Gundam Wing Fan Fiction / Naruto Fan Fiction ❯ Red and Blue Makes Purple ❯ Fox Tail ( Chapter 3 )

A/N:

“Red and Blue Makes Purple”

Chapter Three

Fox Tail

Duo groaned, wishing the drum line playing his head would finish their march and move on. They weren’t helping his migraine. Opening his eyes, he yelped, all thoughts of parades fled from his mind.

He was still in the woods, that much was clear to him immediately. It was also morning, the early light filtering through the tops of the trees. The surprising part was that the tops of these trees happened to be at eye level, and he was laying down.

Pushing himself back onto his legs using his arms, he rose above the woods. The ground felt odd below his palms and Duo glanced down to see why, and the glance turned into a full blown stare. Two orange-furred paws rested on the ground in front of him. Paws!

He needed to see himself, and now. Memory placed a small lake at one end of the valley, barely visible from the balcony. The pilot barely noticed as he knocked down the trees standing in his way.

Duo’d stepped into the lake before he noticed it, and had to wait for the ripples to clear before he could see his reflection. As the image grew clear, the valley shook with a howl of despair. The face of a giant fox stared back at him, red eyes wide in horror. Twisting around at the sight of movement behind him, he counted nine tails.

Come on, Duo, wake up, he thought with a whisper. This is a dream, just a bad dream. Now he just had to figure out how to wake himself up from it.

Wishing didn’t work, nor did banging his head against the mountainside. In fact, that seemed to do more damage to the rock than to him. He lacked thumbs, so pinching himself was impossible, and biting his tails just resulted in a lot of pain and a mouthful of fur. Thankfully, the lake water served to alleviate both problems.

Through experimentation, he learned that if he sat at the base of the cabin’s cliff, he was at the perfect height to glare through the balcony’s glass doors at his cell phone, which was sitting uselessly on the coffee table and blinking to inform him that he’d missed a call.

If I’m stuck like this, I am so going on a rampage on Une’s yard, he decided, flopping down in frustration. See if she likes tooth marks on her precious antique fountain.

With an annoyed huff, he drifted off to sleep.

-

Tsunade couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She’d long since given up on even the faintest hope of Naruto being alive, and now his fresh blood had been found in the forest.

“You’re absolutely sure that it’s new,” she said, fighting to keep her voice level.

Kiba handed her the kunai. “See for yourself. It’s still wet.”

And so it was. Hands trembling, the hokage set it down. “We’ll keep it to ourselves until there can be no doubt that this isn’t just a false alarm. If it turns out to be fake, I don’t want to needlessly raise people’s hopes only to crush them.”

“Understood,” the jounin said with a bow. “I’ll keep searching the woods and keep you posted.”

With a nod, she dismissed him. Once she was sure that she was alone, Tsunade allowed herself to hide her face in her hands.

Five years. It had been five years since Kakashi had returned to the village with news of Naruto’s vanishing. They’d assumed him dead and placed his name on the monument. When Sasuke had returned two years ago with Orochimaru’s head and a summoning contract with snakes, he’d dropped it on her desk before immediately going to leave some flowers in tribute, an odd look on his face that he refused to explain. He and Sakura both visited every Tuesday to their teammate’s empty grave, leaving a bowl of Naruto’s favorite ramen as an offering to the dead. As it was, the two were currently on a mission to what remained of Oto, and due back any time. For their sakes more than anyone else’s, she hoped Kiba’s findings were neat.

-

Fighting with the map as Trowa drove, Quatre silently cursed while wishing Duo could have gone missing somewhere easier to get to... like Pluto.

When Duo had missed even his latest get-home time without calling, Heero immediately began to call the other pilots and top Preventor agents, Une included. The braided teen wasn’t answering his cell, the homing signal in his GPS didn’t seem to be working, and the locator chip Heero had hidden in his surprise present was insisting that Duo hadn’t moved in almost two days. This all equaled to Heero going into paranoid Duo’s-in-trouble-mode and having to be sedated, which meant that he couldn’t leave HQ.

So, instead, Une sent him and Trowa. Yay for them.

Trowa’s pickup came to an abrupt stop as the sometimes clown slammed on the breaks, visible eye fixed ahead of them. About to demand an explanation of his lover, (because they’d set out at three in the morning without time for coffee and Quatre without coffee or sleep was nobody’s friend) the blond noticed his partner’s expression and choked off his tirade. Blue eyes followed green and went impossibly wide.

“What could have done this?” he whispered. ‘This’ was about fifty trees that he could see knocked down or simply splintered. And they weren’t young trees, the oldest being nearly three feet wide. A couple of the larger ones went across the road right in front of the truck. Barely moving, he allowed his eyes to drop down to the map, which cheerfully informed him that there were no other roads through the valley and up to the cabin. “Looks like we go the rest of the way on foot.”

Trowa nodded silently, taking the keys out of the ignition and reaching behind the seats for their bags. “Has he moved yet?”

“Not according to the tracker,” Quatre said, holding up said piece of equipment. “Same spot as before. If he’s holed up in the cabin with a cold and just dropped the watch, I’m going to murder both he and Heero in their beds.”

The clown’s smirk was there and gone in a second. “He would have called.”

The blond wasn’t mollified for long, and his grumblings were some of the only sounds in the woods, which in itself was odd. No matter what people said, forests weren’t quiet. There should have been birds.

As they grew closer to the signal, the two split to walk a bit further apart, but still remained in sight of each other. After a few minutes of searching, Quatre called his partner over. “I’ve found his watch. Look at the belt clip.”

It was mangled, and opening the cover showed the crystal to be cracked. The watch movement itself, however, still ticked merrily away. Swallowing his fears, Quatre looked up to more closely examine the ‘clearing’ they were in. From a center point only a few feet from where he stood right now, everything had been blasted or knocked outward. He didn’t want to admit it, but he recognized the scraps of cloth tangled in the mess as Duo’s clothing, absolutely shredded. The pieces of a GPS hung from an uprooted tangle of tree roots, and a cross with a broken chain glinted from the dirt. The only encouraging part was that there was no gore.

“The path leads that way,” Trowa said, breaking the silence as he took the lead. “Maybe we can find some more information up at the cabin.”

They only made it forty feet or so before both pilots suddenly stopped, each reaching out to each other to hold the other back from going any further. Neither dared to so much as breath as their eyes traveled up to take in the entirety of what they were seeing before them.

Curled up before them in sleep was a giant, nine tailed fox.