Published: 10/5/2020
Previously: Souhei's secret comes to light; Suzu spends a weekend with the Mikawayas; Reiko speaks with her daughter about choices and freedom.
Reprising the Yamanaka Yin Release techniques I'd used on the Sakuya mission was more difficult than I'd remembered it being, but I suppose that was to be expected after so many months without fine manipulation. I'd tried searching for my uncle with regular auditory sense, but he was either hiding or shielding impeccably; I walked through the village several times a day every day for a week, but it still didn't turn up any results. But I knew that while shielding could conceal the chakra he would be producing now it could do nothing for chakra he'd expelled already. And I suspected he'd used quite a lot of it; the crashing clamor of his shunshin through the window had been clear. Chances were he'd used enough of it that traces were lingering even now.
So that was how the morning found me plodding along rooftops, expelling chakra into the environment, and listening carefully for any echoes of his booming signature. Konoha was triply noisy this way and it hurt my head on top of consuming monstrous amounts of chakra, but Souhei Namikaze had been a jounin and his chakra sound was both wider and louder for it. Plenty of shinobi hopped along the rooftops daily but there were only a handful of jounin-level ninja left in the village. And I had spent my whole life listening to the sound of Uncle Souhei besides; it was only a matter of time before I picked up on his trail.
Said trail led through the market and towards the district of the old clans. I passed by the gates of the Uchiha compound and found myself standing at the edge of Akimichi land. Here I got turned around and had to spend several minutes relocating his signature, but eventually I caught it again and followed it until I found myself standing at the gates of a large white-walled estate. I looked at the nameplate and read "Tsukimori" in elegant calligraphy.
I stared. Tsukimori, as in the tea traders? They were an exceedingly old family, established well before any sort of Hidden Village came to be, that had followed in the wake of the Akimichi alongside their vassal clans. Though they were merchants and not ninja, they had brought with them all of their property, business, and craft; paired with the medicine-making prowess of the Nara clan they were half the reason Konoha had had an economy to begin with. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Konoha was the village it was today because of their influence. While most other villages could only peddle their military services, the young Leaf Village had been able to rely on both the Nara medicines and the Tsukimori tea trade to bolster itself in times of financial hardship. In short, they had made the village rich, and that wealth had created the surplus that allowed the Shodaime's peace-loving ways to take root.
The estate, I concluded after another few minutes' inspection, was as warded as any shinobi clan's compound. The sound of its detection and protection seals sang through the air all throughout both the gate and wall, and the construction of it—physical and not—created an absolutely impenetrable space. I could not hear a thing from the place beyond. It was like a pocket of total silence.
Well, I mused, that was hardly surprising. The Tsukimori family lacked neither funds nor prestige. It was no wonder their grounds were so well-fortified. The true mystery was how Souhei Namikaze had come to be here.
Sneaking in was an option, I supposed, but not one with much promise of longevity. Disguise would not avail me much in a private residence, either. Well. Part of infiltration was knowing what constituted a realistic target. Nothing for it: I reached out and rapped the knocker on the gate.
I expected to be kept waiting several minutes; even if they had a sealing relay in place to notify the main residence, it would take at least that long just for someone to come and answer—unless there was a manned gatehouse, anyway. But to my surprise several seconds later a brown-haired boy appeared atop the wall and regarded me quizzically. I blinked and gave him a curious look of my own. I knew from my readings that the Tsukimori were not ninja, but that boy had clearly just used a shinobi's leap.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey," I said back.
"Who are you? What do you want?" His eyes, bright like evergreens, were full of inquiry. He was my age, I decided. He was probably a chuunin, too. His signature was intriguing and complex far beyond the simple monophonic melodies characteristic of genin, but still thin enough to betray a lack of power that precluded him from the rank of jounin.
"I'm Suzu Namikaze. I'm looking for my uncle, Souhei Namikaze."
The boy's eyes lit with recognition and he disappeared from the wall. A moment later the gate creaked open and he waved me over.
"You're Souhei's niece?" he asked in a hushed voice once I had come forward. "Really? I thought he decided not to tell you about us."
I found my face immediately going flat.
"Are you perhaps Kyouya-san?" I queried. Unbelievable—an Earthling here at the Tsukimori family estate. And he knew me, too. Uncle had clearly spoken about me to them.
"What? No, I'm Tsubasa," the boy replied. "Tsubasa Yoshizawa. Kyouya's inside."
"...May I come in?" I decided right then and there that I would be better off gathering more information firsthand. Tsubasa regarded me with a tilt of his head.
"Souhei's not here right now, though," he told me. "He left an hour ago. None of the others are here, either. It's just me and Kyouya."
