Yarn of Time (Canon Patchworking with Uchiha Ren Omakes)

Omake Eight

(worth more than) A Thousand Words

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This piece has been beta'd for you by hestia8693, who deserves sainthood for the sole fact that she didn't run away screaming yet.

Not a chapter, because I'm leaving to a lakeside holiday with my cousins. Also I'll more likely than chapters be writing and posting the 'canon patchworking' (kek) Yarn of Time pieces. Like, y'know, that infamous mission where Ren got her arm cut off and glued back on that was mentioned few times already. Or what are brats up to when Ren's not home.

Alternatively titled 'Hoshigaki Kisame's walkthrough to friendship with Uchiha Ren via ye olden times version of Discord'

In which we finally look into the mysterious letters Ren mentions having been exchanging with Kisame for a while that are never really tackled, from Kisame's point of view.

!This omake is part of CPwUR Canon!, patching up some plot holes I've inadvertently created. (As a matter of clarification, the second segment happens somewhere in the middle of the first one? It's not chronological.)

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It starts like this: he meets a brat when attending the chūnin exams in Iwa. She singles him out, because he's easy to single out, and he's readying for yet another round of remarks, but of all the things she could possibly do, she asks to hug him.

What the actual hell.

The brat's name is Uchiha Ren, and in hindsight, Kisame probably should've known that people like her latch onto you with a single-minded dedication and are unlikely to actually let go if they do, ever. But what seems obvious now didn't seem so at the time, when he was still the same (insecure) Monster of the Mist, but not an acquaintance of one Uchiha Ren yet.

Funny, how just one relationship might change a person's viewpoint a little. But then, it's not really as if he could've expected to forge any sort of a bond with a brat, wielder of Bloodline Limit, from a village his own only had uneasy truce with, who hadn't even been born yet when he himself graduated Kiri's murderous exam. Or was she? Kisame wasn't sure how much older he was than her, but if she was thirteen, then it was eleven years. Which was- a lot, looking back, especially then, when she barely reached to his elbows.

(She wasn't hostile. She wasn't scared. She wasn't there to gawk at him. She was there because she genuinely wanted to know him as a person, and she gave her affection freely, and some part of Kisame, a childish, hidden, affection-starved part of him relished and bloomed in her light.)

It goes like this: the brat doesn't go away. She insists on spending time with him whenever she can, much to the chagrin of her teammates and sensei and to Momochi's amusement. She seeks him out, talks to him, and doesn't care about village attachments. She comes to him for swordsmanship, and-

He gives it to her. Just like that, because she's also the type of person who wears her heart on their sleeve for all to see and couldn't be bothered with all that secrecy. So she comes, she asks, and he gives her what she asks for because she explicitly tells him why she wants that, and who is he to refuse the luxury of honest truth?

Because, you know, Kisame hates lies. And Ren, he learned, might omit some things, skip some more, as she is bound to do like a good little killing machine from a half-enemy village with her own set of ghosts and blood under her nails, but other than that she's disarmingly honest with her intentions and thoughts.

And then the exams came to end, and they return to their respective homes (is Kiri even a home at this point, full of lies, lies, lies-), and he thought, that's it. He'll probably never see her again, never interact with her again. Soon she'll forget and he'll be overwhelmingly alone in the liar's world again.