Hi everyone! I'm back. I am very sorry for the long and unexpected hiatus.
The next few scenes don't fit smoothly into a single chapter, so I have decided to split them up into several shorter ones. Hopefully, they will be posted in relatively quick succession.
Thank you, everyone, for continuing to read and support this story!
Chapter 10
"So he was attacked."
"And chased, Hokage-sama."
"But unharmed." Hiruzen heaves a deep sigh and closes his eyes, allowing himself a rare moment of exhaustion. It just keeps getting worse. "Who was the child who helped him?"
"Haruno Sakura. They seem to have become friends."
"Ahh," Hiruzen murmurs, letting his gaze wander out the wide windows to the bustling village below. The age in his bones trembles beneath the invisible weights in his mind. "That is an exceptional display of chakra control for a child so young."
Haruno…
Hiruzen inhales a lungful of the room's heavy air and steeples his fingers. "Did she demonstrate any other unusual abilities?"
"No. They spent most of the evening at Naruto's apartment. The rest of her Academy file is mediocre on average."
"I see. Thank you, Hound." Certainly noteworthy, but nothing of pressing significance. "Do you have anything to add, Tanuki?"
"Nothing important, Hokage-sama. She tutored Naruto the other day. It appears that her knowledge of theory is very advanced." A muffled chuckle resounds from behind the tall figure's mask. "Naruto seems very taken with her."
"Hmmm," Hiruzen rumbles, leaning back in his chair; considering. "I see. Continue to keep watch over Naruto-kun. If you happen to witness further developments of note in Sakua-chan, report to me."
"Hai, Hokage-sama," the two ANBU chorus.
"Tanuki, dismissed."
With a quick, respectful nod, the shinobi vanishes in a quiet swirl of leaves. Hiruzen relights his pipe and slips it back between his teeth, taking a long, slow puff. The remaining figure waits unmoving, porcelain mask blank, eye slits dark and impenetrable.
Allowing his eyelids to fall closed, Hiruzen blows out a trailing plume of gray smoke, allowing the soothing mixture of herbs to course through his veins before fixing his weathered gaze back upon the blank white face.
"Hound," he finally says, already feeling the weight of each syllable roll heavily off his tongue.
"Bring me Shisui."
Sakura's shirt and pants stick wetly to her clammy skin as she walks through the side-streets of Konoha, bangs clinging persistently to her heated cheeks and falling into her eyes. With both her hands occupied with bags, Sakura is forced to resort to blowing away the offending strands, tiredness threatening to overwhelm her with every breath. The books in her right hand feel like hundred-ton weights, which, when combined with the fragile groceries in her left hand, leave her waddling awkwardly through the streets like an unbalanced penguin.
Sakura sighs. At least she is lucky enough to have bags. The library staff had been so appalled by her sticky, sweaty visage that they had given her a burlap sack to carry her books in—an attempt to protect the already-crumbling tomes from salt damage. Wincing as a bag filled with fish and meats nearly slips through her fingers, Sakura carefully hefts it onto her shoulder and picks up her pace.
She had gone extra hard on herself during training earlier, and the ache in her arms and legs is a painful reminder. She wonders if she maybe should have done her errands before jogging all the way up the Hokage Mountain and back again without chakra—maybe done her studying first, too, because right now, there's a non-zero chance she'll collapse as soon as she makes it back to her front porch.
Perhaps she'll leave out the reading today, she thinks, knowing fully well that she won't. Neither hide nor hair of her mentors have been seen for weeks and at this point, Sakura is starting to feel adrift in a laborious training routine, the purpose of which she has yet to understand, but...the potential reward of which she is unable to give up.
Rounding the corner of her block as her bags grow heavier and heavier, she sighs and makes an internal bargain: she'll shower first, heat up some leftovers for a simple meal, and read a couple of chapters in bed. To make up for the lighter load today, she'll wake up early tomorrow and finish the rest of the reading. It sounds reasonable.
Unfortunately, however, it is not to be.
For when Sakura arrives home, she finds, lounging on her front porch with one eye closed, a cat.
Bemused, she simply stares down at the ball of fluff for a moment in silence.
"...Cat?" she eventually states, unsurely. Said animal stares back at her, opening its other eye.
The cat has heterochromia, Sakura distantly realizes as it stretches languidly along the wooden floorboards. Its left eye is a clear, sapphire blue, while its right eye is the color of tea and honey. Flopping onto its back, it—he, she realizes—yawns and wiggles his paws in the air.
"Meow," he says.
Setting down her books and groceries, Sakura cautiously sits down on the front steps and reaches out a hand to stroke the long, white hairs on the cat's stomach. The animal purrs loudly and swishes his tail before rolling onto his feet and butting his gray-and-white head against Sakura's hand.
"Meowww," he says again, a note of insistence entering his tone. He sniffs at the bag containing meats and fish, then unsheaths his claws.
"No!" Sakura gasps, jumping to her feet and lifting the bag out of reach an instant before it can be torn to shreds. "Not like that!"
With a sigh, she unlocks the front door and picks up the rest of her bags.
"Come inside, then." So much for her evening plans. The cat nuzzles against her legs before sliding past her and into the house.
Sakura has no idea where the feline came from. She has never seen a cat with that coloring in her neighborhood before, and the animal looks too well-groomed, his mannerisms too delicate to be a street cat. Dumping everything onto the kitchen table, she draws the blinds to let in the late afternoon sunlight and then sets to work restocking her refrigerator and pantry.
