The Story of Menma
Anjelle
Chapter 5
Summary:
Do your best, Tenzo!
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
In the grand scheme of things, ANBU uniforms were useless and conspicuous and tired.
Tenzō rose up from his sleeping bag and yawned, his teammates already packing up and halfway to heading out. Now he was joining them, his eyes on the sands of Wind Country on the horizon, forests and grassy plains drying up into cracked earth and then, beyond, a host of stretching desert that he was very much not looking forward to wading through.
In place of ANBU uniforms, the group sported standard jōnin attire, their masks buried and forgotten within their sealing scrolls. Leaving Fire Country for what was very likely a long-term mission dressed as ANBU was probably the worst thing that they could have done. They were allied with Suna, sure. And that was exactly why they didn't need to be trekking through Suna deserts in black ops gear. Could they have kept hidden so that no one would see? Sure. But the mission didn't call for that.
As far as anyone was concerned, they were nothing but a team of jōnin on a B rank retrieval mission in search of a runaway. No one had to know that they were ANBU or that the runaway was Konoha's one and only jinchuuriki.
Tenzō sealed away his things and stretched his arms to the sky, forcing back his dreary thoughts of their nonstop struggles and trying to start the day off on a positive note. On the bright side, they'd traced the fox's movements well enough to predict that he would head into Wind next and were on their way there now. With any luck, they would run into something other than a shadow clone at some point. That would be refreshing. The moment that they did, this whole thing could very well be over; he doubted there was much the fox could do against the three of them, so long as it was true the seal wasn't actually broken. Kakashi was adamant that it wasn't.
Kakashi was adamant about a lot of things. Like, for instance, that Naruto had more control than they were giving him credit for. Tenzō wasn't sure how he felt about that one in particular.
He wandered over to his teammates, smoothed out his flack jacket, and smiled. After so many pointless endeavours, all he could do was smile. If he didn't smile, he'd be sulking. Who would have thought that the most annoying mission he would ever be assigned would be to hunt down a twelve year old and a fox?
"What's the plan?"
Kakashi looked up but Itachi's attention remained fixed to the map they had sprawled out across the table Tenzō created the night before. It depicted all of the great nations, and Itachi had a pale finger over their current location, right beyond the borders of Wind and Fire, on Rivers.
"There is a village just south of the border," Itachi stated simply. His finger slid left, further beyond River Country where they were now and into Wind. It didn't look far, perhaps a short half day's walk. Two days if there were any noteworthy setbacks—like running into yet another barrage of shadow clones, for example. It was exhausting to Tenzō just looking at the two dozen they chased off just the other night. Tailed beast or no, how could it be that Kurama had yet to show any signs of chakra exhaustion? "Naruto will have no choice but to take refuge there if he is reaching the end of his supplies."
"And if he isn't?" Tenzō asked.
The implications of what that would mean hung heavy in the air. None of them wanted to think about it. Truth be told, they'd seen less and less of their target as the weeks went on. Naruto was slipping away. Kurama was escaping. They couldn't afford to lose the target now because, if they did, there was a very real possibility of not being able to track him down again. With so many clones moving in all directions all of the time, Kakashi's dogs had long since been deemed ineffective; the tricky thing with shadow clones was that they left a trail that scented exactly like the original. Their main method of tracking in recent days was through Itachi's crows and Kakashi's uncanny ability to plot out a likely trail the real Kurama was taking using the tracks left by said clones.
Tenzō would never get over how Kakashi was able to do that—to see the lines left behind by all of the decoys and weave them together to form an unseen path marked by the real one, carefully avoided by all of the other clones enough to keep pursuers from getting too close, but not so avoided that it made it obvious which direction Kurama took. It was absurd, but it worked. Effectively. The biggest drawback was that Kurama was producing less clones and by that point was no longer actively trying to engage them. The clones were long-suffering, just marking fake trails, which made it harder to pinpoint which tracks were real and which were fake.
Kakashi shoved a hand into his pocket and leaned over them, casting a long shadow across the map as a dark eye bore holes into a fixed point on the landscape. "Maa, he'll have no choice," he said, lazy and drawn and filled with a disinterest Tenzō came to know well, one that didn't sink far below the surface. Kakashi was just as set on seeing this mission through as the rest of them; he just showed it differently. "Wind Country is an unforgiving climate. It's nothing like the forests of Fire that are filled with food if you're willing to put in a little effort. Water is scarce, much unlike Rivers where the Uzumaki boy has been spending the past few days."
