[Fiction][Sunergos] Chapter 17: Touch Me Not
Title: Sunergos
Chapter 17: Touch me not (the whole thing)
Series: Naruto
Word Count: 9000 or some ridiculous number like that x__x
November was cold. The days passed with surreal brevity, hardly making separate impressions on her mind. They were filled with some activity, for sure; she was out of the mansion all day everyday. Something as repetitive as weeding the local vegetable gardens with a newly-formed genin cell, as elementary as teaching a bunch of seven year-olds basic taijutsu skills occupied her. There has been a few more consequential chores than those she usurped from the chuunins and genins, but she couldn't think up one of the top of her head. Perhaps, her memory was failing her.
Yet evidence contradicted this melodramatic notion. She remembered well. Hinata herself was startled at the amount of information she managed to retain, merely by keeping in the background, blending with the scenery. She had always been very attuned to the goings on around her; this was how she remained a part of things, a rare contributor but a nuanced archivist.
Hyuuga Hinata wasn't accustomed to being the speaker, be it in a companionable duo or a sizable group. It took her a while to get used to it, but she seemed to be getting the hang of it, more easily slipping out of the awkward, halting beginnings her stories usually sputtered from. Sasuke seemed to expect those tales from her, ever since the day he unceremoniously and politely asked her to tell him about her life.
Her life. . .
Well, it revolved around being kunoichi, she figured, so she spoke of that mostly. Discussing her training habits was easy; he seemed to approve her rigorous, disciplined schedule. She only touched on her responsibilities as a Hyuuga very briefly, and he did not pry further. She didn't speak much of the Hyuuga, as a whole.
She had a lot to say about her beloved Kurenai-sensei, and almost as much, her genin teammates. She spoke of Shino and Kiba and Akamaru, reminisced on old missions, their missions as chuunins, the safe ones. . .
She spoke of missions with the then Team Asuma, the then Team Kakashi, then Team Gai, mostly humorous little anecdotes that prompted a smirk, a snort, or even a short bark of laughter from her taciturn companion. He listened with more than passing interest about a number of licensure exams, of victors and losers, of what made the minutest difference between pass and failure. The one that made her a chuunin was of particular interest, it seemed, a tad more sedate than the ones they joined at age twelve, with much less drama, she supposed, though not necessarily technically easier.
He spoke back sometimes, adding a detail here and there from other versions of the stories she told, presumably from various retelling he had heard from others. He didn't talk about himself.
One day, he even asked about Naruto-kun.
"What about the dobe?" he said unceremoniously, after listening to how a badly scheduled "blind date" ended up in an all-out bar fight among several jounins. "Considering how he's always in everybody's face, where was he?"
She decided to tread carefully on this matter, not really knowing what to expect. "He wasn't here either, Sasuke-san," she stammered.
"Not only in this story."
Hinata became thoughtful. Come to think of it, she didn't really have a lot of stories that involved her and Naruto-kun. Oh, she had stories about him, of course, but those were stories she had collated as a by-passer, a spectator. She felt those tales were not hers to tell. "Hmm. . . The Chanting Falls--"
Sasuke gave her a rather dirty look. "I've heard five versions. If I hear another one, I'll puke."
Hinata took a moment to struggle with herself. "Er, Sasuke-san," she finally resumed. "Not to sound pompous or anything. . . I've always thought of you and Naruto-kun as close friends."
Sasuke didn't protest that, so she continued.
"I just thought I wouldn't really have any stories about him that you wouldn't already know about."
Naruto-kun did like talking after all. He was usually bursting with stories, and she could easily picture him forcing chronicles of his adventures on the Uchiha, no matter how unwilling the latter was to hear them. The ghastly look on her companion's face was confirmation enough.
"Aside from that time you weren't here, of course," Hinata murmured diplomatically. She didn't want to tell those. Even if she did, what she knew was fragmented and second-hand, half-jesting tales that tended to mock even the most impressive of Naruto-kun's exploits. Granted the stories were usually good-natured and slyly acknowledging, they were probably still colored by the general outlook of most of the villagers on the rowdy jounin, which was still mostly negative. (Plus, Naruto-kun himself tended to editorialize.)
"You think my life is that involved with that idiot's." It wasn't a question.
"Erm. Yes?"
"And yet, I don't know where you factor in."
A puzzled frown crossed Hinata's face.
"You."
"Me?"
"How did you become friends with Naruto?"
"Same as you. In school, then later as a comrade in missions." Hadn't she answered this question before?
"That's not very specific."
". . . I don't really understand the question," Hinata confessed. "I m-mean, how do people usually become friends?"
"The dobe isn't usual. He traps people to him."
"Traps?"
"Not consciously." She could have sworn he rolled his eyes. "He doesn't have enough brain mass for that."
"What do you want to find out, exactly?" she ventured timidly.
"Fate, someone, decided I needed a permanent thorn at my side. I was placed on the same genin cell as Uzumaki Naruto." He trained his unreadable eyes at her. "How are you oriented in his happy, squeaky-clean universe?"
