Hidden Leaf, Hidden Talents 96 (Patreon)

-Shin-

-Amegakure-

The last thug hit the floor with a sound like a sack of wet sand.

Shin straightened up, dusted his palms twice, and looked around.

The hideout smelled like old grease and unwashed laundry even before the fight, so at least that hadn't changed. What had changed was the floor, which now had twelve people on it who hadn't been on it before, two of them face-down in a puddle of whatever had been inside the barrel he'd knocked over, and one of them half-inside the cooking fire's ash ring, snoring. A chair had gone to pieces somewhere in the middle of it all. Shin couldn't remember hitting anyone with a chair. Maybe someone had sat down at the wrong moment.

He counted heads. Twelve. All breathing, which was more than some of them deserved, but he wasn't in the business of deciding that today. He turned toward the corner.

Nagato was still crouched by the bucket. His eyes, those strange ringed eyes, had not moved off Shin since the first man hit the floor. The maid dress had a damp patch along the hem. He hadn't stood up. He hadn't run. He was simply waiting, having learned at some point that this was usually the safer thing to do.

Shin looked at him.

He looked at the dress.

He looked back at Nagato.

The question he needed to ask was going to be awkward regardless of how he worded it, so he just asked it. "Hey. Are you a guy or a girl?"

Nagato blinked. It was a very slow blink, the one that meant he hadn't expected that particular sentence to come out of this particular person's mouth after all of that. "A boy," he said flatly. "I'm a boy."

"Okay, good, that's what I thought." Shin looked at the dress, then back at him. "So the outfit. Uh, is this your hobby, or…"

Nagato's expression went very flat, very fast. "They made me wear it."

"Right, right. Just checking."

"I don't wear dresses."

"You're wearing one right now though?"

"They made me."

Shin looked at the twelve bodies, then back at the dress. "Well… Good thing I beat them up, then?"

"Yes,” Nagato nodded absentmindedly. “Good thing."

Shin dropped into a squat. "So, what's your story? You don't look like you belong here."

Nagato looked back at him. "I'm not a bandit, if that's what you're asking."

"Then what are you doing here?"

"I didn't have a choice." Nagato's chin dipped. "This place fed me and it was safer than sleeping in the open. The slum is worse."

"Worse how?"

"They bully me out there too." A crooked, joyless smile crossed his face. "But out there, there's no roof and no food, and sometimes it gets worse than bullying. At least in here I was useful enough that they kept me around."

Shin said nothing. He looked at the eyes, ringed and pale and impossible to ignore, and the hair, bright as a wound. In a slum full of desperate people looking for something smaller than themselves to step on, this kid had been walking around with a target painted on him.

He looked at the twelve men on the floor, then back at Nagato, and arrived at a thought he didn't particularly enjoy. These men would wake up eventually. Sore, angry, looking for somewhere to put it. And Nagato was still here, still in this room, still the smallest and most available person in it. Whatever arrangement had kept him fed and sheltered had just been dismantled, and Shin had been the one to dismantle it.

Shin pressed the back of his hand against his mouth briefly and looked at the ceiling. The answer to that problem was the same answer he'd walked in here with. Find Nagato, find Yahiko, pull them both out and drop them in Tanzaku Quarters where Konan was waiting. Three kids from the same ruined world, same age, same circumstances. It had seemed almost neat when he'd mapped it out from the outside. It would solve Nagato's problem, solve his own conscience problem, and incidentally complete the mission he'd come here for in the first place, all in one move.

Then he considered whether any of it was actually possible. One injured woman and two teenagers who couldn't move fast. A hidden village that had, over the past several days, quietly doubled its patrols, staffed its checkpoints properly, put sentries on rooftops. Whatever Ame was preparing for, it had been preparing with some urgency, and three civilians moving together toward an exit would not go unnoticed for long. They'd have jounin on every route before the group had covered two blocks.

He could flood the streets with clones as a distraction, create enough noise and confusion that the patrols had somewhere else to look. He thought about it. The problem was scale. Enough clones to distract a village meant enough chakra to light up every sensor in a three-block radius before the first one hit the ground. And a distracted village wasn't the same as a sleeping one. Ame would lock down. Hanzo might return. What had been a difficult exit would become something closer to a siege, and he would be attempting it with an injured woman draped over one arm and two teenagers he'd have to carry through whatever Ame decided to throw at him.

He tapped his foot twice, thinking.

