EDIT: I apparently posted the wrong chapter earlier. My apologies.
o.o.o.o.o
"…So, you know this man?" Mikoto says, when no one else shows any sign of moving or saying anything.
The man in blue and red turns slightly to look at her, his head lolling unnaturally on his neck. All his joints seem to be a bit odd, actually; everything seems to be either too loose or too tense, more like a puppet than a human being.
"We worked together, before I came to the Elemental Nations." Leah says, and Mikoto files the tidbit away. "I haven't heard from him since I came here."
"I see." Mikoto says, putting a hand to her side to keep her sons from trying to crawl into the aisle to get a better look.
"We should take this outside," Leah decides, grabbing the little green bag she carries around sometimes and fishing out payment for the tea that she and Shin-san were drinking before. Shin-san shrugs, an elegant motion, and slides out from the booth.
(Sasuke starts complaining about how he was hungry.)
"Itachi, sweetie, I'm going to follow Leah-nee-san, okay?" Mikoto's never been able to gauge Leah's age fully, but the first time Itachi referred to her as Nee-san, the woman smiled and called him adorable. The appellation has stuck, and Mikoto is still stuck wondering how old Leah is. "I'm going to give you some ryo, and you can buy yourselves something to eat. Try to keep it healthy, okay?"
Itachi nods, and Mikoto counts out a hundred ryo and gives it to him, then dashes out after Leah, Shin-san, and whoever the man in the red and blue was. (1)
What she finds once she gets outside is not entirely what she expects. She does find Leah, Shin-san, and the unknown man.
She also finds young Hatake Kakashi staring in horror as the unknown man offers him one of his gloves, the uncovered hand—
What.
"Kakashi, this isn't really a good time." Leah puts a hand on the boy's chest and pushes him away, actively ignoring the fact that the man in the suit doesn't have a hand. Or an arm at all, since all Mikoto can see past the sleeve is empty space and darkness.
The man pulls the glove back on, and wiggles the fingers of the hand that, just a few seconds prior, had not existed.
Invisibility? Mikoto thinks, scrabbling for an answer. Some kind of kekkei genkai that confers complete invisibility of the body without choice, forcing the clan members to wear full-body coverings in order interact with the world at large?
The back of her mind suggests that such a kekkei genkai would make childrearing very difficult.
"What the hell is going on?" Kakashi demands, and Mikoto snaps out of her temporary spell of confusion and hurries over. She's got military police credentials, at least; if someone tries to pick a fight like the shinobi inside had, then she'll have the authority to step in.
"Tic-toc." The man says, tilting his head to the side it hadn't been on before.
Kakashi stares in what can only be confusion. The kid is only, what, seventeen? No wonder he's confused. Jounin or not, he hasn't seen the truly strange things that the world has to offer.
"Not them." Leah says, quiet. She puts a hand on the man's shoulder and guides him over to the entryway of an alley. "Why are you here?"
"What you can't outrun." The man says, which Mikoto thinks is probably what he said back in the café, when asked who he was.
"I'm not running." Leah explains, patient. She glances over the man's shoulder at where Mikoto is standing, now just a step away from Kakashi and Shin-san. "I wasn't meant to stay back there. I found someplace new."
"Denial."
"Now you're just being stubborn." Leah chastises. "There's nothing left for me back home. I've got a job and acquaintances, and Loki sometimes visits, even."
"The story."
"Is over."
"Never."
"It is for me. There are others to pick it up. I heard the entire," she hesitates and glances at Mikoto again with that, and then continues, "company got shuffled around recently. I'm sure there's someone else to take my place. Try asking Loki; they know where the stories are going now."
The man shifts again, and then turns to look at the shinobi. Mikoto stiffens as he faces her.
"Time is fleeing you."
Mikoto isn't sure how to take that.
"He means your time is running out." Leah says, pursing her lips. "Which is true for everyone, really."
'Fleeing' implies something a lot faster than just running, though. Mikoto feels a shiver crawl up her spine, like the man actually has foretold her—
"Four years?"
—death.
God, she hopes she's reading the conversation wrong. She hopes she has more time than that.
"I don't know. I haven't checked. I have no way to check, not here. Stop playing around." Leah puts a hand on the man's shoulder again, and pushes him to the side a little as she steps forward. Leah pastes on a smile (they don't usually look so fake, Mikoto thinks; polite and plasticky, perhaps, but rarely like she's hiding something), and addresses the others. "Sorry about that. He's not entirely on top of the idea of social norms. Mikoto, Shin, Kakashi, this is my old friend, Patri-not."
Mikoto hears the word and her brain tries to parse the sounds. Peichurinatto, maybe?
"They're coming."
"Who is?" Leah seems to give up, there. She's… exasperated, maybe even frazzled, if one parses through the mask of perfection and condescension; she's not-so-obviously pretending to humor him. Mikoto's never seen her as anything less than perfectly put together. A glance at Kakashi shows that he's probably thinking along the same lines, while Shin-san mostly seems amused.
"Not-so-child trickster." Patri-not tilts his head. "Story god."
"Yes, in about two weeks, because they've got other things to do until then. And don't call them that, not here." Leah takes one of Patri-not's hands in her own. "I can talk to you, but not here. You're bringing up names and histories that shouldn't be mentioned. Find me at my office, and we can talk there."
Patri-not looks at her for a few seconds, then nods in a jerky fashion that is entirely surpassed in strangeness by the fact that he disappears a handful of seconds later. He doesn't shunshin or kawarimi or anything similarly sensible. It's not even something impressive but feasible, like Hiraishin. The only explanation Mikoto can think of is genjutsu, and that's not possible because her Sharingan is on the second she notices what's happening.
