sleight of hand: II

Uchiha Yashiro had given Itachi a set of hastily-written notes and then gone home. "It's too late for me to go hunting," he had said, "but I'll join you in the morning if you haven't had any luck. Young eyes are better in the dark."

Itachi had accepted the excuse, but not without wondering at its motives. Then he had gone into the bakery to look at the crime scene with his own sharingan, read Yashiro's notes, and sent a junior officer to the Inuzuka family compound to ask for their best tracker to meet him outside the shop. Inuzuka Tsume was the tracker who appeared some time later with her dog Kuromaru. She nodded at Itachi once and went straight into the shop; Itachi waited outside with Tekka, who had come back to make a more thorough investigation of his own when Itachi and Tsume were finished, and they steered away the occasional gawker who had been attracted by the earlier commotion.

Tsume didn't take much longer to look at the scene than Itachi had; she came back out with Kuromaru and said, frowning, "Got a scent, but no trail, at least not from here - and not to here, either. It's like he showed up out of thin air and disappeared the same way."

"Difficult scent, too," said Kuromaru. "About all I can get out of it is 'male,' the rest is a mess. Something a little familiar about it, but I can't place what."

"Thank you," Itachi said, but his mind was occupied with his own impressions of the crime scene. Aunt Uruchi and Uncle Teyaki's bodies had been in the hall of the small apartment above the shop, outside a small room that might once have been a bedroom but was currently being used for storing boxes of non-perishable baking supplies. Several boxes had been dented or crushed; Uruchi and Teyaki's throats had been sliced wide open, likely with a kunai. Their blood had drenched the wall and floor, shining darkly in the moonlight, and the reek of it, familiar and terrible -

"Hey, kid, concentrate!" Tsume waved her hand in front of Itachi's face. "You said there was another scene? Maybe we can pick up a trail from there, there's nothing here."

"Yes, sorry," Itachi said. "This way, please - Tekka-san, can you make sure that the scene isn't disturbed?"

Tekka agreed, and Itachi led Tsume back to his house, where Mikoto and Shisui were waiting in the spare room with the radios. A few minutes of dedicated canine and Inuzuka investigation later, Tsume said, "Got it! Same scent as the bakery, plus a new one - whoever left the blood on the floor."

"That one's easier than the other," Kuromaru said with a fanged grin. "Male, mid-teens, injured but not too badly, a bit singed, low on chakra. There's a lot of other little smells mixed in, too, so I'd say this one at least was fresh from the end of a fight."

"Oh dear." Mikoto sighed and crouched by the bloodstains again to take another look. "And it's been so peaceful lately..."

"Eh, peace never lasts," Tsume said, shrugging. "I'm going to check outside for a trail, whoever's tagging along better get ready to move out - Mikoto, you go find a spot with good radio reception."

Itachi was still in his sleeping clothes; his ANBU armor was at headquarters, but he had his forehead protector and some old light mesh armor in his room that he put on along with his regular clothes and his usual armory of kunai, shuriken, short sword, and other tools. He meant to change quickly, but something was making him clumsy, shuriken slipping out of his fingers, fastenings refusing to close properly, a bitter frustrated taste filling his mouth.

When he was dressed he went outside and around the house to the window of the spare room to meet Shisui and Tsume. Shisui had already been in his police uniform and hadn't needed to change, but Kuromaru had vanished from Tsume's side; after a few moments he bounded down from the roof of the house next door. "Good solid trail," he announced, "least at first - could get tricky later, they're headed for the forest and the wall. Got about an hour's lead on us, I'd say, but I don't think they're moving very fast."

"Then we should go quickly," Itachi said. He was preparing to jump up to the roofs when Tsume grabbed his shoulder.

"What's the deal, kid?" she said. "Bad idea to rush when you're following an enemy trail, and it's not like they'd get past the wall without a fight, anyway. If we don't catch 'em, someone else will."

Itachi couldn't explain his need to hurry; it was simply there, tensing the muscles in his arms and legs, jangling in his nerves, whispering (find them find them find them) in the back of his mind.

Shisui came to his rescue. "He's just worried about the hurt one," he said, giving Itachi a light head-rub. "That's our Itachi, you know - always a soft touch. All he wants is to get the poor guy into a bed with some nice soup and bandages, right, Itachi?"

Tsume snorted, but didn't argue with him. "Turn your radios on and let's go," she said. "But don't rush. I have a feeling this ain't gonna be an easy trail."


In spite of Tsume's intuition, it was an easy trail to follow at first, at least for an Inuzuka's nose and two pairs of sharingan. It went straight over the roofs towards the south-eastern wall, not the most direct route, but one which avoided the Hyuuga clan's stronghold; Tsume and Kuromaru took care to double-check the scent trail with physical traces, pausing frequently to do so. Each time they stopped, Itachi's restlessness grew, until at the edge of the woods between the outer road and the wall Shisui pulled him aside while Tsume and Kuromaru went a short distance ahead. "You have got to relax a little, Itachi," he said quietly. "You're starting to put Kuromaru and Tsume-san on edge, and I don't really want to be out here with a nervy Inuzuka and her gigantic dog, okay? And it's not like you."