"Damsel in distress?" Hinata suggested wryly, responding to the surprisingly sardonic undertone to her companion's voice. "Is that believable enough?"
"Considering he's as dense as a rock? Yes and no."
Hinata laughed, still slightly bemused. "Would you believe it, if I say I really can't remember?"
Sasuke didn't even blink.
"Fair enough," she murmured. "How about the time I started believing he could become a friend?"
"Why? Did he fall from some pedestal?"
"No!" Hinata reddened. "I m-mean--"
"I know all about your respective fights against Neji that chuunin exam," he said bluntly, straightening up from his slouch. "Hardly damsel in distress. I was there."
She supposed it was a roundabout way of expressing approval of sorts from her undemonstrative suitor. But she was distracted by the vague memory of Sasuke-san being somehow absent when those events transpired. She was pretty sure he was unconscious during her fight, and. . . well, she didn't get to see much of Naruto-kun's fight with Neji-nii to know if Sasuke even saw part of it. Still, it was the first time Sasuke-san even acknowledge the her from that time.
"I decided I wanted to stand straighter," she said reluctantly.
Sasuke nodded. "I'm listening." He reclined back on the tatami mats, eyes tracing what was visible of the drab autumn skies.
Hinata took a sip of tea and began.
"One day, I thought I was dreaming."
--
One day, she was dreaming. It wasn't really a strange dream, as far as dreams went. It wasn't much of a dream, actually. They were just a jumbled collection of images stringed together to form a repetitive, puzzling story. She supposed many of the images were drawn from real-life events, things that really did happen only recently: her fighting with Neji-nii, her losing horribly and painfully. What mystified her was the way the her in the dream kept on standing up and barely succeeding. She looked awful; she was dead on her feet and only her skin must be holding her together. It looked liked the Jyuken had virtually beaten her innards to pulp.
Yet, it was a pleasant dream, too. It was nicely romantic, like those magnificent adventures and fantastical epics she had read. If she hadn't known it was her swaying there, eyes glazed over, she would have thought her as another heroine in a dramatic last stand in some tragedic play. This time, however, the audience was riveted by her. He was riveted by her.
But it was so unrealistic, no matter what angle she looked at, on that silent movie. She wondered for the nth time whether she had merely dreamed up the fight, the entire chuunin qualification exam--she was only twelve years old, after all--whether it was possible to dream within a dream.
She must have shifted. Simultaneously, two sharp stabs of pain blossomed in her awareness. Her smarting eyes were soothed, almost as soon as she she shut them against the shaft of sunlight peeping from the half-drawn window, but the pain on her chest twisted deeper and knifed down to the rest of her viscera, lingered long enough to drive her to full consciousness. It was a harsh dose of reality.
She remembered that she did indeed participate in the chuunin exams, and thanks to Kiba-kun and Shino-kun, had even passed the first and second tests. There were too many candidates for the third test, so the sensei had staged an elimination match-off. She lost to Neji-nii.
Neji-nii must not have gotten the chance to kill her, she realized ruefully. She woke up, days later she was told, in the intensive care wing of Konoha hospital, strapped to wires and surrounded by a dull, annoying beeping. (It had been her dull, annoying heart, being monitored by the machines.) They discharged her only two days ago, so it must have been two weeks since the fight. She had overheard some of the grown-ups talking about how they couldn't get the rhythm of her heart to normalize and that was why it took so long for them to release her. As she had been doing since she became genin, she stayed in Kurenai-sensei's home.
The Hyuuga had sent word permitting her to go home, so she figured there were still concerned enough to want to keep her alive. Kurenai-sensei relented enough for the branch families to hear Hinata herself say no. They haven't come back thereafter, but she realized she was still the Hyuuga heiress, even if only in name, since they had bothered with such a formality.
As far as she was concerned, however, Kurenai-sensei's home was the homiest home she had ever had. Even though it did sometimes smell of cigarettes (which was funny, since her teacher didn't smoke), she didn't want to go back to the Hyuuga mansion (maybe she would later, when she felt a lot better. Much later, for sure.) Anyway, she didn't think they really wanted her back yet.
See, that was another thing that convinced her she didn't dream any of it. She would have dreamed it much better, if it was so. She wouldn't have been so pathetic, for one thing, so easily duped into thinking she even had a fighting chance against the Hyuuga genius. Some of her Jyuukenho attacks would have reached their mark and she would have noticed the decreasing efficiency of her chakra release well before most of her chakra network become occluded. Taking it a step further, she wouldn't have been in such a fight in the first place. Neji-nii wouldn't hate her so much in a dream world. Otousama wouldn't despise her as much.
Neji-nii's hatred had always been there, as far as she could remember, though she hadn't always identified it as such until she learned of what happened to his father, her uncle, when she was around eight or nine years old. If she had ever doubted her rightfulness for the position of Hyuuga head, it has never been as strong, as nearly incapacitating, as then. She couldn't imagine killing someone in her place, much less Hanabi-chan, even if it was to protect the clan or the village. Logically, she eventually realized that it wasn't her fault, but it was so hard not to think about it, so hard not to agree sometimes. In the end, she decided that she could live with Neji-nii's hatred. It was just another burden of the Main Family. She was going to try to be as strong as she could be, but she was only twelve years old.