Then he stopped tapping his foot, because there was no way he could get all three of them out safely. But he could at least leave the kid in a better position than he'd found him.

"Hey," he said.

Nagato looked at him.

"What if I told you there was a way to never get bullied for your looks again?"

"How." Nagato's hands, which had been still in his lap, didn't move. His eyes did, just slightly, settling on Shin's face with something that looked a lot like hope.

Shin smiled. "Simple, actually. We give you a different eye color, brown or black, something nobody looks twice at. For the hair, you shave it." He glanced around the room, found what he was looking for, and crossed to the nearest unconscious body. He pulled the bandana off the man's head, and tossed it across the room in Nagato's direction. "Wear that while it grows in. After that you're a completely different person, at least as far as anyone in this slum is concerned."

Nagato caught the bandana. He held it loosely in one hand, not looking at it. "And you can actually do that? Change my eye color?"

"I can do that."

A few seconds passed. Nagato's grip on the bandana tightened without him seeming to notice. He exhaled once, slow and quiet, and nodded. "Okay," he said. "How do we do it?"

Shin smiled. It was a very nice smile. Warm, relaxed, the smile of someone with absolutely nothing to hide, which, in Shin's experience, was exactly how you smiled when you had something to hide. He got to his feet and started walking toward Nagato. "Relax, there's nothing to worry about. You fall asleep, some things happen while you're asleep that we don't need to discuss in detail, and then you wake up with ordinary eyes, no hair, and a bandana, and nobody in this city will ever look at you the same way again. In a good sense."

He was two steps away when Nagato's brain caught up with his ears. The smile fell off his face like it had been pushed away. "Wait," he said, and he was already starting to push himself to his feet, already leaning slightly away. "What do you mean, fall asleep. How is falling asleep part of changing my eye color?"

"It's fine."

"That didn't answer my question."

"It's a very painless process."

"That's what people say right before something is very much not fine." He was definitely backing up now, heels finding what little floor there was between him and the wall. "What exactly are you planning to do to my eyes?"

Shin reached him.

"Don’t worry, you'll wake up a new man," he said pleasantly, and chopped him in the back of the neck hard enough to drop him on the spot.

Shin caught him before he hit the floor. He set him down carefully, then turned to the bodies. He needed a donor. Someone with compatible tissue, close enough in blood type that Nagato's body wouldn't reject the replacement. He checked the first man, then the second, pressing two fingers to the inside of each wrist and running a thin thread of diagnostic chakra through the contact point. The third was close. The fifth was better. He went back to the fifth, checked again, and decided that would do.

The surgery took about twenty minutes. He worked carefully, keeping his chakra suppressed to a thin thread, enough to do the job without advertising it to whatever sensors Ame had running in the area. When it was done he found a blade on the floor near the overturned barrel, tested the edge with his thumb, and shaved Nagato's head in long strokes. He tied the bandana on last, tucking the knot behind the ear.

He sat back on his heels. The face was the same face. But the eyes were ordinary now, dark and unremarkable, and the hair was gone, and without those two things there was nothing left to draw the eye. Just a boy. One of several thousand in this city, indistinguishable from the rest.

Shin tilted his head and looked at the boy. Yep. That was definitely better. He'd done a nice thing today.

…

White Zetsu had a job.

One job. Single, solitary, uncomplicated by design. Watch Nagato. Make sure the Rinnegan stayed where Madara had put it. Report anything unusual.

That was it.

He'd been doing it for years, and years of watching the same miserable corner of Amegakure had given him a reliable picture of what normal looked like down there. People woke up hungry and went to sleep the same way, with whatever scraping and scrambling filled the hours between. Children got thinner. Adults got meaner. The old ones quietly stopped appearing. Nagato scrubbed floors. Thugs kicked things over. The fat boss ate food that belonged to someone else. Repeat, indefinitely.

Today had started the same way. Zetsu was wedged into the underside of a thick branch on a rise overlooking the slum, watching the hideout through a gap in the leaves. Not uncomfortable, as these things went.

Nothing suspicious. Nothing unusual. The usual rotation of people going in and out, the usual background noise of a refugee slum being a refugee slum.

Then a weird kid showed up.

Zetsu watched him with mild curiosity. The kid was young and not particularly good at not looking suspicious. He lingered near the entrance a beat too long, tracked one of the thugs back to the hideout with his eyes before his feet followed, spent a minute outside that looked a lot like someone talking themselves into something, and then went in.

