When Sakura opened the door to the ramshackle house beside the windmill and found Mayu beaming back (with Rai, Naruto, and Sai awkwardly hovering behind), she flung it wide open with a look of delight, and the two girls rushed into each other's arms as if they hadn't met for the first time just a few hours ago.
"I didn't think you'd stay behind!" exclaimed Sakura.
"Of course we'd want to help a fellow Leaf ninja in need!" Mayu said, clasping her hands together. "Isn't that right, guys?"
Rai scratched his face. "Uh...yeah. Totally."
"No," said Sai.
Naruto didn't respond, his mind furiously working to try and salvage the situation.
It wasn't new for Mayu to disapprove of one of his decisions, but she had always deferred to them...until now. After the initial shock, his immediate thought had been to order her as team leader to return, and if that proved insufficient, to resort to whatever physical means necessary. And perhaps even just a year ago, Naruto may have gone ahead and done just that. But now, as the thought of how Mayu might look at him for it floated into his mind – feeling a tightening in his chest, he dismissed it. Even if it were at the cost of a mission, he didn't know if he could bear either of his teammates looking at him in that way ever again.
What's happened to me?, Naruto thought frustratedly to himself.
Meanwhile, as Sakura uncertainly took in their less-than-enthusiastic expressions, a male voice called out from another room, "Sakura? Who are they?"
"They're chūnin from Konoha," Sakura responded, and a few seconds later, a curious-looking blonde boy in a black t-shirt stepped out. He looked them over with a rather suspicious glint in his eyes, which only slightly cleared at the sight of their Leaf hitai-ate.
"How do you know for sure?" the boy asked cagily. "They could be Gatō's goons, for all we know." Without pause, he turned around, and cupping his hand around his mouth, he said, "Hey, Sasuke! Come here for a sec. You recognize any of them?"
Another boy, this time dark-haired, stepped out from the other room, and with an equally wary look in his eyes, he looked at Naruto and his teammates.
After a pause, he pointed a finger straight at Naruto. "That one. I remember him."
"Jeez, Menma," said Sakura, shaking her pink head exasperatedly. "He was in our class for a year. How could you forget?"
"Oh, was he?" The boy let out an easy laugh, raising a hand to his neck in embarrassment. "My bad."
...
He plodded down the path, looking with some disbelief at the hand that was pulling him along. It was warm and felt nothing like anything else he'd ever held before, but it was...it was nice, he supposed.
"What's wrong?" The girl stopped to look down at him, but the sun was high in the sky and shone too brightly down on them for him to make out her face.
"N-nothing," he said quietly. "Where are we...we going?"
The word 'we' felt alien to him, and he had to say it twice to confirm to his brain that it was indeed, the word he was looking for.
"You said you've never played hide-and-seek before, right?" she said, tucking a length of hair behind her ear. "I found a fun place to play it, and thought you might like it too!"
"Play?" he asked shyly. "I've never done that before...with, with someone else I mean."
She laughed. "You're so weird! Who's never played with someone else before?"
When he didn't respond, her smile slowly faded from her face. An odd look flashed across her face. Her mouth began to open, and he squeezed his eyes shut, afraid that she'd say something awful and leave him there like everyone else, when suddenly, another voice called out to them.
"What're you doing? And who's that?"
He opened his eyes and saw an older boy walking across the street towards them. He had a curious look on his tanned face.
"This is the boy my mom's taking care of," said the girl, raising a hand in greeting. She gestured back to him with her other hand. "Come on, say hello."
"H-hello..." he murmured nervously.
"Hold on, I know him..." said the boy, leaning right down to stare at his face. He shrunk back. "Yeah...he's the one Kayumo's mom told us to stay away from."
"Really? Why?"
"I dunno," the boy shrugged, crossing his arms behind his head. "She got mad at Kayumo for letting him join our game of tag."
"Why would she? He's just a kid like us." The girl smiled down at him again. "Right, Naruto?"
...
Naruto's eyes flew open.
Faint motes of light was streaming through the half-open window and for a long minute, he looked up at the ceiling. A tattered string dangled from the lone light fixture, and as he watched, it swayed in an invisible breeze.
Only when his heartbeat had slowed down, did he get up; as Naruto got to his feet, the thin blanket he'd been sleeping under fell off, and at the soft sound, the others in the room began to stir.
Stretching his arms, he silently walked to the window and pushed it open the rest of the way. They had spent the night at Tazuna's seaside house, and from the window, Naruto could see the waves jostling gently against the dock. And just barely, he could hear the sound of seagulls.
The first time he'd visited the sea on one of his missions several months back, he had been taken aback at the high-pitched wailing sound. It sounded nothing like the birds around Konoha, and even more startlingly, it was accompanied by the underlying deep crashing noise of the waves as they pounded down on shore. But he'd quickly come to enjoy it: despite the cacophony of each separate sound, together, they melded together and somehow soothed him. Being near the sea was an experience completely alien to Naruto, having grown up in a landlocked village like Konoha, but somehow, it felt familiar to him, as if he were meeting an old friend.
As he stood there now, however, it had the opposite effect. The seagulls calling back and forth to each other sounded like a warning; it made him uneasy and restless. It was a strange and uncomfortable feeling that tingled almost unbearably across the surface of his skin.
We need to get out of here, he thought to himself.
Sakura's team leader Shirakumo, a stern-faced jōnin with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, had turned out to be recovering from a deep leg wound. However, it was healing well, and the jōnin would likely be able to move around freely with just a few more days of rest. With that out of the way, there was no real reason for them to stay behind in this country...and after the night's rest, Naruto's mind felt clearer. His worries about Mayu resenting him for ordering her back to Konoha seemed silly to him now; she was not so unreasonable as to completely ignore the voice of reason. Surely she would listen to him with just a little more prodding?
"Naruto?" called out a drowsed voice. He turned around to see Rai getting to his feet with half-lidded eyes, audibly cracking his neck. Sai was already up, and was leaning against the wall with his futon neatly folded beside him while Sasuke was just beginning to put away his. Next to them was Menma, who seemed to have made it halfway out of his futon before falling asleep again, snoozing lightly as a trickle of drool dribbled down across his chin.
As Naruto walked back across the wooden floor to fold his own futon, he suddenly wondered about the fleeting dream he had had. But even as he thought about it, like a receding tide, the details slipped further and further back from his memory, and after a while, he stopped thinking about it at all.
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