No.
She was already twelve.
What else could she do then? Training was the obvious answer. They--Kurenai-sensei, Kiba, and Shino--all said she was improving. But it was obviously not enough to make a difference in actual missions, not enough to make otousama happy, and wasn't that what counted? And yet, she could still go back to the training fields, even now. She wanted to go right that moment, but her body felt too heavy to budge from the futon. Instead, she went through the forms of the Jyuuken in her mind.
Tenacity was the word, if she remembered it correctly.
She must have fallen asleep again, because she started violently when a solid thump made her whole head vibrate. She rolled away from her attacker with surprising agility, only to freeze halfway, pinioned by the explosion of pain yet again. She would have conveniently passed out right then, but there were other, more mortifying things going on.
"Hot--!" A string of bad words. "Hot, hot, HOT!"
Naruto-kun's voice. He sounded upset.
"Man!" More colorful words. "This sucks!"
He sounded very upset.
Hinata opened her eyes, and there he was, doing the strangest. . . He was bouncing on his haunches, clawing at his face, and basically just flailing around. There was gooey white material dripping down from his spiky head.
"Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit!"
. . . Naruto-kun. Naruto-kun was in her room. Panic immediately overrode the pain, streaking her need to stay still with an overwhelming urge to bolt. But movement seemed an impossibility and she found her heart suddenly far outpacing the rest of her body. Its heavy pounding footfalls sped up and slowed down in turns, but always maintaining a maddening speed that swallowed her ears, devoured her chest.
From a distance, she could still hear Naruto talking, trying to defeat whatever unseen enemy he was dueling with. . .
The force was sudden and brutal--it knocked the wind off her. At first, she struggled to get her breath back, but then she stopped, fettered by. . . the most horrible thing in the world! It wasn't the anxiety elephant sitting on her chest. It was Naruto-kun!
"Wah! Hinata-chan!" his voice crowed, oddly from far away. "Sorry, sorry! I tripped again. I tripped--"
She didn't dare breath.
"Hey. . . You still alive down there?"
Naruto-kun was shaking her like a rag doll.
"H-Hey. It's not funny. Hey!"
Hinata's head felt like a balloon. Filling up with hot air. La la la Floating up to the skies and bumping against clouds. Bam, bam, bam!
"Shit. I think-- I think I squashed her." He dropped her like a rock and scrambled back. "Oh, shit."
At least, she could breath again, so she did. Her heart was back to a reasonable pace and it no longer sounded like it was skipping around like a clumsy genin. Warily, she opened one eye.
"Oh, good." The sigh he released was explosive. "You're not dead." He began laughing sheepishly. "I thought I was gonna have freaky-eyed oldies after my ass with their canes and stuff."
"Won't." Hinata mumbled. Tired out, she simply went along with the strange non-dream.
"They won't?" Naruto repeated, frowning. "Why not?"
Because otousan hates me.
"Aren't you their all-important whatchamacallit?"
Once again, she didn't answer.
"I got you ramen," he announced loudly, before simmering down to a mutter. "It's all over you and me now. Hope you're not too upset about that. I mean, it's not like I'd blame you if you are, you know? I'm pretty pissed myself. That was the Ichiraku Thursday special, with extra bits of dried fish in it, and double the amount of pork rinds, and special kind of hot peppers that pop in your mouth. I ran all the way to your house, you know? And then they told me you weren't there when I got there. Good thing I ran into Bug-boy who told me you're staying with what's-her-name-sensei." He shuddered suddenly. "Don't tell anyone, but Hyuuga people are freaky. So. Are you mad?"
"N-no," she murmured, oddly serene. "T-thank you."
"Bah, it's nothing. I figured a hot bowl of ramen should help you get better. I kinda forgot about you being in the hospital, actually. Busy, you know?"
"T-tr-training?"
"Very hard." Naruto was nodding seriously. "My teacher is this weird old man who's also a shameless open-pervert. Which reminds me, you know that public bath in Mango Street? Don't go there."
There was another pocket of silence before Hinata could muster up the voice to speak. "W-work hard, Na-na-naruto-ku-kun," she was finally able to say.
"Of course," he promised. "Don't worry about that asshat, Neji. I'll beat the crap out of him and show him what a loser can do." His brow furrowed quizically. "Soon as I figure out how to make the froggie bigger, that is."
"H-hard."
"Yeah, very hard."
"T-tiring."
"That, too."
"T-they s-say I c-ca-can die try-t-trying."
"Nah," he answered sagely. "That's what ramen is for, ne?"
"R-ramen?"
"As long as you get the kind with everything in it, specially meat and veggies. You gotta stay healthy, you know?"
"Sleep?"
"Uh-huh. Speaking of sleep, I gotta go. I'm gonna try sleeping for sixteen hours tonight. Maybe that'll make the froggie summon get bigger."
