Why was she remembering them? What a bunch of dicks. 

She glared back at the Hokage tower. 

“Remembering this morning?” He asked, slowing down to meet her side. “Were they just as awful as I remember?”

“How awful is that?” She asked, warily. 

“Rude, dismissive, very self-important, terrible manners except the few that have too good of manners, lack of personal style..” he rambled. 

“Oh, wow.” she commented. “Uh, not quite that bad. Some of them were nice.”

“That’s good!” He said, beaming. “They weren’t rude about you not being a shinobi?”

‘Of course they were.’

Her sour face must have answered for her. 

“Yeah, I thought so.” He huffed. 

He led her back to the diplomatic house, stopping by the door.

“I’ll be back to take you and Shizune-chan out to dinner, I gotta go do some things first.” He informed her, leaning down a bit to make eye contact.

“Okay,” Regina replied. Today had been oddly exhausting. Maybe just because of how stressful that meeting had been. She wanted to lie down under a fan for a nice nap. 

“Be good!” He told her, walking back out the gate before doing that shunshin thing away. 

She went inside the genkan, took off her shoes, and crawled to her futon. It was nice and cool and so soft…

She went to sleep almost immediately.