Knitting Fate (Canon Patchworking with Uchiha Ren Part II)

Seventy-First Thread

This chapter has been beta'd for you by hestia8693.

Praise be to Hestia whose text editing programs decided to walk out on her and who had to re-type the entirety of this 3,1k+ word-long chapter to edit it.

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I will. Just. Leave this here and vanish.

I'm seriously running out of excuses. Is pandemic-induced depression and lethargy something we can work with if I'm a homebody introvert to begin with?

Right, school! I have school! And a part-time job. Honestly any excuse to make myself feel less like a failure for not producing a chapter sooner when I promised myself soon.

Also every once in a while I get a comment bitching about how terrible writer/person am I and how crap my story is. I've actually blocked a person here on ffnet, for the first time since I made an account. You might know the guy, Spidersauce. Sorta made me want to just delete the story and cry in my bed. It's not my fault you hate everything homie.

***

"There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign."
― Robert Louis Stevenson

0

Time flies after Ren's talk with Genma. She spends time with Sasuke and Naruto, along with any of their friends that they drag in on a given day, packs her things for Jōren Falls, meets up with Hibiki again, and bullies Hana into taking an actual day off to hang out together. She even manages to catch a brief glimpse of Anko and talk to her before they're inevitably pulled back to their respective duties. She writes to Kisame and Kakuzu. With Deidara, she can just catch in the corridor if she wants to talk these days, and Torune can be seen tailing him more often than not.

In a way, Ren supposes, Deidara slotted himself nicely in place of Yamanaka Fū, who would've been Torune's partner had he been dragged into ROOT.

(She hoped Fū was there, and that he and the other stolen children would be successfully extracted during the raid.)

She makes the final arrangements to have Sasuke and Naruto stay with Tsume under the guise of her training trip taking longer than a regular mission. While the kids are responsible enough to be left to their own devices for a week or two, a month is a bit of a stretch. It's really not far from the truth, in any case—Ren is a proponent of self-sufficiency, and Naruto swears up and down that he and Sasuke are fine, but regardless of Danzō's threat, Ren would always leave them with someone if she were to be away for more than two weeks. At least until they become genin.

Even the last mission's surprise extension had been a stretch that invaded Ren's comfort zone, despite her reassurances that the kids and cats would be alright in the apartment with a full fridge, money, and Genma right next door.

Speaking of cats, though, Tsume flat out refuses to take them, due to the compound being full of dogs, and the vet clinic not being able to keep them for that long. Thankfully, Sakura got permission from her parents to keep them for the month as a trial for if she ever wants a pet.

***

The evening before her departure, she encounters Kakashi on the roof of her apartment when she's out for some fresh air. He's out of his ANBU gear and in regular Konoha blues, with his trademark Icha Icha book in one hand. Ren had read one of those out of curiosity, and while the smut was written fairly well, the rest of it was a bit lacking.