"Uhn."
"Get better, 'kay? And you have to watch the finals."
"Y-yes."
"And, uh, I cleaned up the mess with this old shirt here. Whatcha want me to do with it?"
". . ."
"Okies. I'll leave it here," he said hastily before he took off.
Hinata became sure it wasn't a dream later, because Kurenai-sensei went ballistic when she came home and discovered her favorite night gown crumpled up in a mush of noodles and the slimy stench of fish.
Naruto-kun was. . . nice. Well, nicer up close. And she even talked it him! It wasn't so bad. Maybe she didn't have to always just watch him from a distance. Maybe they could even be friends, one day, someday.
About a month later, after a gazillion sad things happened, Hinata agreed to go back home.
"Are you sure about this?" Kurenai-sensei asked her, worry palpable in the glaring furrow between her eyebrows.
"Yes," she answered. "It's not easy p-popping out froggies, much less big ones."
Kurenai had looked at her oddly, but in the end, let her student go.
Hinata was laughing.
The Hyuuga mansion could be likened to a puzzle box, a bewildering collection of rooms, partitioned by movable walls, interlaced by labyrinthine passageways. It made hearing and seeing so much easier, which was only appropriate for the secretive clan. It suited its members to learn that their only sanctum lay within their own skulls, to develop their ability to speak and act as discreetly as possible early in life. It wasn't, truth be told, a very comfortable way to grow up. Younger children, of course, were gifted by nature with a shielding obliviousness, but that only lasted till the child learned to look with their eyes, to listen with their ears, and to discern with their minds, what happened behind the moving walls, the shifting passages, the possibilities that lay behind the mask of a person's face. Neji himself couldn't remember much of such blissful ignorance.
The problem, as it ever was, was that he he saw too much, but always, always, a smidgen of a degree not enough.
He would grudgingly admit that he had spent his formative years hating his family. His hatred of the main family was well-known among the people who knew him and of him, but many didn't reach the obvious conclusion that he hated the branch family, as well. It had been the driving force behind the breakneck speed of learning, the fuel behind the exploits that made everyone bemoan his being borne of the wrong father. Without that hatred, he wouldn't have had the drive to explore and learn for himself, by himself, the secrets of the Hyuuga. (Which, objectively speaking, did not render the corollary automatically true, considering his relentless personality. His progress would have been at a more believable pace, however.)
Letting go of that hatred has been a long and as of yet unfinished process. It was no longer constantly there, hiding in the shadows of his every thought and action, but it was there. Once in a while, it still tinged his opinions, though never enough to deviate him from the clearer, sharper view point.
Perhaps, he had fallen into something he had never expected he would: complacency. He had become. . . satisfied with his station in life. He enjoyed an autonomy that enabled him to exercise a fair amount of power, to influence outcomes within and without the clan. There hasn't been a need to test boundaries, but he never doubted their existence. There were. . . differences.
Did it all boil down to power then? Was he bound to ambition as intricately as any other man? If indeed he was caged, the walls of said cage extended far beyond the constant detection of his senses. Was there then a need for escape?
Adaptation was a key survival skill for any species. No--to be alive meant being able to adapt. Perhaps, he had merely learned to maneuver well inside his bounds. That he had. . . accepted the possibility of no escape.
Until now, that is, with such a possibility tantalizingly presenting itself.
They, he, had known that a ninja may have possibly been able to reverse the effects of the Jyuuken while in battle. The news was slightly disturbing, anomalous, but nothing was done beyond routine investigation of the mednin Naga Yuuhi's background, which ended in a cold trail, an unremarkable career of a Stone nin. He never seemed to have had any contact with a Hyuuga (which didn't necessarily mean anything,) and inconveniently, the Mist nins had his body.
Inuzuka Kiba's revelation changed things. It meant the possible breaching of the impenetrable Hyuuga secrets. It meant that Yukimura Bloodshanks may have counteracted the Jyuuken through some method developed from research and study, a technique tested and practiced well beforehand. (His supposed ability to ape blood limit jutsu was far-fetched and largely debunked, but it had to be kept in consideration all the same.) It wasn't an anomaly, wasn't some peculiar bloodline ability. Neji's thoughts led speedily to his father's body in the hands of the Cloud nins, the Cloud nins who triggered the events that led to his death, and a compelling hypothesis formed in his mind. It was simple: the Cloud nins were able to bypass the Hyuuga curse.
The bird seal in his forehead was more than a constant reminder of his subservience under the main family. It was there to protect the Hyuuga secrets, to bind ones corpse in such a way that no secret could be divulged from it, ensured that the secret of the Jyukken, among many things, remained a secret.
Supposedly.
It appeared the Cloud may have benefited from the body of Hyuuga Hiashi after all. Perhaps, they have learned from a Hyuuga's chakra systems how to speedily reverse their efforts. Didn't that just as speedily nullify his father's sacrifice? Didn't that just make the fact that he lost an entirely different kind of childhood and future utterly meaningless?