Zetsu tilted his head.

Hm. Definitely weird, but not that weird. Someone with a grudge, probably. He'd seen it before, actually, about a year ago, some kid whose sister had gotten roughed up by the same gang came back with a sharpened stick and enough anger to make up for the lack of anything better. Got thrown out on his ear, obviously, but the impulse was understandable. People did strange things when they were angry and young, and in this slum there was no shortage of either.

So he filed it under probably fine and kept watching.

Then the kid came back out carrying Nagato.

Zetsu went still.

“???”

He looked at the weird kid. He looked at Nagato, unconscious, draped over the kid's shoulder. He looked at the hideout the kid had just walked out of, which seemed to still be standing and which no one else had come running out of, alarmed or otherwise.

He stayed still for another few seconds, turning the image over in his head.

Is the kid Nagato’s family? Brother perhaps? No. He'd been watching Nagato for years and this kid had never appeared once. Friend? Nagato didn't have friends. He'd made absolutely sure to watch for that. This was not a friend.

Then what?

Zetsu watched the kid cross the slum with Nagato over his shoulder. He tracked them through the gap in the leaves until the angle got too narrow, and then he went underground, pushing himself down into the wet soil and following from below. Roots and rock and old pipe infrastructure sliding past him as he moved, the slum's foundations a mess of competing materials that the original builders hadn't bothered to plan around.

The kid stopped near the retaining wall. Set Nagato down in the gap beside a tent. Adjusted the bandana on his head, tucked something in, straightened up.

And then left.

Zetsu surfaced just enough to see, one eye above the waterline, so to speak, half his face still submerged in the earth.

The kid was already walking away. Gone into the dark. Not looking back.

Zetsu looked at Nagato on the ground, then at the fading back of the kid, then at Nagato again.

That was it?

He just dropped him there and left?

Zetsu pulled himself up slightly further and looked around, checking for anyone else, some second party, some follow-up, some indication that this was the first step in something larger. Nothing. Just Nagato on the ground between two tents.

Huh.

What’s going on?

This was, without question, the most confusing thing that had ever happened to him. And he had been alive for a very long time.

In the end, he went back underground and stayed there. A stranger had carried Nagato across the slum and put him down next to a tent, which was strange, but strange things happened in slums, and the target was alive, and Black Zetsu could deal with the details when he reported in. His job hadn't changed. Watch the boy. Watch the eyes. After sending the report, he went back underground and did exactly that.

A few hours passed.

He surfaced when he heard voices. A boy with orange hair was crouched over Nagato, shaking his shoulder, asking if he was alive. Nagato stirred, then groaned, then slowly pushed himself up, and they looked at each other for a second before the orange-haired boy asked who he was and what he was doing sleeping outside his tent. Nagato apparently had no good answer for either question. Names got exchanged eventually. The boy was Yahiko. Nagato was Nagato. Two strangers, one of them confused about how he'd ended up on the ground.

Nagato opened his eyes fully.

White Zetsu froze.

He looked at the eyes.

He looked at them again, because the first look hadn't produced a result he was prepared to accept.

Dark. Plain. Completely, ordinarily, unremarkably dark.

Where the Rinnegan had been this morning there were now two eyes that could have belonged to any boy in any slum in any country, and they were not purple, they were not ringed, they were not Madara's eyes at all.

How?

He looked at the empty dark eyes.

He thought about the kid. The weird kid who had gone into the thugs' hideout and come out with Nagato, carried him across the slum, only to abandon him in the middle of nowhere.

He thought about these things for a while. The answer kept coming up the same. Madara's eyes were gone.

Zetsu looked at Nagato's plain dark eyes one more time.

He was so dead.

…

-Kawazumi Outpost-

The barbecue had been running for hours and was still growing. A shakuhachi had found its way out somewhere past the northern benches, the low notes landing in the chest before they reached the ears, and the smoke from every grill in the square carried woodsmoke and rendered fat and the low, rich smell of bones going soft over a slow fire.

Three plates occupied the low table. Aya's was mostly clean except for a small island of elk fat she'd pushed to the edge. Mikoto's was halfway into a second helping she clearly hadn't planned on. #63's third plate was nearly gone. He caught the eye of the nearest grill clone, made a small circular gesture over the empty center of the table, and went back to eating. The clone turned without a word and started loading a fresh plate.