Itachi nodded. "This is the only oasis between here and Suna. If the fox intends to keep moving, he'll need to make that stop."
Tenzō hummed and nodded, drumming his fingers against the wood of the table. Then his eyes narrowed on the symbol of the hidden village in question, tracing its hourglass shape thoughtfully. "You're sure he'll aim for Suna?"
Kakashi tilted his head, lingered over the map a few seconds more, and wrenched himself away to tuck his sealing scroll into his pouch. "Maa, who knows?" There was an inflection there, though, razor-sharp and hedged with confidence, that spoke otherwise. "He may just be putting distance between us. Foreign lands are safer because we have our ally nation's regulations to fall by."
"But there's nothing of interest to a tailed beast outside of Suna," Tenzō finished for him, sighing as he straightened his back and slipped his happuri into place. "Alright, I'll buy that. Lead the way, Captain."
Kakashi gave him a look that spoke volumes and Itachi smiled, easy and amused, and they were back on the road.
"And Captain?"
Kakashi shot him that same look again, over his shoulder, clearly unamused by Tenzō's tone. "Ah?"
"Try not to pull that face with Naruto," he teased. "You'll scare the poor boy away."
Kurama never thought that he would be so happy to be out of the hell-bound land of Rivers. Rivers, for all that it was a brief stop in their very long, seemingly endless and quite possibly pointless endeavours, was the most agonizing six days of his jinchuuriki's nearly thirteen years.
Rivers lived up to it name and then some; it was a land of water and rain and bounty. Even if Naruto hadn't gotten the hang of fishing and hunting—which, thank the Sage, the boy had —there would have been no issue finding food to get them through the journey. Fruits, berries, herbs—there was no shortage of anything in those lands. No shortage of anything.
Not even water.
And curse those ANBU and whatever hole they crawled out of because they all had a grasp on water release and they used it generously. How thoughtful. If Kurama had to relive the demise of one more waterlogged clone, he would break the damn seal himself and tear out of Naruto's body the hard way to drown them each in the nearest riverbed. Let the current carry them away and with them, all of his problems.
Even if it hadn't rained—which it had, especially as they took a route close to Ame—there was no shortage on big, annoying bodies of water pooling around them for the ANBU to draw from. Now every time they went to fill their canteen, Naruto would have war flashbacks, the poor kid.
The ANBU caught up with him twice. They were right there, right in front of Naruto—once across the riverbed, and once below in the trees. Kurama managed to get them out of there by the skin of his teeth but damn it, if he hadn't felt scared.
It was surreal. Feeling scared. It was such a human, such a mortal thing. Not for himself, not for his safety, but for his human container. And what would it matter if Naruto died, or if he was ripped from the boy's tiny body? If he died, he would rebirth. If he was placed in another human body, then it would just be a repeat of something he'd already lived through three times now. It wouldn't matter.
It did.
He didn't know why, but it did.
"Seal your hitai-ate," he commanded, sounding far too much like a stern sensei for his liking—though he'd been relegated to that duty months ago, so perhaps it was appropriate. "This country allies itself with the Leaf, and with Fire."
Naruto pulled a face, one that promised many complaints and a healthy spoonful of make me, but listened all the same. For all that he was a contrary brat, he was disciplined in his own right. And maybe that fact just made him even more contrary. He reluctantly untied the headband that he wore, gave the defaced symbol of the Leaf one last, forlorn look, and sealed it into his scroll.
Then there was a groan, load and complaining and so very Naruto as the brat threw his hands behind his head and kicked the sands at his feet in what had to be the most childish display of this place sucks possible. "It's hot," he whined, and that was an understatement. It was very hot. "Can't we just find, like, a tree or somethin'? I need some shade."
"Do you see any trees around, kit?"
Naruto narrowed his eyes on the long-standing, flowing sand dunes that made up the entirety of his vision, and huffed. "I'm sure there's gotta be one. Somewhere."
Kurama laughed because of course his jinchuuriki would never concede to his logic. Not even Kushina could rival that boy for sheer stubbornness.
"Then a break?" Naruto pleaded. "At least?"
"No."
