Yakumo stared at the rabbit in her arms, her fingers still poised against its ears.
"You can talk?" She was astonished, but still kept her voice very gentle.
"I can." The rabbit tilted its head up. "But only you can hear me."
Yakumo blinked.
She lifted the rabbit off her lap and held it level with her eyes, studying it carefully.
White fur, red eyes, and a three-part mouth chewing a small blade of grass it had somehow picked up.
It looked just like an ordinary rabbit!
"Why can only I hear you?" Yakumo set the rabbit back on her lap and wiped a bit of dew from its ear with her sleeve.
"Because I'm only talking to you." Escaping Rabbit's voice was still soft and sweet, unhurried. "No one else can hear me."
"Can you control who hears you?"
"Mm. I couldn't before. I only learned how recently." Escaping Rabbit scratched the fur behind its neck with a hind leg, then remembered to add—
"I've improved."
Yakumo didn't know what to say.
She realized that the rabbit in front of her must be some kind of highly intelligent ninja rabbit, though she'd never encountered one before.
She slipped her fingers into the soft fur at the back of Escaping Rabbit's neck and gently stroked downward.
Escaping Rabbit closed its eyes in contentment, and that rumbling sound started up in its throat again.
"Then why did you come looking for me?" Yakumo lowered her head and looked into Escaping Rabbit's eyes. "I don't have many friends here. Everyone's a little afraid to come near me."
"Kei sent me."
"Kei?"
"Mm."
Yakumo's fingers stopped. "Is Kei a girl?"
"Kei is Kei." Escaping Rabbit lifted its head from her palm.
"Kei doesn't want to tell you who he is yet. You just need to know that someone cares about you. You can keep in touch with Kei through me."
A breeze swept across the lake, blowing the loose hair over Yakumo's forehead into her eyes, but for a moment she forgot to brush it aside.
Someone cared about her.
Not because she was someone's daughter, or because she had a Kekkei Genkai, and not because the village feared she might lose control and had sent someone to keep watch over her.
Just because—
"Cares." Yakumo repeated the word in a barely audible voice.
"Mm." Escaping Rabbit washed its face with its front paws. "Kei knows you're not very happy here. I'm not very happy either, so I came."
"Why aren't you happy?"
"Kei left, but still wants me to do things for him. I don't really like working." Escaping Rabbit's voice sped up for once, tinged with displeasure.
"But he said someone here needed me. So I left a clone behind. This body is the clone."
"A clone..." Yakumo looked down at Escaping Rabbit, suddenly thinking the rabbit was even cleverer and more candid than she'd imagined.
"Where were you before?"
"I followed Kei around everywhere. All the rabbits in the village are me."
Yakumo's mouth fell open.
All the rabbits in the village?
Those rabbits that had suddenly appeared all over Konoha—
"Those were all you?" Yakumo couldn't help smiling a little. "I thought someone's lab animals had escaped."
"I'm not a lab animal." Escaping Rabbit perked up its left ear. "I'm Kei's ninja rabbit."
After saying that, it flopped down, rested its chin on Yakumo's knee, and looked up at her with its red eyes.
"Could you draw something else instead of those pictures?"
Yakumo's smile froze.
She remembered what she'd been drawing these past few days.
A bird strangled by tree roots in the courtyard, a hand reaching out through a crack in the ground, and a monster with a silhouette like a person's.
She hadn't drawn those pictures—not entirely, at least.
Every time she picked up her brush, those images appeared in her mind, and then her fingers moved on their own.
After she finished, before the paint had even dried, she would hear someone laughing behind the canvas.
It was Ido.
She didn't dare let anyone else see those pictures.
"How... how do you know what I drew?" Yakumo spoke slowly, her voice much lower than before.
"I saw them." Escaping Rabbit blinked. "You spent a long time in the studio before you came out, didn't you? There's still paint on your hand."
Yakumo reflexively turned her right hand over.
A small smear of dark red paint remained on the side of her index finger.
"I didn't want to draw those. I can't control it." Yakumo's voice trembled. "Every time, he..."
