Chapter 26Chapter Text
Cats.
A brown tabby did a boneless roll off a couch.
Cats.
A cream shorthair, chin on its paws, yawned.
Cats.
A living carpet of felines of various colors, a furry rainbow draped all over a quietly smoking woman who may have been older than Konoha, wearing a black cat headband of all things that kept bushy gray hair swept back, dispersed into the rest of the store in a meowing wave as my team and I walked in; Some were normal. Some were ninja cats pretending otherwise. Some were the in-between, what the ninja cats would have considered civilians.
There were so many cats…and weapons. Kunai. Swords. Wire. Tags. Anything and everything a ninja could want for a mission that wasn't some overly specialized nightmare, I saw them on the walls.
And an orange kitten had just tackled my braid with a heart-melting mew.
"It's been a long time, Granny Cat," Sasuke said, oblivious to what mattered here.
Another black-and-white kitten, seeing what the first had, joined in on attacking my braid. Then another kitten. And another as my hair lifted slightly off the ground, forcing them to wave their tiny paws around and take a tumble as they reared back in surprise.
This was great.
"...Yes, Sasuke-boy. It has. So long that I remember that last time being when you weren't even as tall as me." Granny Cat, her face so wrinkled that she could barely open her eyes, took a long drag on her pipe as Sasuke tried not to squirm, I was viciously attacked, and Naruto resisted the urge to touch any of the weapons on the walls after one of the older cats hissed at him for doing just that. "You've grown up."
Had it?
Had he?
Seeing as she was, at most, four and a half feet tall, and he was getting closer to six than not, that must have been quite a while. Long enough to be worthy of shaming, as Sasuke damn well knew; even Naruto knew, and finally figured out why Sasuke had been so insistent on us not embarrassing him, the doubletake he did between Sasuke and Granny Cat making that clear.
Only the promise we'd made before entering this shop, the verbal contract not to embarrass Sasuke any more than he already was, kept Naruto from saying what was on his mind. Not that he needed to say it. We all knew what he would have said if he could.
'Dick move, you fucking asshole'. Or something to that effect.
It was a very Naruto thing to say.
And I'd have to say that I agreed with the sentiment somewhat.
They might not have been family. Sasuke wasn't obligated to visit outside of those expected of an employer and his employee. But really. He ordered all his equipment from her, and his family had relied on her ninja cat spy network to stay competitive… She wasn't even an hour away.
She was old. At her age, a visit from anyone made her week.
And she had cats.
Where was his heart?
One of the kittens, one of the smaller ones, eventually broke free of the pile to hook its claws into my hair and start climbing.
Where was his soul?
"Y-yes." Sasuke cleared his throat as the silent weight of our collective disapproval weighed on him. "Like I said, it's been a while. And it is good to see you. But I'm not here to catch up." He cleared his throat again as the old woman huffed, a strong feeling of amusement under the grumpy sound. "You hired us to do a job."
Ah. Yes.
That.
The thing we came for.
As fun as this was, and as much emotional blackmail material as I was gathering while I took advantage of this chance to play with the babies, she had.
We had a job to do.
Damn it.
"Of course, of course… Tamaki!" She put her pipe to the side even as smoke left her mouth in a plume. "Bring the book!"
"One second, Grandma! Just need to-"
There was a sharp bang behind the curtain at Granny Cat's back, of something solid colliding against something just as solid… And a rolling puff of dust got Naruto to snicker and the kittens to disperse as it rolled over them, sneezing.
All but the one, still doggedly (heh) clinging to my braid and frantically kicking its back legs as it narrowly avoided doom… Before it was lifted higher, the funny little thing not knowing where it was or how it had gotten there as it lay, stunned, in the palm of my hand.
So small. So soft.
It…he just about melted as I moved a finger along his spine. And I sighed as Tamaki, a pretty brunette in a red top, stepped out from behind the curtain with a pink, cat-themed book in her hands.
With a dent in it.
I sighed again as I put the kitten down on splayed-out paws, confusing him all over again.
If only dad weren't allergic.
"Sorry about that. Old book problems. You know, what with the… Hmm." She trailed off for a second when she saw Sasuke, a slight blush showing on her face before she looked away to hand her grandmother the book… And I wished her all the luck. "Here you go, Grandma."
"I'd forgotten how that book looked up until now." Sasuke scowled and ignored the other girl as she brushed some hair behind her ear to show off her neck… And all the luck I had to give didn't even get her a look. "Only two left to go."
"One, Sasuke-boy," Granny Cat chuckled, croaked really as her granddaughter bristled at the apparent dismissal, an angry flush filling her face as she spun on her heel and left the room. "I was able to meet the Two-Tails during one of my vacations, and she was kind enough to give me her print with a polite request."
Naruto's flinch at 'Two-Tails' wasn't quite a spasm. "You talked to the Two-Tails?!"
