Disclaimer: Naruto and Déjà vu no Jutsu belong to Kishimoto Masashi and Vixen Tail, respectively. I have an idea, internet access, and too much free time.
Yamada Tarō, former jōnin-sensei of Team Four, now-captain of Cell Four, slumped against the tree trunk with a sigh. "It's nice to see nothing has changed," he remarked dryly, watching two of his former students engage in a rather one-sided shouting match.
The final member of his cell chuckled from her perch further out on the tree branch. "They enjoy antagonizing each other too much to stop," Uchiha Akiko agreed, Sharingan-red eyes scanning the forest around them. It wasn't the Byakugan by any means, but it was better than nothing. "Takeo's really getting into it, too; he's using that 'unflappable doctor' tone."
"And nothing riles Daisuke up like someone who doesn't react," Tarō sighed, "That's going to get him killed in the Land of Earth."
"It almost has, a couple of times," the kunoichi replied, watching the argument with a fond smile.
Tarō took a second to be thankful once again that he'd gotten an Uchiha that acted like a normal person as a student.
"I thought you were going to work on thinking before you act, Daisuke," he called down, "Something about not needing to be rescued by a girl anymore?"
His former student sputtered indignantly for a moment before glaring at his snickering teammates. "Why am I the one getting called out?" he complained, "Akiko's the one who joined ANBU!"
Akiko was very definitely avoiding her sensei's pointed look as she took to scanning the trees again. "It was while you were out of the village," she muttered into the loud silence, "Besides, it's not like I'm–" Her justification cut off as she tensed up, focusing on some distant point.
"Akiko?"
Now that he was looking, he could see the difference in his old student. The way she held herself, how she positioned herself in the group; like at any second she was going to vanish into the shadows. He wondered why he hadn't noticed it earlier, and then mentally smacked himself because not noticing was the whole point.
"I thought I saw something." Akiko's tone was staccato, her voice clipping as she spoke. Takeo and Daisuke's argument completely stopped, their gazes fixed on the two sitting above them in the tree. "Yes, I can see their chakra; three people, maybe four. They're coming up fast."
Tarō stifled a groan. Was it really too much to ask for a nice, easy, quiet patrol around the village to catch up with his students? The war shouldn't even be anywhere near here.
"You and I, Akiko," he stated flatly as he stood up, "are going to talk after this is over."
His former student had the decency to at least look embarrassed. More probably out of being caught than any actual shame, but he'd take what he could get. "Yes, sensei."
"Ooo..." her brown-haired teammate teased, "Akiko's in trouble..."
With a momentary glare at Daisuke, the Uchiha turned back to face the Cell's captain. "We should try and ambush them; I don't think they've noticed us."
"We should make sure they're an enemy, first," Tarō pointed out wryly, "But yes, if they don't know we're here, it would be prudent to keep it that way for now."
The other half of Cell Four took the hint, vanishing into the trees themselves with a quick shunshin. Akiko jumped further into the trees as well, while Tarō ran through the hand signs for the Camouflage Jutsu. Some users, he knew, had gotten to the point they only needed the Tiger seal to pull it off, but he wasn't that practiced yet.
Yamada heard them before he saw them: a child's heavy panting and crashing through any impeding undergrowth, and the quiet wish of displaced air as the tailing ninja leapt from branch to branch. Wherever they were from, they were toying with the kid. That made them unlikely to be friendly.
The child finally crashed through the bushes into the small clearing Cell Four had just been in, cradling a hand to their chest, and the first thing Tarō noticed was how long the kid's hair was. It almost reached the ground and was so tangled and matted with dirt and (what the hell, is that blood?) other gunk that he couldn't tell what color it actually was supposed to be. The picture just continued to deteriorate as he took in the tiny one's filthy, emaciated features and ridiculously oversized, beyond threadbare shirt (just pretend those aren't bloodstains, they're not there) that looked like the only thing the kid was wearing.
The shinobi following the child appeared between one blink and the next, one rather lanky Kumo-nin appearing in front of the kid and kicking them hard enough in the chest to worry the Leaf jōnin about broken bones. He wasn't imagining the aborted lunge that had one of the upper tree branches rustling overhead, but he couldn't tell which of his cell it was. The Kumo squad was either supremely sure of themselves or had no idea what they were doing in a forest, because none of them reacted to the noise.
Another of the shinobi who landed almost exactly where Akiko had just sat (in a hilarious stroke of luck) sighed. "Mugoi, just because your parents hated you doesn't mean you have to live down to your name," he stated wearily.
"Why not?" the gangly one sneered, "Little sonuvabitch ain't given us nothing but trouble since we found him."
The Cloud captain took a deep breath, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. "Just...don't break him, okay?"
The aptly-named Mugoi grinned maliciously at the kid. "Maybe I break his legs, so he can't run no more."
Before he could follow through with this, a dark blue blur came down on his shoulders with a sickening crack. Tarō lunged forward almost before he'd registered Akiko slamming Mugoi into the ground, his kunai severing the spinal cord just beneath the base of the captain's skull. He heard the sound of muffled blows as Takeo and Daisuke ganged up on the final enemy shinobi.
Grinding her knee in between Mugoi's shoulder blades, Akiko placed a kunai just behind his jaw as she brought her head closer to his. "Break his legs, huh?" she hissed into his ear as his pained whimpers died down, "Maybe I break your spine."
"Come on, Akiko, put him out of his misery;" Yamada cajoled, rifling through the (technically not quite yet) dead captain's pack, "don't be cruel."