Did it merely coat his every thought with paranoia and dab his tongue with that stinging, pungent bitterness?
Dwelling on the possibilities, on what came to be and what went wrong was foolhardy and overly theatrical. In every game, the level could shift at any given moment, could leave your whole life's work compromised one second or bring you absolute victory the next. Adaptation: the Hyuuga would simply evolve itself into something better, stronger, more powerful, and more formidable. The ancient Hyuuga pervaded the earth too deeply for it to simply dissipate away at every challenge it faced. It will endure.
But it did offer--
chance
--he sneered in spite of himself, for entertaining such a childish fantasy. The issue at hand was foremost Hinata-sama's safety. Yukimura Bloodshanks defected from Cloud. For what reason? His political viewpoints were contrary to those prevailing in Kunigakure no sato. Familial troubles ran rampant through out Bloodshank's life. What he knew of the Hyuuga was likely to be stolen knowledge and therefore likely incomplete. Was Bloodshanks then completely working independently of the Clan Sanada, of Kunigakure no Sato, or was it a concordant effort?
Was it one man's obsessive quest for revenge or something more insidious? Was it something as incidental as the Serrators running into Hinata's team in Marima that prompted Bloodshanks to come after Hinata-sama? Either way, it meant Bloodshanks found whatever he knew of the Hyuuga insufficient, meant he suspected only the elite members of the clan held the reigns to the family secrets, as it was in many shinobi clans. Given Yukimura Bloodshanks reception of Shinoda Iga, and vice versa, it seemed too convenient to put all blame on the missing nin. (Shinoda Iga and his team of children fit nothing and remained seemingly innocuous. They were somewhere in the west now, still under hire to the Prince Amarillo.)
Neji had also learned more about the tracking powder/poison the Serrators had used on Hinata. It was, as initially theorized, some engineered virus but the chemical malatanol, which was thought to have poisoned Hinata-sama, was not the vector, but simply a by-product. The vector was the yeast itself that produced it. The virus were parasitic on the malato yeast, a rare fungus in the jungles southwest of the continent. These yeast did not ordinarily infect humans, but the infusion of the infamous pink dust in the culturing medium seemed to catalyse the mutations being caused by the bioengineered virus on the yeast and even became a part of their cell wall (details Neji didn't really need). The yeast in their inactive form came as a powdery inhalation. Only a tiny amount actually reaches the lungs, but what little did lodged there, feeding off the excess chakra exuded by the dense pathways crisscrossing the thorax and thus able to indefinitely pulsate in reaction to Bloodshank's chakra. The by-product malatanol surprisingly stabilized the pink dust-infused cellwall of the yeast (again, more details than Neji cared for) and prevented it from disintegrating as rapidly as it usually would, thereby forming self-sustaining little parasites that Bloodshanks' body seemed perfectly in synch with.
The version Bloodshanks used in Chanting Falls, in conjunction with the Mist nin's technique, worked similarly. The Mist Technique activated the powder and kept it airborne, while Bloodshanks kept the cloud of spores pulsating by generating a constant trickle of chakra. It created the cloud of light that initially inhibited the Leaf & Cloud nins' sight, even Neji's, during the ambush.
The theory of the mednins was thus: Hinata inhaled the tracking dust in Marima, had reactedly badly to the malatanol and altered pink dust combination, which caused a problem in her heart's conduction system. Bloodshanks had to be within a certain distance of her to be able to track her down through the parasites in her body, which could either mean the had known Hinata-sama was going to Chanting Falls or they had been merely hovering about Fire Country, waiting for an opportunity. The time factor at the moment, supported the latter.
The technology, they all decided, was far too sophisticated to have been developed by a group as ragtag as the Serrators. It was a Cloud technique, no doubt, particularly because Shinoda Iga had been able to remove the tracking material from Hinata-sama's body. The question boiled down to, how aware was Kunigakure no Sato of all these events? Were they simply turning a blind eye to their prodigal son's escapades, or was it all orchestrated with their blessing? Considering how ignorant the rest of the Serrators were of Bloodshanks' plans on the Hyuuga heiress, it remained unclear to where Yukimura Bloodshanks loyalty and enmity truly lay.
It was all well and good to ponder over these things, but Neji didn't simply sit in one corner to think. Though evidence seemed to build towards the Cloud, it only raised questions about the Hyuuga involvement in the whole situation. Granted, a plot against Hinata-sama may indeed really exist, the Hyuuga clan seemed decidedly reactionary, even before Cloud's apparent involvement.
What happened eighteen years ago?
In that avenue, silence still prevailed. Nobody else dared at to Hiashi's story. He still found no documentation of anything relating to that event.
There was, however, a disgusting amount of satisfaction pervading the house over the seemingly good terms between Hinata-sama and the Uchiha. At this point, he supposed, there wasn't really any reason to oppose the match. At least, there was one thing going well for his besieged cousin. After all, Hinata-sama was laughing.