"I've eaten twice already and I'm still hungry. What is wrong with me." Mikoto said.

"That's the elk shoulder." #63 reached across and added two strips from the serving plate onto hers. "Give it twenty minutes. You're going to feel it all at once, like someone filled you with wet sand."

"That's a horrifying description."

"Being full is a good thing. That's the best possible ending to a meal."

She thought about it for a second, decided he had a point, and picked up a strip. One bite and her eyes closed for half a second. The char cracked, the fat hit the back of her tongue first, then the meat itself, rich and soft and so well-seasoned it made every ration bar she'd eaten in the past two weeks a thing to be resented.

Across the table, Aya had her elbow on the bench and her chopsticks held loosely, not really eating, just watching. Her eyes moved across the square without hurry. The sheer density of bodies moving through the square with nowhere specific to be, which meant they were waiting, and people waiting in this number at a single outpost meant command was planning something.

A man stopped at the edge of their table. #63 noticed him about a second before Mikoto did. Mikoto set her chopsticks down across her plate with both hands, carefully, the tips aligned.

"Father."

He had Mikoto's jaw and Mikoto's eyes, and thirty more years of war in the lines around them. Behind him stood a young man, a year or two older than Mikoto, with a serious face and his hands loose at his sides.

#63 looked up from his plate, took in the father and the young Uchiha behind him, and gestured at the open bench with his chopsticks. "Sit anywhere. There's more coming." He caught a grill clone's eye across the square and made a rolling motion with two fingers. "Hey. Two more."

A few minutes later, a clone arrived with two fresh platter and set it at the table. #63 looked at the father, looked at the young man, looked at the slight rigidity across Mikoto's shoulders, and picked up the serving chopsticks. "Try the elk first. The boar's good but the elk is better." He pushed the platter toward the father's end of the table, then slid the second one toward the young man. "Before it cools."

The young man gave a small nod of thanks. #63 returned it and leaned back slightly, cup in hand, and looked at the young man over the rim. The face was nagging at him. #63'd seen it somewhere, or heard it, or both. Black hair, serious jaw, the posture of someone who'd been told to make a good impression and was taking the instruction literally. Then he glanced at Mikoto. She'd stopped smiling. He looked back at the young man. Then back at Mikoto. Then back at the young man.

Oh.

Oh, that's who this was.

Fugaku Uchiha. Mikoto's future husband. Currently sitting at the same table as the man she actually wanted to marry. #63 was not dense. He was, in fact, the opposite of dense. He had excellent social perception. Which meant he had known for a while now that Mikoto liked Shinji, who was, to be specific, right here, and Fugaku had just sat down directly across from both of them, which was roughly equivalent to showing up to a funeral with a birthday cake. Technically not wrong. Just badly timed. He reached for his cup and decided that was enough thinking about that.

Across the table, Mikoto's father, Soma, looked at #63 for a moment. The boy had served them without being asked, and without waiting to be thanked. Soma picked up his chopsticks and gave a small nod. Polite kid. Thoughtful.

Soma tried the elk. "Not bad," he said, chewing slowly.

Mikoto looked up from her plate. "It's very good, actually."

A slight pause. "It is," he agreed. He took a second piece.

“…”

Soma set down his chopsticks. He looked at Mikoto for a moment, then at Fugaku. "You two have met before, if I recall. The clan gathering last spring." He reached for his cup. "Fugaku-kun's been making a name for himself on the northern front. Good results up there, from what I hear."

Mikoto picked up a piece of boar. "Good for him," she said, and ate it.

Then silence…

Soma: “…”

What an awkward father and daughter moment. Fugaku caught #63's eye and gave a small, pained grimace. #63 raised his cup slightly, a wordless toast to the situation, and drank.

Fugaku cleared his throat. "The gathering last spring felt like a long time ago now. A lot has changed since then."

“…”

Soma looked at Mikoto with the flat, expectant stare of a parent waiting for their child to stop being difficult.

She touched the rim of her cup. "…It has," she said flatly.

"I heard you've been doing well. Your team's reputation precedes you, even up north."

Soma looked at Mikoto again.

"…That's nice," she said.

Fugaku paused. "Do you think you'll make chunin soon?"

This time Soma didn't have to look. "Maybe," Mikoto said, in exactly the tone of someone answering because a parent was sitting directly across from them.