"But Kurama—"
"I know you're tired," he cut in. He could feel the aches and pains as though they were his own, could sense their depleted chakra reserves and damn the Fourth Hokage and curse the miserable seal that cut him off from the vast majority of his chakra. "Night will bring with it a terrible cold, kit. We aren't equipped to deal with that right now. Our only option is to try to reach the village oasis before sundown. Get a move on."
Naruto rolled his eyes dramatically, as though he were so utterly put out by Kurama's explanation, but his feet started moving. "Let's just shunshin there," he grumbled.
"You're fooling no one. You don't have the chakra for that right now."
"If I dispel the clones—"
"We need them to cover our trail."
"But they always find us anyway!" Naruto whined, throwing his hands up to show how done with the ANBU he was. Kurama could relate. Painfully so. "They just keep coming back. Like roaches."
Oh. Well. Kurama never heard a more fitting word. His amusement rang through his voice but he tried to push it back, to take an authoritative tone with his young protege, even if it came off sounding like he was suppressing a laugh. Which he was, but Naruto didn't need to know that. "It slows them down, if nothing else. And it allows us to keep track of their movements."
"Yeah, yeah," said Naruto, to a story he heard a thousand times over.
When going down the list of nations, Wind was far from ideal to hide out in. Kurama only chose it because of how close it was, but from what he could recall, Suna was allied with Konoha which did not bode well for them. The flat, expansive plains of the desert were the worst possible thing for a man on the run. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. What's more, the harsh climate made it difficult to navigate for the inexperienced. Naruto very much fell under that category. But, well, it was at least out of Konoha's territory, and it was progress.
Something told him that there would be another close encounter here, though. There was no reason to think they were safe.
The oasis was like a mirage amidst the expansive, blinding sands on Wing Country, and for a moment they thought it really was an illusion. It turned out it wasn't; they were both fairly certain that even their fevered brains wouldn't subject them to the looks that Naruto was getting, dressed in attire very much not suited to the desert. The cloak was heavy enough to stand against non-threatening rains, meaning it was too much for the heat of the desert, but too light to prove all that effective in the below-zero nights they'd be subjected to on the next leg of the journey.
Supplies came first—new clothes, specifically. A set that allowed them to blend in, to look like they belonged—and damn the Sage, it took everything Kurama had to talk Naruto out of getting the flamboyant orange and blue robes that first caught his attention. Nothing about Naruto was ever discreet.
Then came the inn. The village was small and only had one; he hoped the monster trio didn't catch up to them because he did not want to have to place chakra suppressors on the poor kid's body to wait out the night knowing that the ANBU were staying in another room. If it came to it, Kurama would just have to keep them preoccupied with clones long enough to slow them down.
Sage, why did they have to pose as regular jōnin? Why couldn't they stay acting as ANBU? As ANBU, they wouldn't ever risk staying at an inn. Somehow, by some blind roll of fate, holding a lower rank made them more troublesome than ever before.
Naruto signed in at the front desk, scrawled the name Menma into the sign-in sheet like it was second nature, and climbed the stairs to his room on the second floor.
"Henge, kit."
Naruto unlocked the door and slammed it shut behind him, dropping his things into a pile on the bed, including his new clothes. There were protests on his lips—Kurama could feel them—but instead of the expected onslaught of complaints there was just a hand sign and a disguised. He stood before the mirror, his face blank as he assessed himself. Dark hair, dark eyes. Pale skin. Everything about him was the opposite of what it was in reality. He was tall instead of short, an easy to overlook bystander if ever there was one—not so generic that it was suspicious, but not so overt that he would draw attention to himself.
Kurama would never admit it out loud, but the kid developed his jutsu well.
Naruto sighed, hung his head, and scratched at his stomach. A mostly-healed scar carved its way across his abdomen, itching with the healing of newly stitched-together cells—a recent injury from a close call with standard bandits and not the ANBU, surprisingly. "Don'tcha think this is overkill? They ain't even here yet…"
Kurama huffed his indignance. "It pays to be cautious. We can't mess up here."
"Wouldn't it be better to—er, I dunno…"
"To what?"
With exaggerated exhaustion, Naruto flopped back onto the mattress to stare vacant-eyed at the ceiling. He worried his bottom lip, considering his phrasing carefully, which was an honest rarity in that boy. "Teach me to fight," he demanded. "I'm tired of learnin' all this stuff to get away. I'm strong, Kurama."
"I know that, kit."
"Then teach me something useful so that we can stop running away!"