--
The vari-shaped glassware could morph her face into a number grotesque masks. This particular boiling flask, simmering with a glowing cyan liquid, rendered her an insect-like creature, her wide eyes dominating the girth of the transparent container. Sakura stared at her reflection absently, even as she mentally sorted through the rows of equation scribbled on the notepad before her, formulating and dismissing solutions as easily as she breathed. She could be pretty when she made an effort, she thought in between the numbers and variables floating in her mind. Failing that, she had a pleasant, non-offensive face, even with her prominent forehead exposed. Her hair color was unique enough to warrant her a second look from strangers and her eye color matched its flowery pink hue. The ruts under her eyes, however, were not permanent fixtures on her visage, and she found them unsightly. They reminded her of a certain somebody who probably had chronic sleep problems, though he always denied it so. Her sleeplessness, unlike his, was mostly elective.
She's practically lived in the mednin quarters for the past couple of weeks. She hasn't seen much of anybody, with the exception of Hinata, who had been visiting in her office for their usual Clique meetings. Ino dropped by once to berate her for missing yet another of her infamous blind dates. Naruto was probably off wandering with the Toad sennin or whatever it was he did whenever he felt the village walls too stifling, and they haven't really talked since they parted in disagreement over a mutual friend. She hasn't seen said mutual friend yet either, but then Sasuke was like the moon, who came in phases. He'd turn up at some point, so she didn't think much of it. Her worrying was simply a force of habit, see.
Ruefully, Sakura admitted she didn't exactly have a battalion of friends at hand. Mostly, she blamed her rigorous schedule as a mednin, not to mention her additional duties: training the apprentices, taking part in the various research projects, and studying for her ever approaching exam. Of late, she hadn't been doing as much studying as she was capable of, needing something less passive and more consuming. (Ordinarily, she could study like a fiend, foregoing food and sleep for days on end. Nowadays she could get easily distracted). The studies on Mr. Walking Corpse wouldn't usually fall to her lap, but they needed her fill in for staffing deficits and she needed the hectic schedule it demanded, while it lasted.
Mr. Walking Corpse was probably now mummified by the body-cleaners and very discreetly buried somewhere he could easily be exhumed from. They were fairly sure he wasn't going to be doing any more walking, and that he was definitely, clinically, and completely dead, from the systemic down to the cellular level.
As Sakura had been explaining to Hinata (who seemed a safe enough bouncing board of ideas), the dead man did have another resurrection, a dangerous event that summoned even the members of the ANBU to contain the resulting clamor. The release of the seventh and final gate released such power that the corpse would have escaped from, no, decimated the laboratories, had it not been such a damaged specimen. Sakura was convinced now that it at least had the most basic awareness still present in that minimally functional brain, that it was the primal demand of fighting or fleeing that prompted the stilted attack. As her and the team earlier theorized, the attack was preceded by the sudden rise of the rose chains in the man's blood and followed by an explosion of monstrous amounts of chakra. The man was indeed powered by sheer spiritual energy. (In retrospect, it was such an irresponsible thing to have allowed the presence such a volatile creature within the village walls, within reach of innocent civilians. It still made her blood run cold.)
Gross tissue analysis was. . . well, it was gross business. Most of the guy's visceral organs have been reduced to something brittle and honeycomb-like, easily disintegrating into sludged when prodded. It appeared also, that particular kinds of his cells had all somehow mutated, consisting mostly of mitochondria, the part responsible for generating energy. It sure gave "power cells," a new meaning.
It wasn't an entirely alien find, truth be told, though Sakura was careful to keep her mouth shut. She had encountered such before, very briefly, on specimen stolen from Kabuto's laboratories. Okay, so the story was more roundabout than that. There was an escaped experimental subject, who bore an earlier, more unstable prototype of Orochimaru's curse seal, who managed to survive long enough to stay hidden in a remote civilian village in the Western continent. Sakura had found the man while in a sweep of missions geared on exterminating all traces of Orochimaru's activities for the last two decades (mostly to protect Konoha secrets--some of Orochimaru's discoveries, with some very careful tweaking, were actually beneficial in the medical and agricultural fields). She had pinched bits of his cadaver after he died.
The man was a once-famed Grass nin, universally thought to be dead. He was being kept alive by a witch-doctor in the village he sought refuge in. He was dosed by an interesting concoction of ordinarily, highly toxic herbs, which kept him living for at least five years after escaping from Sound.
Now with Orochimaru's curse seal, one thing determined the survival of the implanted specimen. That person must be strong enough to be able to force the curse seal back into a dormant stage, to keep it from spiraling out of control. The earlier versions of the curse seal did not develop into clear cut stages. They either exploded into a frenzied, one-time rush that literally burned out the carrier, or simply burned steadily and impotently, like a malignant cancer that slowly and excruciatingly devoured the subject. Back then, Sakura had reluctantly concluded that the changes in the body of that Grass nin was caused by the curse seal--Sasuke's curse seal did cause mutations, too, but only indefinitely, and the body's own defense mechanisms have the capacity to suppress them, given the right jutsu and the right supportive drugs immediately at hand. In light of her studies of Mr. Walking Corpse, however, Sakura was finding herself believing it was actually the toxic chemicals that gradually altered the body of the Grass nin.