#63 looked at Fugaku. The man was trying so hard. It was genuinely painful to watch. He'd seen better odds on a burning building. Poor guy. #63 picked up his cup and stared into it. Then his brain, unhelpfully, started connecting dots. If Mikoto didn't marry Fugaku, there was no Itachi. And if there was no Itachi, there was no Sasuke. And if there was no Sasuke, there was no — he stopped. He put the cup down. He picked it back up. He drank the entire thing in one go and signaled for a refill.

He took a moment of silence. For Itachi. For Sasuke. For the entire hypothetical branch of the Uchiha family tree that was currently being pruned by a girl eating boar one feet away from him. The refill arrived. He accepted it with both hands and drank slowly.

When he put the cup down, Aya was looking at him. The two of them got the table talking again, starting with the outpost, the reinforcement waves coming in all day, and the square that had started as a few hundred and ended up feeding half the western front. Soma listened more than he spoke, but he spoke enough, a question here, a short observation there, enough to keep things moving. The food kept coming. It was going well, actually, right up until Soma set down his chopsticks and said. "Mikoto. How long are you planning to stay at this outpost?"

Mikoto's hand stilled on her cup. "Until the assignment ends," she said. "Same as everyone."

"Have you thought about requesting a transfer back to Konoha?"

"No," she said, and looked at him. "Where is this coming from."

"Things are about to get a lot more complicated around here." He glanced at the square, at the thousand people eating under open sky. "This outpost especially."

"Complicated how," Aya said. "Because from where I'm sitting, this outpost already looks like it's being prepared for something. So if you have information that confirms that, I'd very much like to hear it."

Soma was quiet for a moment. "I understand why you're asking. But this isn't something I can speak to openly."

"You don't have to be specific," she said. "Just point me at the right direction and I'll fill in the rest myself."

"I'm sorry," he said, and meant it. "I genuinely can't."

Aya pressed her lips together. "Right," she said. "Of course you can't."

#63 picked up a strip of boar and ate it thoughtfully. "Well, if I had to guess. This many people pulling back to one outpost, this fast. Either we're winning somewhere big, or we're losing somewhere bigger. Could be the western front's gone sideways." He paused. "Could even be something happened to the Hokage."

The table went very still.

Aya stared at him. "Hold on," she said. "Are you seriously implying something happened to the Lord Hokage right now, at a dinner table?"

Soma choked on his meat, got it down, and reached for his cup. "Lower your voices," he said. "I get that you're guessing. But that particular guess, at this particular table, surrounded by this many people?" He glanced at the crowd around them. "You know better."

#63 smiled. "Well," he said, "it's hard to call it guessing if it turns out to be true."

Soma gave him a look that communicated several things simultaneously, none of them approving.

#63 held up a hand. "Alright, alright. I'll stop." He reached for his cup, still smiling.

He hadn't even taken a sip when the BANG hit from somewhere in the middle of the square, something heavy meeting something solid, and voices shot up sharp over the crowd noise. Heads turned.

Fugaku turned toward the noise. "What's that?"

Aya propped her cheek on her hand. "Brawl, probably," she said, without particular interest.

"Sounds about right," Mikoto said. "Same thing broke out twice at the field hospital. You could always tell by the sound."

Fugaku asked. "Should we do something?"

#63 chuckled. "Leave it."

Fugaku turned back. "Leave it?"

"Brawls aren't purely negative," #63 said. "Sometimes they're the healthiest thing that can happen in a unit."

The table looked at him. Every single face at it wore the same expression, polite on the outside, deeply unconvinced on the inside.

Mikoto looked at him with curiosity. "...How does a brawl become a healthy thing?"

“Shinobi life is brutal and war makes it worse," #63 said. "Stress builds up. Resentments build up. A brawl lets two people dump all of that on each other in about three minutes, and when it's done it's done. Sometimes genuine respect on both sides."

Mikoto tilted her head. "That only works if the fight actually resolves something though, doesn't it? If the root problem is still there, the brawl just delays the rot."

He chuckled. "You're not wrong. A brawl only works if the problem is small enough to fit between two people. Someone stepped on someone's pride, someone took someone's spot, someone said the wrong thing after a bad day. Those you can actually fix with a brawl." He reached for his cup. "But overcrowding, bad rations, officers who play favorites, a punch doesn't fix any of that. It just delays it." He leaned back slightly. “The good news is, most brawls in a camp this size are exactly that shallow. Two people, one bad interaction, nothing that a bloody nose can't solve."