And his question wasn't quite a scream as his worldview took a hit, the idea that you could speak to the Beasts directly and without hostility blowing his mind.
It would be better if he learned this sort of thing organically, without me telling him. Or leading him to the answer… It was the same thing.
I'd shown my hand enough as it was.
Sasuke, not grasping the gravity of the situation, which I'd noticed was a common situation with him recently, growled, "Naruto…!"
"No, no. That is a reasonable response. Talking to one of the Beasts is not for the faint of heart. Or for those with their lives still ahead of them - but that is a story for another time," Granny Cat interrupted by opening the book, a gigantic sheet of paper unfurling to show us a pawprint that was…a lot smaller than I thought it would be before Sasuke could think about smacking Naruto upside the head. "You're after one of the big players of the ninja cat world instead."
"Nekomata." I nodded.
"A master of illusions and disguise, an escape artist who never publicly shows his face. Nekomata," Granny Cat confirmed as she flipped several pages in the book, eventually landing on a picture of...honestly, a rather hideous cat. All frazzled fur and scars and bright yellow eyes… Cute though, in that way animals tended to be when they had failed at anything else. "And the last challenge that Itachi ever-"
Killing intent.
Unfocused. Sporadic… Hateful to a degree I couldn't imagine feeling myself in any depth… Or that I just didn't want to imagine feeling.
I ground my teeth as the silence dragged on.
There was nothing I knew so far that felt as soul-crushingly awful as still loving someone you wanted to kill.
Nothing at all.
"...I'm going to go prepare," Sasuke eventually said, his voice hollow as he turned to do just that instead of screaming or yelling. Or anything I'd expected as the warmth in the room turned cold, and the mood was ruined. "Don't take too long."
It was only polite to wait for Sasuke to leave and the door to close behind him before a consternated Naruto, his brow furrowed as the realization that Sasuke might have something wrong with him sank in, and I turned back to the client.
"...They were both so cute once. But things change. Isn't that right?" Granny Cat picked up her pipe to take a long draw as she set the book aside, the wrinkles on her face deepening from regret. "I must be getting old."
And the kittens returned, the small one leading the lot while the older cats looked on, to try climbing my hair as a group.
Cats would be cats.
"So. Nekomata," I prodded her.
I knew what it looked like when someone got lost in their head.
I did it often enough to know.
"Yes, yes. Him… He has a castle that he rarely leaves and is staffed from top to bottom with ninja cats, maintained, guarded, and supplied." The old woman leaned forward, recrossing her legs. "Staff that you're going to have to get past without harming them, if you can help it."
"What? We can't hurt them?" Naruto asked, shocked at the idea that he might not have to punch something. "Why not?"
"Well, for one, this is a D-rank. Naruto, we aren't getting paid to punch cats in the face." If there was heat in that statement, which it might have seeing the uneasy look on Naruto's face as a wave of kittens competed to see who reached my head first, I didn't apologize. "For another, these cats are, assumedly, part of the Uchiha information network. Which means they are part of the Leaf's information network."
If you wanted to stop existing as a nation, you made your intelligence apparatus mad at you. Punching them in the face got them mad at you. So don't punch them in the face.
This was a relatively easy concept to grasp.
"...Wait. Wait a second. Wait." Something went clunk in Naruto's head. "We're taking a mission against our allies?"
That was...one way of looking at it.
"We're getting a paw print. And, as you said, they are our allies. This is different." At some point, we'd have to talk about allies and 'allies'. "So we're not taking a mission against them. We're testing their defenses."
Another, much easier to swallow way of looking at it.
"Defenses, huh?" Naruto peered at me through narrowed eyes, the lines on his face giving him a comedically vulpine look. "...That sounds like bullshit."
Welcome to politics.
"So, we have to infiltrate Nekomata's castle. Not hurt anyone. Get his pawprint. Get out," I affirmed, abruptly cutting the conversation with Naruto before he could give me a speech on honesty and why friends shouldn't spy on each other. Or something to that effect. "Anything else, ma'am?"
"Of course there is." Granny Cat stroked the back of a cat as it moved past her, neither looking at the other. "Sneaking in is one thing. But why make it harder than it has to be? A guide should be outside town to the east, ready to lead you to the castle."
"A ninja cat," Naruto grumbled.
"As if there was another kind," Granny Cat said in a way that, if I hadn't had my particular set of skills, would have ramped up my paranoia something fierce as I cradled the entire horde of kittens in my arms; all I felt was a very kittenish joy and curiosity, and it was good. "And you know, dear, if you want one…?"
"Oh." If only. "No, thank you." One of the kittens escaped the crab bucket that was the cradle of my arms to smack me in the chin with a paw. "My dad is allergic."
If only.
"Poor dear," Granny Cat shook her head before returning to business, "Also, while you have to sneak in, why make it harder than it has to be? Tamaki!"