Speaking of physiological alterations, the odd thing about the Grass nin was that majority of his nervous system was anatomically intact, which could be evidence to the possibility of some sort of awareness still existent in some deep corner of the Grass nin's mind. (Indeed, Mr. Walking Corpse could have very well been sentient, and she did, albeit only briefly, toy with the challenge of saving such a patient.)
Another problem of the earlier curse seal prototypes was that they did not lie dormant for long, unlike the ones Sasuke and Anko-san bore that were activated at will. The Grass nin probably had to be regularly dosed by the witch doctor to not simply die of energy exhaustion at the uncontrolled released of the curse seal. It eventually turned him into a zombie-like creature, which the witch-doctor apparently used to terrorize the neighboring villages. It was zombie reports that prompted her investigation of the area in the first place.
The herbs she used consisted of the shangrila rosettes, the flower from which the pink dust was manufactured from. It was mixed with other medicinal plants and, almost aptly, the venom of a rare snake native to the area. They either counteracted or controlled the more malignant symptoms of each other, for example, the effects of pink dust on the liver and kidneys. Which explained how the man managed to survive for so long.
She was able to use what she learned from that Grass nin. At some point, she did use various extracts from the shangrilla rosettes, not just pink dust, mixing it with a variety of other drugs. Some worked better than others. Some. . . well, some were definitely more trouble than they're worth.
--
She turned eighteen that spring for crying out loud, but she still didn't learned her lesson: some things were just more trouble than they're worth. Signing up for that stupid mission, for example, was much more trouble than it was worth. For one thing, it almost got her killed for practically no reason at all. For another, it almost got both Naruto and Sasuke killed, too.
Three chuunins assigned in to S-class mission. The elders had gone up in flames when they found out, bringing it swiftly and loudly to Tsunade-sama's attention. The Hokage merely washed her hands off the whole debacle and the mission planner happily gave them the green light, with the blithe assurance that it was all going to be a piece of cake.
Fact of the matter was simply this: the three of them were formidable as a unit. The client was having trouble affording the going rate for jounins, so he agreed to risk chuunins, signed a waiver form, and hired the trio. By no means was Konoha undercutting, assured the assignment coordinator. The three of them would be more than sufficient, he said, a glibly confident statement Sakura had calmly agreed to at the time. In the aftermath, she was more inclined to agree with the elders.
What rankled the most was that they were winning. It was a gigantic tortoise, for crying out loud! Sure, it had enormous amounts of chakra at its disposal, but it was also subject to its animalistic instincts. A careful, canny plan would have worked out, and they had exactly that kind of plan ready and in place. It would have worked flawlessly, had one Uchiha Sasuke followed through.
First, they altered the geography of the immediate vicinity, creating a monstrous fissure in the earth, something she's usually opposed to, due to its effects on the local ecosystem. It effectively trapped her with the gigantic reptile in a water-flooded chasm--which was what they wanted in the first place! She was the only one capable of delivering a massive, single-blow attack at close-space, close-range, without alerting the beast with a sudden rise in chakra that would have accompanied an attack from either Sasuke or Naruto. Besides, wasn't the creature supposedly susceptible to meek, nubile virgins?
Sasuke deviated from the plan, engaged the poor tortoise in combat, and eventually needed to use the power of his curse seal. Of course, the poor animal would have gone on a panicked rampage. It was a shrewd powerful monster, but it still felt trapped and terrified--what manner of creature wouldn't try to run away from the miasmic aura of the level-three curse seal? Not to mention, the reptile's supposedly helpless victim turned into a screeching, PMSing, unbelievably furious harpy. Naruto, who apparently didn't like the plan from the start, decided to join in at that point.
Men!
(Now listen to her. She was starting to sound like Ino! Ugh. But it was such a muggy day that day, too. High noon in mid-June had no business to be that hot and humid--not in that part of the world. Which probably explained why the tortoise was cranky from the start. They probably roused it from its estivating.)
Everyone attributed (i.e. blamed) the negative outcome of the mission on the biased viewpoint cultivated by her training as a mednin, including the ingrate brooding in one of the bunks in her office, following her movements with hooded eyes. She had given him what she had dubbed her "emergency" drugs in the field, and had gotten the team to safety as quickly as possible. Now, they were at the secure underground quarters of the mednins, in shishou's study quarters to be exact. It housed Tsunade-sama's immediate apprentices' offices, namely Sakura and Shizume-san.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
She chopped through the bones with deliberate ferocity, washed them under running water, and mashed them into the marinade so vigorously her mixing bowl got deformed (which only added to her stress. These days, her mixing bowls came and went to quickly for her peace of mind.) She set it aside for later, deciding she didn't want to risk cooking what she had meant to be her special steak dinner for the month, what with her temper still as volatile as it was.