"I'm sorry. It's only -" But he couldn't explain it to Shisui, either, the facts of the case that were so straightforward and so completely senseless and kept running across his mind, the way the moon's light would refract into bloody edges in his peripheral vision, the nerves digging into his bones and crying hurry, hurry, hurry. There was no reason for him to be so tense and anxious about a simple case, and his inability to express it only made the anxiety worse. He hadn't felt so wordless since - for a long time. Years.

(The war.)

"I don't know," Itachi said at last. "Something isn't right here."

"Yeah, I get that. Don't tell the chief, but I'm kind of glad we're taking it slow. At least your little shadow's not here to get in the way, right?"

The radio in Itachi's ear crackled. "Itachi, if you don't feel up to it -"

"I can handle it, Mother," Itachi said, glaring at Shisui, who had hidden his grin too late. "We haven't even caught them yet. We'll report if there's trouble."

"It's okay, Mikoto-san," said Shisui, "I'll take care of your precious - ow! - never mind, I think he's going to have to take care of me and my new broken ribs."

"Shisui-kun, would you please take this seriously for -"

"Hey, you two, get your asses up here! We found something."

What Tsume and Kuromaru had found was the aftermath of a small explosion in the undergrowth: shreds of paper, charred branches, the fading scent of burnt leaves and smoke. "Lucky it's the rainy season," Tsume said, "or half the woods could have gone up. Not that whoever started it cared, I think, there's a couple other signs of a fight, so I'm guessing these two aren't exactly friends. Bad news is that the trail splits here - the injured kid's still headed for the wall, the mystery man seems to have headed back into Konoha." Kuromaru paced around the radius of the explosion before padding back to her, and she reached up to scratch behind his ears absently. "So, you two are the big detectives. What do you wanna do, split up or leave the one for the wall patrols and go after the other one?"

"Don't even think about splitting up," Mikoto said over the radio. "I've seen that recipe for disaster happen too many times to count."

"Yeah, in horror movies." Tsume rolled her eyes. "Either of you ever see me getting like this about my brat, you aim to kill, got it? So, plan?"

"We'll split up," said Itachi. "Tsume-san will accompany me to find the wounded one, and Kuromaru will track the murderer with Shisui, since his trail will be more difficult to follow."

"Smart," Tsume said approvingly. "I see why they made you a captain. Okay, Kuromaru, play nice and go get 'em."

Shisui hesitated. "You sure about this?"

Itachi nodded, and Shisui shrugged and said, "All right, then, just remember the radio if you need a hand and keep your sharingan on."

"We're the ones going after an injured teenager with low chakra," Itachi said. "I think that we'll be fine. Take care."

They didn't start on their chosen trail until Kuromaru and Shisui were gone. Tsume and Itachi both wanted to make a closer inspection of the setting before moving on, in hopes of discovering more about either of the strangers. Itachi collected the shreds of paper, enough to be the remains of two exploding tags; Tsume found a scorched tree that should have been out of the range of the tags and sliced branches that could have been the work of a sword. "So, definitely shinobi or knows enough to use our equipment," Tsume said, "and at least one of them knows fire techniques."

"And lightning techniques," Itachi said, thinking of the electrified air in the spare room.

"Kumogakure, maybe?" Tsume frowned. "They'd do anything for a sharingan or byakugan, the assholes, remember what happened with the Hyuuga heir a few years ago... Could've been trying to sneak in and grab a kid but messed it up."

It didn't sound right to Itachi; as a plan it was sloppy and risky, and it wouldn't explain the apparent falling-out between the two men or the one's injuries. He shook his head and said, "Let's find at least one of them before we come to any conclusions."

"Fine, fine, just trying to be prepared. Anything else you want to look at or can we go?"

"That's all, I -"

He was looking past Tsume and his sharingan caught the motion of thread dangling from a bush. His mouth was suddenly too dry to answer Tsume's sharp "What?"; he went past her without speaking and pulled the threads from the thin branches. It was difficult to discern colors in the shadowy dark of the forest even with the sharingan, but he knew the exact shade of lavender the threads would be in the daylight.

He didn't know why that realization froze him in place, staring numbly at the threads as his heart beat too hard against his ribs.

"Hey! Are you done yet?" Tsume snatched the threads out of his hand and sniffed at them. "Yeah, these have the right scent, so let's get a move on already - you were the one raring to go earlier, weren't you? You get cold feet or something?"

"Yes," he said. "No. Let's go."