So Uncle wasn't here after all. Perhaps that was why I had gotten the trail confused. He'd probably crossed his own path over.
"That's all right," I said. "I don't mean to intrude, of course, but if I could…"
Tsubasa scrutinized me for a long moment before shrugging cavalierly and grinning. He widened the gap in the gate and motioned me inside.
"Oh, wait." Tsubasa paused before pulling me over to a wooden plate affixed to the gate post. "Hey, could you put some chakra in your hand and put it on that wooden circle?" He frowned. "Wait, can you use chakra? If you can't, blood is okay, too."
Well, those were flags of a fuuinjutsu contract if I ever saw them. I examined the wooden plate critically. My sealing knowledge was far from complete, but from what I did know, it seemed that this plate was linked to the security seals. A close look revealed something like a reverse summon mechanism, which made me wonder if the people on the contract could be dumped outside the gate at the order of the array master.
"It's nothing sketchy," Tsubasa added helpfully. "It's just anyone who isn't registered automatically gets thrown out by the sealing wards. If you're with me, it's fine, but if you have to go pee or something you might end up sitting on the street instead of the toilet if you don't get back to me in time."
Well, wasn't that fascinating? Subject oneself to the array or automatically be expulsed. I had heard of such powerful security seals from Kushina; they were excruciatingly difficult to anchor and insanely expensive to create on all accounts. Labor, materials, expertise—probably in all the Elemental Nations only the Uzumaki themselves would have been capable of it. The only other family in the village likely to have such a defensive array would be the Senju, and that was because the clans had intermarried.
Conclusion: the Tsukimori family had hired Uzumaki fuuinjutsu masters to ward their family estate at the time of its building. I paused. Either they really were just that rich, or they had powerful enemies. Considering their role as an economic pillar of Konoha, though, it was quite possibly both. The village would have an interest in protecting them.
Still, I thought as I gave the plate another once-over, the seals Kushina had told me about were much more malicious than a simple reverse-summoning. I supposed they were a civilian family after all.
So thinking, I gathered chakra into my hand and pressed it against the wood. The plate flickered briefly upon contact, but nothing else happened after that.
"Oh, you can use chakra," Tsubasa commented.
"I'm a ninja," I replied before pausing. "Or—well, I have a ninja's training."
Tsubasa made a thoughtful noise at this. He eyed me speculatively and tilted his head.
"I wasn't sure," he said after a moment, and I realized he was tilting his ear towards me like he was listening. "You don't look like one, and I thought you didn't really sound like one, but maybe you do. For some reason it's hard to hear you. You sound… kind of slippery."
Curious, I released my blending technique. I had been hiding my signature in case Uncle Souhei was using his own sensory abilities to avoid me, but maybe—
"Oh," Tsubasa paused. Then he narrowed his eyes at me.
"I—haven't decided if I'm retiring for real yet," I confessed a moment later. "I thought I would like to. But I'm not sure. I don't know. But it's useless to think about right now anyway. I'm on a mission ban."
"Wow, you got suspended?" Tsubasa gave me an impressed look as he waved for me to follow and we began making our way to the mansion nestled in the grounds ahead. He was a charismatic boy, I decided. He had the air of an old friend who was easy to talk to. The admission had slipped out without my thinking.
"I got in trouble," I said, a little more vaguely now.
"Well, duh. People don't get full mission bans for nothing."
Charismatic, but also somewhat insensitive. Or, I considered, intentionally obtuse. Some people did cultivate that sort of persona deliberately.
Tsubasa led me down a winding stone path and over a small ornamental bridge. A tiny stream—I couldn't tell if it was natural or man-made—cut through the grass and pooled into a decorative pond dotted with lilypads. From there we entered a lovely garden, and from the garden, a short walk through a copse of bamboo. Then we made it to a small side door at the east end of the building. Instead of entering, however, Tsubasa circled around the wall and hollered, "Kyouya, Souhei's niece came to visit!"
I hurried around the corner and saw a large study located in a traditionally-styled room. The veranda doors had all been slid open to admit the spring air and a man was sitting at the center of the tatami; his desk was small and lightweight, as was typical of Japanese furniture, but his pile of scrolls was very, very large.
He stood with vigor at our approach. He was dressed as traditionally as his surroundings in full haori, kimono, and hakama, and he clapped his hands delightedly when he saw me.
"Oh, welcome!" he beamed. He did not look so old in the face, but his dark hair was sprouting streaks of gray at the forehead. "Please, come in. Tsu-chan, would you—"
Tsubasa kicked off his sandals and entered directly via the veranda. He went to a closet and pulled out extra cushions to sit on, which he lined up at a low-lying table on the other side of the room before plopping down. He patted the other cushion with his hand.
