Lost and Found [open, Tentsuke, Gaia]
Many people, upon meeting Maito Gaia, would dismiss her as a lunatic - a grinning, amiable idiot, who was jounin due only to her freakish physical capabilities. Others, more paranoid, decided that no one could POSSIBLY be that eccentric and strange, and that the whole thing was an elaborate, complex facade that hid Gaia's true plans - which were ( Read more... )
She got most of the story out of the fisherfolk anyway, but he didn't need to tell her.
She'd been in his dim dreams, the things that might have been his memories, and something inside him prescribed trust. Having no other little internal voices to consult, not even memories, the re-named Tentsuke did just that. He followed her back to Konoha, regaining the muscle-memorized movements of tree-leaping by following her, pulling off physical feats he had no idea he could pull off until right that moment.
He got tired soon though, and she'd looked honestly shocked when he collapsed. He did that a lot, collapsing, but she'd looked very worried and upset by it, and he felt a little guilty for that - he tried to apologize, but she only waved it away.
The next day, she insisted on carrying him. Tentsuke was accustomed to blind obedience by now, but being around her - it seemed remembering even a little made it easier to remember more, at least more of what had happened recently, and to think clearly, and he objected to something for the first time in his admittedly faulty memory.
They compromised, he leapt some and was carried some, and he was moving under his own power when they came within sight of the towering gates of Konoha, a sight that set off another bell-toned shock of recognition inside him. They darted through the gates, Tentsuke gaping around him and not really listening to Gaia as she gasped out her story to a pair of dark-clad people in a little hut, crowing now and then from what seemed like sheer joy, and finishing by an exuberant hugging of the two bemused gate-guards.
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Completely forgetting about the nice green lady who had brought him there (who was now weeping into the shoulder of one visibly terrified guard, who patted her back awkwardly), Tentsuke wandered off to explore, hoping to find more things that he recognized - to find more blocks to build up his mind again.
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In the meantime, she would have to settle for pulling her hair back in a ponytail. When it got long enough, she would braid-and-bun it to keep it off her neck.
Since she did not come from anywhere near where Gaia was regaling the gate guards with her tale, she had no reason to suspect who was around. But since she did have to cross the main thoroughfare and she wasn't being a paranoid shinobi (it happened, for she is only human and Konoha is pretty safe all things considered), she only just saw in her peripheral vision that some shabbily-dressed guy next to her had stumbled pretty hard. She reacted quickly, grabbing his upper arm with both of her hands so he wouldn't hit the ground and so she could haul him back up.
The last thing she was expecting was to be looking at the thinner, darker, slightly confused face of her second former sensei.
Oh, shit. "Tentsuke?"
And just to be sure, she did a quick check with Sharingan. Nope, not an illusion. Holy shit. He was back.
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Dark hair - pale skin - eyes that shone with odd, strange intensity. Something tickled at his memory -- faded dream-memories ran together, and he ended up not quite knowing her but knowing he did.
(( And something in him would always belong to a kunoichi with dark hair and doujutsu-eyes, no matter what he knew or said or did or became))
He smiled at her, the sweet, trusting smile of a child, of someone who had forgotten had not learnt to be cautious.
"Do I know you?"
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...No, she decided as she looked at his eyes. There really was no recognition there. There was something, sure, besides the confusion, maybe a kind of maybe-recognition, but something else, too. She couldn't place it, but it caused an uneasiness to stir in her.
"I would think so," she answered slowly. She made sure he was firmly on his feet again before looking up at him. (She had forgotten how tall he was.) "I was your kouhai before I was your genin student. Uchiha Sachiko," she added at his continued blank expression.
Oh, man. What had happened to him? Did he remember anything? And how'd he find his way back here if his memory was shot? Not that the mountain's faces weren't a screaming advertisement of where Konoha was. Hidden village? Hah!
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"Student? I taught you? What did I teach you?" He asked, confused, and then remembered to explain himself. Nice-green-lady - he strained for it - GAIA had asked him a lot of questions, and then murmured that he had lost his memory. He offered it as explanation and a request for information. "I don't know, you see, because I've lost my memory." He'd nearly said mind. A mind was memories.
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And that answered any questions she might have about if Tentsuke's return would mean no longer having Asuka for a sensei. "You were my jounin sensei for a while."
Really, she probably wasn't the best one to help him get his memory back. That would be Hyuuga or Leigh-san or Tsurude or Kureno. And since she didn't have any ideas of where either of his teammates were, as she wouldn't go near the Hyuuga compound with a ten-meter pole and Leigh had dropped her a note saying she was on another courier mission just this morning and it was too early to know if she would be back by now, the best bet, really, was to take him to Tsurude as Tentsuke was still officially MIA.
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