The man dissolves into smoke, starting from one edge and travelling across, and wafts away on the breeze. The smoke itself is dispersed to invisibility within seconds, and all Mikoto catches from Leah is a whispered huff of, "—such a drama queen."
Mikoto doesn't really think Leah has any room to talk, honestly. The woman's own method of leaving Konoha is still baffling people, and it's been three years. She either uses some green portal-like thing that no one else can enter, or simply steps forward and disappears, like she's just walked into another room that doesn't exist. The one time Mikoto had her Sharingan on while the latter occurred, she'd gotten a headache from whatever the hell had happened, with space and chakra twisting in on itself in a way that made her feel like she was suddenly seeing in four dimensions instead of three.
She hasn't tried watching Leah leave with an active doujutsu since then. A few of the other Uchiha and some of the Hyuuga have, but… well, on their own heads be it. If they haven't heeded her warnings, then that's their own fault.
"I'm so sorry about this. I wasn't expecting him to find me after all this time. We hadn't known each other long, and quite frankly, most people assumed I was dead, with how I left, so I thought he had as well." Leah crosses her arms. "I'm honestly surprised he cared at all, really."
"These things happen." Shin-san says, and there's a hint of amusement to his voice again, though his face betrays none of it. "Think nothing of it."
"Will someone please explain what's going on?" Kakashi asks, sounding a little like he's dying inside. "Who was that? What was going on with his hand? How did you actually know each other? What was with the whole 'turning to smoke but not a genjutsu' thing? Why was he even here?"
Mikoto wonders how long Kakashi's frustrations with Leah have been building. He's been working very hard at pretending to be laid-back since the Kyuubi disaster, and he's a trained shinobi besides. It's both out of character and unprofessional for him to just spew questions like this.
Then again, he is a teenager.
Hm.
That's something to consider.
"In order: I would if I could, an old coworker; I'm still not entirely sure; we were assigned to a project together for a few weeks, once upon a time; it's his form of long-distance transportation; and I'm still not entirely sure, again." Leah shrugs. "I'd tell you more if I could, but I'm honestly still not sure what he is, where he came from, or what his long-term goals are."
Mikoto has a distinct feeling that there's something more that Leah's tempted to add on, but doesn't prompt her. The woman would have added it on of her own volition if she was willing to say it at all. No one's had much luck in tricking information out of her, yet, and they don't have the legal or technical recourse to bring her in for torture, but she's usually rather talkative.
"But you worked together." Kakashi says.
"Yes."
"On what?"
Leah pauses at that, presumably thinking it over. Mikoto's pretty curious about that too, honestly.
"Trying to kill Loki, really." Leah muses, ignoring their reactions, or at least pretending too. "More accurately on my end, I was forcing Loki to acknowledge their own mistakes by way of intense battle, while Patri-not's goal was a bit more obscure, but still involved attacking Loki and their friends."
She blinks innocently at them. "We've all forgiven one another over that little dust-up. There's no need to look so put out."
"Indeed," Shin-san still seems to find the whole thing funny, "What's a little attempted murder between friends?"
"Exactly!" Leah smiles brightly at Shin-san, and Mikoto's struck by the fact that this is why they're friends. This type of black humor isn't really uncommon between shinobi either, but she gets the feeling there's an inside joke here that she isn't getting.
"I," Kakashi say, very slowly and deliberately, as though trying to stay calm around a wild animal, "am going to leave now, and go get a mission from the Hokage that will take me far, far away from you."
"Have fun," Leah tells him as he shunshins off. She turns to Mikoto, finally, "I really would like to apologize for this whole mess. Perhaps another time?"
Mikoto actually raises an eyebrow. "You mean, the next time you come to Konoha and I have to tail you, because Kakashi will undoubtedly still be finding excuses to stay out of the country and away from you?"
"Precisely! I'm glad we understand each other. That said, I really should be going." Leah nods at them, "Mikoto, Shin. I'll see you both some other time."
She steps sideways and disappears.
Mikoto slowly turns to look at Shin, who blinks and—
—aaaaaaaaand he just collapsed into a pile of red liquid, as a Hozuki becomes water, looking suspiciously like blood, and is now slowly draining away into some unseen hole in the fabric of space time.
"…are all her friends drama queens?" Mikoto mutters before she walks back into the café to make sure her sons are eating properly instead of messing around with desserts first.
At least she can count on her boys to provide some semblance of sanity to her life.
o.o.o.o.o
(1) The Naruto wiki states that the ryo is based off of an old Japanese currency that is no longer in use, which had an exchange rate of about one ryo = ten yen. One hundred ryo is approximately ten USD, depending on the strength of the dollar in comparison to the yen (it would currently be about eight USD, for instance).
A/N: Writing the Patri-not is... difficult. I ended up quoting some of his (its?) lines from the comics, because he tends to repeat himself a lot, and tried to keep to his somewhat stilted short speech otherwise, but it was still a bit hard. Word to the wise: the whole "they're coming" (but not for a while) thing is actually based on a canon incident; the Patri-not told Leah at one point in the comics the same line, to which she replied that yes, she knew, he had been telling her such for hours, and 'they' had been invited/taunted into coming in the first place.
Also, what pronouns do you use for the Patri-not? I stuck with 'he' in this chapter since it was from Mikoto's POV, but I have no idea what to do for the rest. I'd normally be tempted to use "it," just because... well, the Patri-not isn't exactly human. Or anything we know of. I'm not joking about the whole Eldritch Abomination from beyond the Void thing.
If you want to learn more about the Patri-not, look up "Patriot (Entity) Earth-616) on the Marvel Wiki.
Next Time: In which Leah reaffirms her support of the idea that pacifism is for losers.