A moment later Kyouya swept back in with a tray of tea and a bowl of rice crackers. I found myself seated beside Tsubasa and plied with refreshments.
"I'm so pleased to have you here today," Kyouya told me with a glowing smile. I was somewhat taken aback by his earnestness. Hospitality was a skill of any upper-crust merchant and warm welcomes, no matter how artificial, were a social obligation in these circles. But it was hard to fake the kind of sincere joy that made eyes light the way his were lit now. I glanced at Tsubasa, but Tsubasa only returned my curious look with one of his own.
"Thank you so much for welcoming me into your home," I replied searchingly. "My name is Misuzu Namikaze. I'm honored to make your acquaintance."
My formal salute seemed to trigger a conditioned response in him; he straightened and answered in flawlessly natural keigo, "The honor is mine. I thank you for coming to my home today. My name is Kyouya Tsukimori."
There was the smooth courtesy I had initially been expecting. As was befitting of the scion of Konoha's richest trade titans; just that single greeting was enough for me to glimpse the education of a prince. But then Kyouya blinked and seemed to come out of it.
"But please, just call me Kyouya," he continued, warm once more. I was stumped.
"Kyouya's not a snob," Tsubasa, having watched this exchange and rightfully guessed at my confusion, said. "Don't worry, he means it. He lives to have visitors."
I turned to stare. I appreciated a person who would rather cut knots than dither over niceties, but there existed a kind of blunt that soared beyond frank and landed in rude.
"Tsu-chan," Kyouya laughed, utterly unbothered.
"What?" Tsubasa put his arms behind his head and kicked back. Kyouya tsked as the boy let his upper body sprawl across the tatami.
"Tsu-chan, not in company!"
"What? It's fine, isn't it? She's Souhei's niece."
"Yes, well…" Kyouya's lips pursed. But his eyes did flicker, inscrutable, in my direction. I couldn't help but smile a bit at the sight. He carried the air of the cheerfully guileless, which was unusual for someone of his status, but that flicker spoke of intelligence. He was sharp, then. Possibly he was sharp enough to play the inevitable politics of the wealthy without corrupting himself in the process. At any rate he was very polite—polite enough to play the host before satisfying his own curiosity, which was the sort of courtesy that spoke less toward social obligation and just a little more towards kindness.
"I'm sorry to impose so suddenly, Kyouya-san," I offered as I decided that, tentatively, he was deserving of good regard. Kyouya's face broke out into a small smile; he looked pleased that I had acquiesced to call him by name. Perhaps he sensed tacit approval in it. It was obvious I'd been sounding him out... he was probably no stranger to these sorts of games. The fact that he was playing along so good-naturedly, I thought, was another point in his favor.
"Not at all, Misuzu-san," he assured me. "Tsu-chan has the right of it. I'm always more than happy to have visitors. Please—"
"—come by any time you please!" Tsubasa cut in with exaggerated mimicry, voice doubling over Kyouya's. Kyouya shot the boy another amused look.
"That's what I'm doing, anyway," Tsubasa added cheerfully. He wiggled his eyebrows and fluttered his fingers to show he had only been teasing. "Haven't been home in ages. He even gave me my own room."
My eyebrows rose. Kyouya let out a sheepish chuckle.
"But most of us have rooms here, honestly," Tsubasa added. He regarded me slyly. "Souhei has one, too."
My first impression of Tsubasa began to solidify. At first he had reminded me quite a lot of Akihiko; with his friendly bearing and open personality, it was an easy comparison to make. And just like Akihiko, whose intelligence had frequently been obscured by his overly-straightforward approach, Tsubasa, too, seemed to be a person of hidden depths. But that, I thought, was also where the two comparisons disconnected. There was a kind of cunning intentionality behind Tsubasa's behavior. He was not incognizant of what he was doing. In fact, I suspected he was very aware of every faux pas and subtle slight he committed—he was just choosing to commit them anyway. To what end I couldn't tell, but it made him quite different from Akihiko indeed. Akihiko, I reflected, had never been so self-aware as that.
Tsubasa saw my assessing gaze and flashed a charming smile.
"Tsubasa," Kyouya said as he leaned his chin onto his hand. There was a note of warning in his mild voice; he gave the boy a quelling look as if to tell him to play nice.
These two, I reflected, were a fascinating pair. Still, as interesting as it was to play ball with them, I had come this far with a task. My head was still faint and my ears were still ringing with it. "I came here today to ask after my uncle. He's been missing for over a week now. I followed his trail here."
Both Tsubasa and Kyouya stalled.