He knew this was coming. He wished he had more time. There was only so much time they could waste running all over the great nations before Naruto got a little too fed up with the chase and wanted to stand his ground. No, Naruto always wanted to stand his ground. There was no backing down from a fight if that boy was involved and it was only under Kurama's very strict instruction that they'd reached a compromise with the running. It wasn't running from a fight, he'd told Naruto; it was running from capture. Those were two very different things with two very different outcomes and one was acceptable while the other was not.
"I'm sick of it," Naruto continued, his head rolling to the side to face the evening hues of gold casting light through the window. "Why do we gotta run? We didn't do anything!"
"I know."
Then he was sitting up, sudden and determined as he stared hard at his reflection of black hair and eyes, of pale skin and an inconspicuous face. "It wasn't even your fault for the attack on the village. It was that Uchiha guy's."
"I know."
"Then let's tell them," Naruto pleaded, brow twitching, eyes hard and desperate in his reflection. "Maybe they'll listen. Or something. Or—or I dunno, maybe…"
"Naruto," Kurama called, voice even and calm. "They know."
His jaw went slack and he said nothing.
"That man died the night of the attack," he continued after a time. "Your father killed him. Then I killed your father. Kushina, too, in my rage."
Naruto flinched and tore his eyes away, fisting the sheets draped over the mattress and biting his lip. He shook his head once, twice. "Dad was stupid," he spat. "You said the seal killed him."
"In a way."
"I don't blame you, Kurama." Naruto swallowed against his dry mouth, a tremble to his limbs and stinging in his eyes. "...I can't. I've tried to hate you and I can't."
Kurama decided long ago that this boy was strange indeed. Naruto was, to Kurama, a wildcard; there was no way of discerning which way he would sway, who he would side with or what he would do. Every time he opened his mouth, Kurama was left there in a baffled stupor. And every time they talked, there was no telling where it would lead. Naruto was an enigma and that was the most refreshing thing in the world.
"I hate them," Naruto spat and it took him off-guard, the venom in that small boy's words. "I hate that they hate you and that they hate me because they think that I am you. I hate that you're the first person who ever told me who my parents were. I hate the way they look at me. I didn't do anything..."
Kurama let the silence hang there as he gathered his thoughts, seeing through that boy's eyes as they stared at the wall, breathing that boy's breaths as though they were his own. He sat, stared, breathed and sucked in all of the hatred seeping off Naruto in spades. Raw and real and corrosive like red chakra.
And beneath that, so, so sad.
"I know."
The clones that evening seemed preoccupied with something. Tenzō was hardly the first to notice—one look over at Kakashi's narrowed eye was all he needed to know that his teammates were on the same page.
But there were so many clones.
Forty-seven, if he counted right, beating their way through the blur of the approaching sandstorm as it raised the ground. They were there to slow the team down, no doubt, but they couldn't just ignore them; the less clones they left running around, the less scents for Kakashi to sift through. Besides, if they were there as a diversion, it meant that the ANBU were on the right track. Itachi had been right.
They were down to eleven now and the clones were running, and Tenzō was so tired of running.
"Scatter," Kakashi commanded, and that was unusual because they rarely ever broke formation. One of the only times they had was their first big stand-off with Naruto's—Kurama's—shadow clones.
Far be it for him to question the captain's orders, though.
He took off across the sand dunes to the left as the bite of cold set in, the sun just beyond the horizon, dipping lower at an exaggerated rate as time flew by around him. He didn't need to rely on his wood for this; there was hardly any point when he knew very well that the original was not among them. Two shuriken flung forth, sailing through the air from his fingertips, and they stabbed at the clones at breakneck speed. Two bodies dispelled in smoke and that left one. He slipped a kunai out of his pouch and spun it around his finger, arm pulled back and ready to get this over with so that they could get back on the road.
Naruto spun around to meet Tenzō's eyes, backing away as sand and wind beat around them. It was picking up. There was no helping it; with that wind, he wouldn't be able to throw and actually hit his target (the shuriken were one miracle too many for the night) so he'd have to get in close.
Tenzō kicked off the sand and leapt forth—
Blue eyes looked up at him, wide and scared, and he stopped his hand with a frustrated curse. The blade of his kunai hung over the clone's eye.
Naruto swallowed, a shaky smile on his face. "U-um," he tried, voice failing. "Thanks?"
Tenzō kept his hand there, face smooth and betraying none of the confliction raging beneath the surface. Blue eyes. Not red, but blue, and how had he never realized it before?