Soma nodded slowly. "That's not a bad way to think about it."

Aya smirked. "Spoken like someone who's broken up more than a few of them."

#63 drank instead of answering. He looked around the square for a moment, then back at Mikoto. "Tsume's not with you?"

"She was," Mikoto said. "Until she wasn't. She caught the smell before we even reached the gate and that was the last I saw of her."

That was such a Tsume thing to do that #63 laughed before he could stop himself. He scanned the square, found her in about three seconds, far side near the eastern grills, head down over a plate that had clearly lost count of itself. One of the clones manning the grill was already loading her next helping, having apparently accepted his fate.

#63 was about to look away when FSSSSHT. A single red streak tearing across the darkening sky from the command post, trailing smoke. It hung there for about two seconds. Long enough for everyone who needed to understand to understand.

One second of total stillness. Every conversation in the square cut off at the same moment, a thousand people reading the same sky at the same time. Then most of the jonin stood up across the entire square, at almost the same moment. They moved into the crowd without a word, finding their squads by touch and eye contact and the shorthand of people who had run drills for exactly this. A hand on a collar. A two-fingered point. A nod that meant pack up now. The square started coming apart at the seams, tables emptying from the inside out.

The chunin followed their jonin without being told twice. The genin followed their chunin. Nobody had a full picture yet and nobody needed one. Plates stayed where they were. A strip of elk on an unattended grill darkened past saving. Someone two tables over was still chewing as they tightened their pack straps, getting every last bit of value out of the meal before whatever came next.

Same at #63's table. Aya was already on her feet, one arm through her pack strap, eyes on the gate. Mikoto stood, checked her weapons by feel without looking down. Soma was upright before most of the square had registered the flare.

He had many things he wanted to say, and he knew, with the certainty of a man who had raised this particular child for years, that none of them would land.

So he didn't say them.

"Be careful," he said instead.

She nodded. "I know." She was still angry at him, had been angry since the day he sat her down and told her, calmly, like it was already decided, that Fugaku would make a fine husband. But anger and love had always lived in the same room in this family, and looking at her father’s face right now, she couldn't pretend otherwise. Her fingers tightened on her pack strap. "...You too, Father."

Soma didn't say anything after that. He just looked at her like he was memorizing something, then turned and walked into the crowd. Fugaku followed a step behind. Neither of them looked back. Well. Fugaku looked back twice.

#63 was still watching the gate when something hit his peripheral vision at full speed. Tsume skidded to a stop at the table's edge, boots dragging on the packed earth, a strip of elk dangling from her mouth. She grabbed it with two fingers, got the rest of it in, and chewed twice.

"I don't know what's happening," she said, still chewing, "but I'm ready."

"You have sauce on your chin," Mikoto said.

Tsume wiped it with the back of her hand. "Ready," she said again.

…

The square was almost unrecognizable. Grills still burning, most of them, clones tending the ones that hadn't been abandoned mid-cook. Every table had plates on it. None of them had people. The shamisen was gone, player and instrument both. Maybe a hundred bodies left inside the walls, support staff, the lightly wounded, a few squads still getting their orders. Everyone else had gone out the gate in under ten minutes.

#63 was still looking at the empty square when something moved at the gate.

Two people. One walking. One not.

He went still.

It took him a second. Just one. The same second it usually took to process information you already knew, somewhere in the back of your brain, but hadn't let yourself put words to yet.

The figure with the iron-grey hair. The broad shoulders. The straight back on a man carrying what had to be ninety kilos of unconscious Hokage.

Danzo.

#63's eyes found him and stayed there.

He’s still alive?

How?

How was that possible? His clones had been out there. They'd been close. Whatever happened on the front, they hadn't finished it. Hadn't taken the shot.

Out there, one more body was one more body. Nobody sorted through the details until after.

In here was different.

…Or it had been, ten minutes ago?

His gaze moved across the outpost slowly. The empty tables. The abandoned plates. Ten minutes ago this place had a thousand people in it. Now it had him, a hundred support staff, and Danzo.

He looked at Danzo one more time. Thoughtfully.

Hm.

#63 nodded slowly. The clones had made a mistake. Mistakes happened. The important thing was whether there was still time to correct them.

He was starting to think there might be.

A chance, even.

#63 stepped off the rooftop.

He didn't make a sound when he landed. He didn't make a sound after, either. He just started walking, and the distance between him and Danzo got a little smaller with every step.