"...He didn't tell you he was here?" Tsubasa asked. Kyouya's eyebrows began to rise.
"No. We haven't spoken since he left."
"Then how did you know Kyouya's name?" Tsubasa squinted with confusion. "I didn't mention him."
Figuring now was as good a time as any to lay out the situation, I shrugged and did just that. I detailed how I'd found the letter, confronted him about its contents, and had a massive row. By the time I had finished both Tsubasa and Kyouya were regarding me with troubled brows.
"My person never knew what Naruto was," Tsubasa told me.
"Nor mine," Kyouya agreed. "I only learned of it after meeting Daisuke and Souhei."
Then that, at least, had not been a lie. Uncle has claimed that only half of the group—however big this group was, I thought with exasperation at yet another unknown name—had known about the story.
"Souhei's been using your house to avoid his family," Tsubasa said to Kyouya after a moment had passed. Kyouya raised an eyebrow and I remembered Tsubasa's comment about not having been home in ages. "What? I'm not giving him flak about it. But my situation's also pretty different, hey? Besides, I don't have kids to take care of."
These days it was feeling more and more like even that didn't matter—we were getting by just fine without Uncle. In fact, lately things got so awkward when he did finally roll around that his presence was probably actually a detriment to our daily operations. But that didn't make it all right for him to just ditch us, I reminded myself silently. The solution wasn't to just cut him loose to keep doing as he pleased. It was to make sure he was actually present enough so that he wasn't such a stranger in his own house. Besides, even though most of us were old enough now to help Auntie around the house, it was not fair in the least to pin the raising of all of us on a single woman. Even if the war had ended and no more new orphans were coming to the House, that was no reason to put everything on her.
"Hayato would know more about this situation," Kyouya concluded after a moment of long thought. "Souhei doesn't talk about his personal life with us."
"Even though he crashes at your house for weeks on end?" Either my uncle was tremendously rude or Kyouya was tremendously permissive.
"Both, I'd say," Tsubasa replied to that. "Souhei wasn't always like that, though. He was a pretty normal guy when I first met him."
"When did you first meet him?" I pounced on this first chance to gather actual concrete intelligence on this "Earthling group" since I'd arrived.
"Eh, three or four years ago, I guess?" Tsubasa tilted his head ponderingly. "I was like nine or ten or something. But it's only this past year or two that he's gotten weirder and weirder."
That matched with my experiences. When I'd been younger he hadn't been nearly so distant and avoidant as he was now. What had changed? Had it been something I'd done? Had it simply been because the time to change things had been running out?
"How did you meet my uncle, Kyouya-san?" I asked softly. Kyouya regarded me knowingly. And then, instead of calling me out in my unsubtle digs for information, he politely began at the very beginning of the beginning.
"I can't give you the full story because I wasn't around for the start of it," he cautioned. "You would need to talk to Daisuke or Souhei themselves. Daisuke is the oldest," he added when I opened my mouth to question him. "He was the first person out of all of us. I don't know how they met. But as for me, Souhei and his team took a genin mission to help my uncle remodel the west gardens when we were children." Kyouya pointed a finger past the bamboo thicket Tsubasa and I had come through. "And that's how we met for the first time. He saw me writing in English and recognized it right away. I knew he was different, too, because most people just thought I was making up my own code and let me be, but he kept bothering me about it.
"Later on I went out to meet him and Daisuke. I was curious because I'd never met anyone else who could read English. When I got there, they tried to talk to me about Naruto, but of course I didn't know." He paused. "And then while we were talking Hayato dropped out of a tree and said that it wasn't surprising that I didn't know. 'Not everyone on Earth knew what Naruto was, either.'" Kyouya made air quotations with his fingers.
I stared. And then I fought back a laugh. It seemed that even when he'd been young Hayato-sensei's defining trait had been his practical rationality.
"The group grew over time," Kyouya continued. "Hayato met Hideaki and Aoi at the hospital. My cousin Nana came to stay with my family for a month and we found each other out at the same time. And Tsubasa…"
"They fished me out of the river," Tsubasa interjected brightly. I turned to stare at him.
"...What, with a fishing rod?" I asked, incredulous, as he continued to smile without elaborating.
"You bet." Tsubasa made a hook with his index finger and snagged it on his collar. "Just like that."
I looked at Kyouya, fully expecting him to ask the boy to stop telling tales, but Kyouya nodded. "He got caught on Hideaki's line and snapped it, so Hideaki dove in and pulled him out of the river. He'd hit his head and was babbling in Earth languages, so Hideaki brought him to Souhei and Souhei took care of his injuries."