Should she post signs in the area for a lost-and-found cat? Send him to the pound?
The cat executes an incredible leap up to the counter and settles there, his bushy tail lazily swishing in the air as he pins his sun-and-sky eyes on Sakura.
Definitely not the pound, Sakura decides. Who knows what could happen to him there. And there's no way she can bring herself to just set him free in some alley, either. Grabbing two small fish and some spices before closing the refrigerator door, she fills a small dish with water and sets it on the floor.
"Only cooked food for you!" Sakura warns, shooing the cat off the counter when he starts nosing at the raw fish.
The animal lands gracefully on his feet and wanders away for a drink, but keeps an oddly observant eye on her as she sets about searing the mackerel and steaming the rice, his ears flickering occasionally as he watches. As soon as Sakura plates the food, he springs onto the dining table and sits primly across from her chair.
"Meow," he announces, curling his tail around his paws and staring expectantly at the plate Sakura had been about to set on the ground.
It's kind of cute.
"Alright," Sakura accedes hesitantly. "You can eat on the table, but only if you're really neat, okay? No splattering fish bits into my rice!"
She probably has a few screws loose, Sakura decides, for lecturing a cat she has just picked up off the streets about dinner etiquette. As if he could understand her, never mind actually take her preferences into consideration.
With a sigh, she places the cat's fish, which she had purposefully left unseasoned, onto the tabletop. Shikamaru will definitely tease her for this. 'Are you taking in a pet or a houseguest?,' she can already hear him ask.
Giving the cat a rueful glance, she sits down and starts on her own dinner.
Strangely enough, the animal doesn't immediately eat, but instead studies Sakura unblinkingly until she takes a bite of rice. Only then does he carefully sniff at his own meal and languidly lean down to take a delicate nibble.
Sakura hasn't interacted with many cats in her life, but she's pretty sure normal cats don't do this. Absentmindedly chewing on another mouthful of food and feeling increasingly as if she must have lost her mind somewhere on the walk home from the library, she stares as the feline fastidiously strips flesh from bone and leaves the fish's skeleton utterly clean without ever dropping anything onto the table.
"You are so…strange, you know?" Sakura can't help but mutter in amazement. At this point, she nearly expects the cat to respond.
He doesn't. He just gives her a dismissive look before ignoring her in favor of cleaning his paw, and she wonders whether it would be better to ask Shikamaru if he'd like to watch over the animal until they find the owner. At least he's taken care of deer before; she has never had a pet, and this cat is definitely out of her league.
"Neko-chan," she says to the cat as she brings their empty dishes to the sink, "how would going to Shika's sound?" She turns on the faucet. "He's got a really nice pond in the back, too," she muses.
"Meowww," the cat says as if in reply, somehow managing to sound scathing. He jumps off the table and circles her legs.
Sakura huffs out a surprised laugh and places the last of the dishes onto the drying rack.
"I guess that's a 'no' then." To be honest, she probably wouldn't have bothered Shikamaru with this anyway; it would be unfair to put such a burden on him. Returning to the dinner table, she sits back down and pats her thighs.
"Okay, Neko-chan, it looks like you're going to be staying with me for the time being then, until we find your owner." The cat gracefully obliges her request and hops onto her lap, curling up against her stomach and allowing her to examine him more carefully.
His fur and soft and smooth, perfectly groomed and clean. He looks to be in good health, and the pads on his paws are squishy enough that Sakura can't resist giving one a gentle poke.
The cat purrs and sniffs at her fingers.
"You're pretty cute, you know that?" Sakura says to him, scratching hesitantly behind his ears. "And your owner definitely loves you a lot. I don't understand why you don't have a collar."
The hairs around his neck are free of kinks and tangles, a clear sign that he hasn't worn a collar for some time now. Sakura purses her lips as she puzzles over the available facts. Hopefully, the owner will be a kind person. On the slim chance that they turn out to be nasty, Sakura isn't sure if she'd be able to hand the charmingly haughty animal back over—honestly, she is already a bit too attached.
"Well, Neko-chan, I guess we'll start looking tomorrow." She gives his head one last pat before setting him down on the floor. "In the meantime, let me think of something better than 'Neko-chan' to call you by."
The cat blinks at her, flicks his ears, and wanders out of the kitchen to explore. Shaking her head in amused exasperation, Sakura follows.
It is only after she's showered, dressed down, and cocooned in bed with a textbook propped on her stomach and the cat nestled against her left side that a name that feels right finally floats through her mind.
"I got it," she declares in the middle of reading a paragraph detailing the role of alveoli in gas exchange. The cat opens his blue eye, flicks his tail against her elbow as if to say 'shut up, I'm trying to sleep,' and closes his eye again.
"Hey, pay attention!" Sakura huffs as she gently pets his gray-and-white head, combing her fingers through his silky fur.
"Meoww," the cat sighs, fixing her with his multicolored gaze. Sakura shoots him a cheery smile.
"Kumo." She strokes behind his ear with her forefinger. "You're practically a stormcloud in cat form, you know. May I call you Kumo-chan?"
The cat nips at her finger and yawns, laying his head on her arm. Sakura decides to take that as a 'yes.'
"Okay, Kumo-chan. I guess we're friends now, ne?"
In response, he bats a paw at her book as if to tell her to get back to studying and promptly closes his eyes, ignoring her.
With a chuckle, Sakura obliges.