He's there, just outside a tunnel entrance, staring into the distance blankly.

(There's sounds. Someone kid sized, trying to get away very quietly but quickly.)

She wraps him in the net, tightly.

"Sasuke?" she calls. "I'm with Itachi. I came to bring you home."

The noises pause, and after a few seconds a mini Uchiha comes sidling in. He eyes the trapped man, then says, "He'd had someone else, that weirdo Naruto. Unconscious. But a weird shadow thing took him away." He squints at her.

"Can you tell me what happened?"

She removes the man's mask and conjures a blinfold over his eyes.

"He showed up in my room and grabbed me. Didn't say anything. Left me in a cave. It was empty, and the passages out that I could find were all blocked, but it was also too dark to see so I might've missed something. It was dry, though. Then he grabbed me again and dropped me here, and he had Naruto over his shoulder, and then a shadow thing leaned out of the tree and he handed Naruto to the shadow thing, which vanished with him. He didn't say why, and when I tried to kick him he just picked me up, and he didn't answer any of my questions."

The man looks younger without his mask, one half of his face covered in scar tissue, the eye on that side missing.

"Okay. I need to rest a bit before we start going back, so I'm gong to explore this tunnel. Will you come with me?"

Slow, hesitant nod. "How do you know Itachi?" he asks.

"Your cousin Shisui introduced us." She gently levitates the bound man into a horizontal position and attaches a glowing string to the net to drag him along with. "My name is Tasara. I'm from a long way away."

"Shisui has weird friends," he says, seriously, like this explains everything. "How long away? Another continent?"

"Much farther than that. Another entire world, around a different star."

"That sounds like a story," Sasuke says, voice skeptical.

"It is. But it's Shisui's story as much as mine, and I promised I wouldn't tell too much of it without him."

He nods.

The tunnel slopes down into the earth, opening into what seems like a meeting room. It's empty, now. There's spokes off of it, mostly going into bare rooms, or assorted necessities for a short-term hideout. It doesn't seem to have been used in a while.

No obvious clues, all right. That's more or less what she expected but it's good to check these things. Is her prisoner still out?

His face keeps scrunching up, but he's still insensate to the outside world.

Good enough.

"Okay, Sasuke, we're going to go back now. Can you climb onto my back?"

He nods, and does so.

"Hold on tight," she says as she jumps up, lifting the prisoner in her wake.

And then they're off. She pushes the trip back harder; there are allies waiting this time.

He squeezes tight, but seems interested in the landscape zooming by under them, craning his head around as much as is safe.

Itachi's ravens spot her arriving, and Itachi positions herself to be the greeting committee. (She figures she has a few seconds to usher Sasuke away before the Hokage shows up.)

She sets Sasuke down in front of Itachi. "He said that a boy named Naruto was also taken, and given to a man made of shadows. I didn't see any sign of him."

She frowns. "Naruto is important. This might have been a distraction for such a grab..."

Sasuke will have to report to the Hokage, then, instead of conveniently vanishing back to the clan. She accepts his hug, tightening her arms around him.

"One step at a time. We should look into more permanent containment for the attacker before he wakes."

She nods - 

And the Hokage arrives. He's in his battle armor, having fought several of the clones, and he inclines his head gravely towards Tasara. "My gratitude for retrieving young Sasuke-kun," he says. "And our original attacker?"

"Secured for now. With the aid of the Uchiha."