That was… the most miraculous string of coincidences I'd ever heard of in my life. The entire group, it seemed, was made totally of chance meetings. If Earthlings were this easy to stumble across they could be anywhere.
"You're not wrong," Kyouya commented contemplatively. "Hayato thinks so, too. Obviously the phenomenon isn't incredibly widespread, else we'd have clairvoyant shinobi tripping all over themselves in an attempt to manipulate the future, but there's no discounting there may be others out there we just haven't met. Most of us were carrying on with our normal lives before we happened to meet one another. Like as not any others out there are doing the same."
"Hayato thinks there may be others in the other villages, too," Tsubasa commented. "He says it must be the reason why reality here differs from the one in the story. He thinks some sort of—what'd he say, butterfly effect? He thinks some sort of butterfly effect has been going on for a while now, altering things."
It took me a couple of moments to chew on this. Putting aside the notion that there were others out there in the world running about with their own second sets of alien memories, in what way did reality differ here from the Naruto story? Everything had been proceeding on track for tragedy right up until the moment I set out to change things myself.
"I think it's more subtle than that," Kyouya said. "I don't know the details, but he did try to explain it to me. According to him, if things here were exactly as it was in the story you all know, the world would be warped and full of inconsistencies. But for some reason the plot holes haven't managed to break reality here, and he thinks that it must have been the presence of others like us, if not their direct intervention, that have caused a stabilizing effect."
I stared. "That seems like an awfully neat explanation," I finally replied. "If it's true that there are more of us, you'd think things would be more chaotic and reality-bending, not less. I'd be surprised if things bore any sort of resemblance to the original story at all."
Tsubasa and Kyouya both shrugged at that. "It was all very cerebral," the Kyouya admitted. "I probably have not done his theory justice with such a confused and abridged explanation. I suppose you could ask him yourself the next time the group gathers…"
I perked up. "How often does the group hold gatherings?"
Kyouya and Tsubasa exchanged glances.
"There's not any sort of formal schedule or anything, if that's what you're asking," Tsubasa replied. "...When I was younger we got together monthly to eat and stuff, but lately nothing happens unless someone purposely asks for a meeting."
"Souhei was never explicitly our leader," Kyouya commented, "and it's not like we have any sort of hierarchy to begin with, but after Daisuke took off on his own I suppose he just sort of fell into an organizer's role. But at some point Souhei…" Kyouya paused to search for a suitable phrasing. "...began to express discomfort, I suppose, whenever we had meetings, and things got awkward. We never did anything besides socialize and I suppose it felt awkward for a lot of us to see him forcing himself like that when we weren't doing anything important, so that's how monthly tea parties eventually ceased to be. Now most of us simply exchange letters to keep in contact instead."
I sat on my heels and frowned. If that was the case they might not meet again at all in the foreseeable future. I resisted the urge to cross my arms as I sat and considered my options. What would I do now that I was here? What could I do, knowing my uncle's secret as I did now? I knew without a doubt I wanted to meet the rest of these people, but I sincerely doubted my uncle would simply summon them all at my request. If anything it was going to be a challenge just to get him to speak with me at all at this point.
"How does this Thursday sound, Misuzu-san?" Kyouya asked, jolting me out of my thoughts.
"No way, my squad's got company drills with Team 23 and Team 25," Tsubasa objected before I had a chance to reply. "And Hideaki and Isana are out of the village until Friday, anyway!"
"Oh, I'd forgotten. That's right. Then how about Saturday?" Kyouya looked at me. I gave him a bewildered stare.
"What about this Saturday?"
"What else?" Tsubasa interrupted again before Kyouya could speak. "For a group meeting, obviously."
NOTES:
1. "Part of infiltration was knowing what constituted a realistic target."
Something I regret cutting from an earlier chapter: Suzu being assigned a list of targets for infiltration training, beginning in public places and escalating gradually into hypersecure private areas. The Tsukimori Estate was meant to cameo near the top of the list, just behind the Noble Clans' compounds, the ANBU Base, and the Hokage's residence at the Tower. As Suzu notes in this chapter, some targets are too treacherous to tackle and an I&E agent should know when an infiltration is not viable. She originally learned this lesson from the cut exercise, which was meant to slot in somewhere between chapters 11 and 12.
The scene itself felt like too much fluff, but I see now that I lost some valuable foreshadowing by eliminating it. Perhaps I'll make it into a sidestory and post it in the HSS companion piece.
2. "If Earthlings were this easy to stumble across they could be anywhere."
Do you smell it? (sniff) The scent… of the sequel hook. And the spin-off hook, too, now that I think about it. If I ever manage to finish this chonker story, it'll be fun to dive into this plot in Sakuragakure and Myriad World.