"Then draw me instead." Escaping Rabbit cut her off, nudging her wrist with its head.
"You're here, and I'm here. Drawing anything else would be a waste."
"You seem to know you're cute."
"I've always been cute." Escaping Rabbit said it quite naturally, without sounding like it was praising itself at all.
Yakumo looked down at Escaping Rabbit, at its ruby-red eyes, its two unruly long ears—one upright, the other drooping—and its two soft front paws resting on her palm.
She fished a palm-sized sketchbook out of her ninja pouch.
She'd used up more than half of it already. The pages were filled with vague landscape outlines, all abandoned halfway through.
She turned to the last blank page, set Escaping Rabbit on the grass beside her, rolled up her sleeves, and took a charcoal pencil from her pencil case.
"It doesn't have to be big or detailed," Yakumo murmured to herself. She held the page down lightly with one hand, then began to sketch.
She drew more slowly than usual.
It wasn't the frantic pace of something driving her to scribble wildly. Instead, she studied the subject, made a stroke, then looked up again, one line at a time.
Escaping Rabbit lay on the grass beside her knee, occasionally twitching an ear or nibbling a blade of grass.
The charcoal pencil whispered across the paper, while a small fish occasionally leaped from the lake, splashing down and sending out tiny ripples.
Yakumo drew the final stroke, rested the charcoal pencil on her knee, studied the sketch for a moment, then held the book out to Escaping Rabbit.
"Take a look."
Escaping Rabbit sat up from the grass and tilted its head to look at the drawing.
Its snow-white fur had become charcoal lines, but those lines captured every detail of Escaping Rabbit.
"Does it look like me?"
"It does. You're just a little fatter."
The page of the sketchbook suddenly glowed.
Light spilled from the paper, quickly racing along the charcoal lines and gathering around the outline of Escaping Rabbit's portrait.
Then the light separated from the page and dropped onto the grass.
The glowing ball bounced across the grass. With each hop, its shape became clearer, until it finally turned into a rabbit.
A rabbit identical to Escaping Rabbit.
White fur, red eyes, one ear upright and the other drooping. Even the tuft of hair sticking up on its head was exactly the same.
Yakumo's charcoal pencil rolled off her knee and fell onto the grass without a sound.
The new Escaping Rabbit that had jumped out of the picture crouched on the grass, blinked, then turned to look at Escaping Rabbit before turning back to Yakumo.
"Now there are two," the new Escaping Rabbit said.
Yakumo stared at the new Escaping Rabbit, her mouth opening and closing as her right hand clutched the sketchbook tightly.
"Wait." Escaping Rabbit's voice suddenly lost its sweetness.
It stood up on the grass, circled the new Escaping Rabbit, sniffed its bottom, then sniffed its tail.
"Did you really become another me?"
"Yep." The new Escaping Rabbit replied lazily. "I was drawn."
Escaping Rabbit's usually languid eyes finally showed its shock. "How can this be?"
It hopped twice on the spot, then turned toward Yakumo.
So this was why Kei had sent it to find Yakumo!
Yakumo looked down at the two Escaping Rabbits lying side by side on her lap. She stroked one rabbit's ears, then the other's back, repeating the motion twice.
Both rabbits were real.
"Is Kei very far away?" Yakumo asked softly.
"Mm." Escaping Rabbit stopped tapping its tail. "Very far. But he left me here so he could hear how you're doing."
"If you have anything to say, just tell me."
Yakumo hugged both rabbits to her chest and rested her chin on their backs.
"When Kei comes back... I want to thank him in person."
"He'll definitely say there's no need." Escaping Rabbit yawned. "But if you want to say it, then say it."
In the afternoon sunlight, flecks of light shimmered across the lake. The two Escaping Rabbits crouched on the grass and yawned one after the other, burying their faces in their front paws.
Yakumo opened her sketchbook to a new page and began drawing again.
This time, she drew a tree in full bloom.
"Kei... if he's a girl, would she like looking at flowers?"