"What, Grandma?" Tamaki replied, pure sulk in her voice.
"Bring the ears!"
"The ears?"
"The ears!"
Naruto opened his mouth. Closed his mouth. Opened it again. "The what?"
==========
The sound of the fountain at Sasuke's back was a welcome one.
It was noise. And that's it. That's all he wanted out of it as he tied another flash tag to the end of a kunai. One of a pile that he was sure would be put into use.
And that he would need more of it, no matter how much of it he had. It had been a long while, but he remembered the broad strokes.
There was a castle. There was a giant cat and his servants.
He…the dead man had thought that Sasuke wasn't good enough to handle it.
That he was too weak.
Sasuke paused. He closed his eyes… Exhaled as he deactivated his sharingan, and snapped the string on his current kunai with his teeth before moving on to another.
That wasn't true. It wasn't. But it was what he'd thought. And Sasuke would prove it by doing something that man had never been able to do.
He was going to get that paw print. He was going to finish that book. He was going to put it in a shrine.
Sasuke tied another line.
Bit it.
He was going to kill that man. He was going to burn the body, put it in a jar, and he was going to force it to exist in the same uncared-for room as-
"You're going to damage your teeth."
Sasuke flinched. And reoriented as that sound had come from behind him.
Where the store was.
That he had his back to.
Not his best choice of positioning.
...And maybe he would damage his teeth. Maybe he would.
Or, maybe he already had.
He'd noticed that his right canine didn't seem as sharp as it used to be… But he snapped it anyway, setting aside the last kunai he modified today; he'd started it that way, so he might as well end it that way.
People might have called that 'being stubborn'. He liked to call it 'commitment'.
"Teeth only grow back once, you know?"
"...Wait." Naruto, his face scrunched up in disbelief, said. "No they don't."
"Teeth normally only grow back once," Sakura amended with a dull disappointment as Naruto went 'oh', her being the first type of person as Sasuke stuffed the kunai into his pack. "But I suppose it is your choice."
"That's right. It is." Sasuke resigned himself to whatever revenge that would bring on his head at a later date and stood. "It's my choice."
And he'd stand by it.
"Yes," Sakura agreed, suddenly closer and at his back...where the fountain was. Was she standing in the- "But this isn't."
Sasuke didn't think that her revenge would come this fast. Or it would be literally on his head as she grabbed him.
"Let go!"
"No. Stay still for a second."
Or that his first instinct was to go limp as soon as Sakura touched his head outside of a sparring match… When Sakura had you, she had you. And if you didn't have help, you were screwed.
"There you go. Now you can talk to cats; they'll mistake you for one, too." Sakura laughed, making Sasuke shudder, and his hair stood on end as he turned around, and she stepped back into the fountain; it was like she had stepped on a solid pane of glass instead of water, and not even the bright white cat ears she was wearing, that she had put on him, could distract him from that. "Isn't that something?"
He'd thought she was going to… never mind what he'd thought. He needed to train harder; maybe there was more to chakra control than he'd known. "You couldn't have just given them to me?"
"And wait an hour for you to get the courage to wear the mission-appropriate gear?" Sakura laughed as she hopped out of the fountain…and still no splash. Chakra control. Look into it. "Don't be silly."
"Y-eah. We're going to be talking to some cats - Sasuke. Don't be silly." Naruto forced down his cackle as Sasuke glared at his pair of cat ears; he didn't know Naruto could look any dumber than he already did, but he'd managed, and he had no room to talk. "Do it for the mission, Sasuke."
… Do it for the mission?
For the mission? What did he know about the mission?
What right did he have to tell Sasuke what to do?
Sasuke's lip curled, his teeth showing as he drew in a breath, "If you don't sh-"
Sakura laid a hand on his head, between the ears of that stupid headband, and he went limp.
Just like Naruto, the stricken look on his face as the water clone that had appeared with a flick of Sakura's wrist pulled him by the collar, and…it was an understandable look to have. Sympathetic, even.
He hated it.
He hated Kakashi-sensei.
He hated hand-to-hand training.
This was such bullshi-
"Boys, boys. Come on now. Play nice." Sakura laughed as she let them both go, the clone pushing them both upright before stepping back and falling apart.
Laughed. Sakura.
She laughed. She didn't chuckle. Or giggle.
Laughed.
She was…happy?
"Give it a rest for once, would you? We're a team. Live a little. Enjoy yourselves."
Sakura put a hand on Sasuke's shoulder.
"It's alright to be childish sometimes."
She put a hand on Naruto's shoulder.
"Every mission we do doesn't have to involve risking our lives."
Sakura, so close that Sasuke could see every strand of cat hair on her black and pink cheongsam top and the glow of her eyes, shook them both with an unearthly wide grin.
"Let's have fun."