Lately, the clones always had blue eyes. Blue. Blue and not red.
Blue like Naruto. The real Naruto.
The moment he realized that, everything else fell into place. He lowered his hand slowly, staring blankly at the boy that stood before him in the swirling gusts and unforgiving stand, and his heart sank.
"He's fooling the both of you."
"This whole time…"
Naruto gave him this look, like he'd lost this mind, and squinted. But the boy's attention was soon on the cycloning mass behind them. He let out a noise, small and maybe a bit too high-pitched to be taken seriously, and tugged at Tenzō's sleeve.
"Hey hey, Tenzō—let's go?"
Tenzō opened his mouth to protest, tightened his grip in the kunai to dispel the clone and be done with it. But then the disaster behind him made itself too loud to ignore and he pried his eyes away from Naruto long enough to see the massive tidal wave of sand and dirt coming at them like a runaway train. All he could do was stare and wonder how in the hell he managed to ignore it for that long.
Naruto, somehow, was the more pragmatic of the two. Still latched tightly to Tenzō's sleeve, there was a quick succession of hand seals and suddenly they were elsewhere, pressed against the face of a large rock structure as the storm raged on around their security. Naruto dragged him to an overhang where they held up against the fast-approaching mass of misery. The boy poked his head out, watching curiously, and Tenzō just stood there.
What… what just happened?
Naruto whistled. "Lookit it go. Man, that was close." He looked in, eyes squeezed shut, and grinned. "I know I'm a clone, but I rather not go out in that, y'know?"
"Uh," he said, stupidly. Tenzō carded a hand through his hair and was displeased to find sand, sand, and more sand. And then there was that boy, also covered in sand, brandishing a defaced Konoha hitai-ate, and nothing made sense.
Naruto was the first to settle, because of course he was. He lowered himself down onto the sandy earth, getting cozy because this was just about the only place in the area that wasn't getting bombarded by impossible winds, and dusted himself off. Then he noticed the ANBU, still standing there stupidly, and made a face. "...You just gonna stare at me, Tenzō?"
Tenzō was very, very confused, but he sat down anyway. That seemed satisfying enough to the clone.
Naruto yawned, scrubbing at his eyes. Tired. Exhausted, if the dark rim of his eyes was anything to go by. Tenzō thought to all of the encounters with Kurama's clones he had in the past, how unfazed the fox seemed to be from using so much chakra, but now, looking at Naruto… that wasn't the case, was it?
That face was one near chakra exhaustion if ever he saw one.
Naruto blinked away sleep and shook himself. He had this dopy, barely-there smile that was probably unintentional, and he wiggled his fingers. "Wasn't supposed to shunshin," he stated simply. "Waste of chakra. Whatever. The furball can bite me for all I care."
Slowly, hesitantly, Tenzō leaned back against the rocks behind them. They were cool, a chill seeping in through the sleeves of his shirt, and it was a bit refreshing after six hours of non-stop heat.
What was he doing? When Kakashi ordered a scatter, he hadn't meant this.
"Naruto?" he tried, hiding a million and one questions behind the inflection in his tone.
"Ah?"
Tenzō frowned. "You're a missing-nin."
"Huh?" Naruto blinked, and then a hand automatically came up to touch the metal plate of his hitai-ate. "Oh. Yeah."
Shit. He needed to fight through the wrenching in his chest, to smooth over whatever reaction may have bubbled to the surface, but it was hard. It was hard because that entire time he truly believed—
"You never had any intention of returning to Konoha, did you?"
"Nah," Naruto answered with a simple grin. "I was just really hungry, y'know?"
"And the fox…"
He shrugged. "Kurama's my friend. He was helping me."
"Ah."
What could he say to that? Tenzō wasn't delusional enough to believe that this was still somehow the fox manipulating the boy. He wouldn't cling onto the hope that this could have a happy ending. For all that he was an optimist, Tenzō wasn't blind.
That right there was a missing-nin, a twelve-year-old boy, very nearly thirteen. The jinchuuriki of the nine-tails.
Traitor to the village.
Suddenly Naruto leaned in close, newfound light in his eyes and bounce to his movements, and Tenzō couldn't help but lean away. "I like you," he stated matter-of-factly. "Not Hound. He's the worst. But I like you, Tenzō, so—" The grin faltered. Naruto's eyes cast to the sands beneath them. "So… sorry."