Straightening, the Uchiha shoved the kunai up through the gap between the shinobi's jaw and the rest of his skull. As she wiped the blood off on his shirt, she blinked in surprise before snorting and rising to her feet. "...Wow, sensei. That was several different shades of horrible."
"I couldn't resist."
Takeo and Daisuke reappeared at that point, their running fight having obviously finished by the last Kumo-nin draped over the latter one's shoulder.
"Please tell me we managed to take at least one prisoner for T&I," Tarō asked as he reluctantly admitted that he wasn't going to find a physical copy of whatever orders these jokers had been given, and he'd just killed the captain. Idly, he wondered if the Raikage hadn't sent them on a suicide mission to get rid of them. Given their village's previous near-success at kidnapping the last Uzumaki some years ago, the Konoha jōnin couldn't really fault them for thinking they could get away with something similar again.
…And now he felt old, because that had happened back before he'd finally made chūnin.
Takeo affected a look of mock hurt. "We're big boys now, sensei; we can handle ourselves."
The kid, who'd by then managed to shakily stand up, chose that point to limp over to the only female member of the cell and hold out the hand he'd previously been cradling to his chest.
"Ow."
Bemused, because the tiny one seemed completely unconcerned about the dead body slowly leaking blood at his feet, Tarō watched as an equally-confused Uchiha kunoichi knelt down and gently took the little thing's hand.
"Takeo?" she said conversationally, "I'm no doctor, but this looks like a dislocated thumb."
"I don't believe you can't tell, given how often you dislocated mine," the medic grumbled, ambling over and taking the child's hand from Akiko. "Yup, dislocated thumb. Rope burn on his wrists, too."
The kid just gave him a blank look before turning back to Akiko and reaching out with his other hand to grab at her hair. The surprised, hurt look on the tiny one's face when she grabbed it with her own had the chūnin crumbling almost instantly, Tarō noticed amusedly, as she let him card his fingers through her hair.
"Kaa-san..." the kid suddenly blurted, fixated on the lock of hair he had gripped in his off hand, unnoticing of the way Akiko froze like a deer in bright light. Daisuke glanced at Tarō who just motioned for him to ignore it.
There was a short, sharp pop as Takeo used the distraction to manipulate the child's thumb back into position before using the Mystical Palm technique to speed up the rest of the healing process. By the time the kid had even reacted to the reduction with an unintelligible shout – "Muthr fukr!" – he was all but finished. Tarō had to admit he was quietly impressed with how well the tiny one handled it; he wasn't bawling his eyes out, at least.
Silently jumping down to the forest floor after sealing away the body, Yamada watched his team try and figure out what to do with the painfully skinny child. Akiko looked internally torn over something as she watched the tiny one experiment with his newly-healed thumb's range of motion. Daisuke was trying to figure out how to extract the dead body of out from underneath their feet without drawing attention to it. Takeo, whose hands glowed green as he used medical jutsu to diagnose anything else wrong with the little one, was starting to look uneasy.
"Something you want to share with the group?" The jōnin prodded. The kid's gaze jumped up to his as he spoke, and Tarō quickly tamped down on the urge to look away, even as staring back felt almost like he'd been kicked in the sternum. Those eyes were hard, a wild intelligence glinting in their golden depths. No child should ever have eyes that old.
Looking up, he noticed everyone looking him expectantly, apparently waiting on a response to whatever had just been said. "Sorry, didn't quite catch that; start over again?"
With a sigh that sounded more irritated than everyone knew it actually was, Takeo acquiesced. "He had a dislocated thumb and rope burns on his wrist, but you already knew that. His limp is due to a rolled left ankle, he has about half a dozen fractures that haven't properly healed and a, frankly, disturbing number of bite and slash scars all over his body...most of them on his forearms and hands." With another, heavier, sigh, Takeo rubbed the back of his head. "It's almost a miracle he's even standing, given everything I just said and what has got to be severe malnourishment."
"Those scars," Tarō mused, his eyes raking over the raised skin as the child reached for a ration bar Akiko had in her hands, "Defensive wounds, you think?"
"That'd be my guess," Takeo agreed, watching as the boy cautiously sniffed at the (unequivocally nasty-tasting) bar before taking an exploratory bite.
"So, wait;" Daisuke interrupted, confusion written across his face, "the kid actually is a boy?"
Tarō shrugged. "I was only using it because that's what these brilliant examples of situational awareness were using," he admitted, kicking the trussed-up captive at their collective feet lightly.
With a very put-upon eye-roll that fooled no one, Takeo pinched the bridge of his nose. "Yes, the child is male."
Cell Four all turned to look at the child, who froze as he tried to stuff half the ration bar in his mouth at once. The look on the little one's face was just too amusing for Tarō; he looked like he'd just been caught out doing something the wrong way.
"You are going to be one very pretty boy," the jōnin couldn't resist quipping.
First off, to those of you coming from the original version, I'd like to apologize for how long it took to finish this one chapter. I don't know why it was so hard to just sit down and bang this out, it's not like I didn't have an idea of what I wanted to do with it.
To those of you joining us for the first time: welcome to the Madhouse.
Moving on; I've made more than a few changes to bring this more properly in-line with the Mesuji-verse (which the honorable Vixen Tail did green-light before I started) including moving our little protag's age group up half a decade or so because I wanted to make use of a certain pasty eye-mad pedo-snake. I have all of jack-shit medical experience, so I have no idea how realistic any of what came out of Takeo's mouth is. I more or less yoink'd it right out of the Arrow pilot.
And final note, including Kushina and the future Hyūga affair, this makes Kumo 0 for 3 in the Land of Fire. They're really incompetent at this whole kidnapping thing.
PFCDontKnow, Out.