Oh no, Tenzō was feeling things. And this was not the time to be feeling things.
Naruto yawned again, slumping back against the rock. His eyes fluttered shut. That last shunshin really must have depleted the clone's reserves, for him to actually be falling asleep like that. "Hey, can you thank Itachi for the ramen? It was really really good. No Ichiraku, but…"
"Why not tell him yourself?"
Naruto let out a soft snort. "'Cause that'd mean facing you guys. And I'm not goin' back to Konoha. No matter what."
That stung. He made a mental note never to tell Kakashi about this conversation, for fear of the I-told-you-so looks hidden behind friendly smiles and silent gazes.
This was a shadow clone, and he should just dispel it and move on, but…
"Our mission is to get you back to Konoha, Naruto," Tenzō stated firmly. "Whatever reasons you have for leaving, they don't change anything. Our objective remains the same."
"If you try to take me back," Naruto hummed, his head barely staying up as he let out yet another squeaky yawn, "I'll kill you."
He was afraid of that.
Naruto slid along the rock, caught in his fall by Tenzō's shoulder. For a while, they sat like that, the clone's weight pressing into his arm, heavy and solid and so very there until it wasn't. The weight lifted, the warmth of shared body heat dispersed, and the clone was gone. Dispelled.
Tenzō waited out the sandstorm beneath the overhang of stone as his world became just a little too heavy.
The village inn was three stories tall, small, with five rooms on each level. Wind had a large population, larger even than Fire Country's, but this oasis in particular was tiny and remote; they didn't have much and fifteen guests was likely the most they ever saw at once. If Naruto stopped in that village at all, and he must have, he would have stayed there.
They were close. Had to be.
Tenzō was sent ahead to pay for the room while Kakashi tallied their supplies and formulated their next course of action, and Itachi scouted. Itachi's summons were good at scouting; if Naruto was there at all, he'd be located in no time.
Tenzō smiled at the receptionist as she held out the sign-in sheet and he took it with a polite 'thank you.' He flipped it open to the correct date and penned in his codename, then flipped back a page; they'd just arrived shortly before dawn, so if Naruto did make a stop there, his name would be there.
It wasn't, he bitterly observed. No Naruto Uzumaki anywhere on the page. There were three names listed along with their times of arrival, the last of which being Menma, at 20:04.
Menma. The name nagged at him. He saw it somewhere before but couldn't place it.
The receptionist handed over the keys to their room and he took them gratefully, climbing the steps to the second floor. The room was 205, so if he had to guess, it would be right at the end of the hall. As he landed on the second floor, he passed a young boy with dark hair and eyes that reminded him so much of the Uchiha on his team. Tenzō smiled when the boy's eyes met his, but the child turned away coldly and quickened his pace down the stairs.
He decided not to dwell on it. Sure enough, the door at the other end was labelled 205. He fumbled with his keys, jiggled the knob, and it creaked ominously as it swung inward to reveal beyond a rickety old room with sparse furniture and a sandy colour palette. Tenzō was starting to hate sand. There was sand in his shoes, in his clothes, in his hair. In his mouth. His eyes.
Sand was very much the worst thing ever.
With a sigh, Tenzō slipped open his pair of sealing scrolls and looked over his belongings with careful thought. He still had most of his provisions, so they wouldn't have to do much of a restock—which Kakashi would be glad for, because Kakashi was very much not a fan of spending money, even if it was a part of the budget—and even if they were all out of food pills, Tenzō kept a few instant meals that they could heat up. There was ramen. Ramen, because it was Naruto's favourite, and he naively thought the boy would deserve it once they suppressed the fox—
Ramen.
The name Menma was scrawled onto the sign-in sheet. Menma—a name he saw in countless inns before this one, a name that seemed to follow them around the whole of Fire Country, a name—
A name so very similar to Naruto.
Tenzō doubled around, spun on his heel, and shot down the stairs, out the front of the inn and into the streets, but the boy with black hair and black eyes was gone. He cursed and grit his teeth and pulled his eyes to the crow perched on the windowsill of the inn, recognized it for the summon that it was, and mouthed his next words carefully.
"Itachi, I found him."
Notes:
Well, Tenzo, you tried. Thanks for all of the comments and kudos and I hope the chapter was worth the wait! My wife has made a lovely little comic from one of the scenes of this chapter, so check it out in the 'related works' section if you're interested!