She flashed a brief glare to his direction. He probably did it out of pride, she thought grimly. He probably couldn't handle the fact that it was Haruno Sakura at the crux of the battle plan, that it was her move, her time. He wasn't used to being relegated to the peripheries of a fi--aah, but that was her anger still talking. Grudginly, she would admit the it was more likely that she had overlooked some factor in the scenario that jacked up his near-instinctive paranoia, which cause him to instinctively (or so he claimed so often he didn't even have to say it anymore) decide the whole team needed to be saved and went off with his unnecessary heroics. Naruto was no help when she tried to talk to the Uchiha. Naruto enjoyed the fight, saying nobody got hurt anyway, and surmised with satisfaction that the tortoise would probably stay in hiding for decades because of this. He was probably right, but still. The mission was to eliminate the monster. Technically, it remained a failed mission and they were paid the rate for one. (Actually, it was downgraded to a B level so they were all paid even less.)
Way too much trouble for what it's worth. . .
She started. She had turned with another disgruntled grunt and had suddenly came face to face with his pale, grayish visage, with his dark eyes boring into hers.
"What are you doing, Sasuke-kun?" she asked in her patented mednin tone. "What part of, 'bedrest' can't you understand?"
"You cook here?" he asked in a gravelly voice.
It wasn't what she expected him to say--heck, she was well prepared to start a fistfight at that point. "This area is clean," she said defensively. "It doubles as my living space, so I usually don't treat patients or I perform experiments here, and you're obviously an exception. . . Besides, mednins have to eat, too. And if you're going to be confined here indefinitely, I suppose I'm required to give you some form of sustenance and--so what if I like boiled cabbages? Tomatoes are equally laughable to hanker for. I mean, what are you, chronically pregnant?"
"Just say what you really want to say," came the quiet interruption. "Say it to my face and get it over with."
"Who said I wanted to say anything to you?"
He grunted ungraciously. "This is annoying."
That word alone would have reduced her to the throes of depression years ago. Now, it merely reignited her simmering rage.
"And you think you acting as if nothing happened is any less so?" she asked, attempting to infuse her voice with a calm she wasn't feeling. It didn't work; her greens were now mush in her fists.
"Considering the circumstances, I thought I deserved a thank you."
"Since when did you start admitting you do deserve some things?" she retorted, foregoing her attempts at mature civility. It was under the belt, but she couldn't help it. "You don't have to martyr yourself for my sake, thank you very much. Are you happy now?"
"Not at the slightest. What happened out there?"
"It's called fucking up," she said sweetly. "Now, if you don't mind, I would like you to remove your face from my general vicinity, because I'm really tempted to smash my fist into it right now."
He stepped up nearer her, obviously taunting. This distracted her from her anger for a few moments, concern fleeting but gripping at her throat, claw-like. His flesh was burning, emanating heat like a furnace. He was dangerously feverish, probably from the drugs he's been receiving, who knew? She'd have to get his temperature under control.
"You really should go back to bed," she said. "I mean it."
"Won't you at least own up to your recklessness?"
"My recklessness?" was all she managed to bite out, the direction of her thoughts once again effectively derailed.
His criticism was double-edged. First, he was criticizing her action plan to draw the tortoise to herself in the close quarters she devised. Second, she was criticizing the fact she went for him, instead of chasing after the monster. In other words, he acted on some belief she needed his protection. Perhaps, it was just his usual paranoia acting up, but it also meant he didn't regard her with the same respect or confidence her other colleagues did. For example, if it were Naruto there, standing as bait, would he have interfered?
Eighteen years old and she was still the same Haruno Sakura: weak and troublesome, a burden.
She gritted her teeth in an effort to calm down.
"What's the matter?" he asked. "If you're that tempted, just do it."
She really did mean to head-butt him.
"I was bracing for your favorite right hook," Sasuke informed her as-matter-of-factly.
"You shifted!" she accused, horrified.
"So did the tortoise," he said, still as if commenting on the weather.
She was going to miss and would have gotten captured, he was saying. Well, did he actually think she neglected to calculate that into her plan? She supposed it simply bore down to him not trusting her. There really was no point in arguing over it, since he was so stubbornly set at making her admit she was less then proficient yet again.
"You have a cracked lip," he said, drawing her hand away from her mouth.
If he would just move away and stop stealing all the available oxygen she would have been able to think up a retort in a timely manner. At any rate, she got distracted again, for his eyes were blacker than usual--most of the time she could still call them a very dark brown, a brown tinged with enough red to match the rich damp loam that grew the giant sentinels of Konohagakure no Sato--but then his pupils were dilated into virtually holes, so cavernous her voice would have echoed, had she relinquished as much as a squeak. And there was something very important about this piece of assessment, but she couldn't remember what it was. She was occupied at the moment, or would be, semantics and just a little bit of innuendo notwithstanding.
And who would be contented with just one, anyway?
It didn't even count as one, that pathetic peck on a cheek. (His face was surprisingly soft, albeit a bit to prickly for her taste. But again, who's complaining?)
She kissed him.
Irrationally, she thought--when she could think again--that his fever must be catching, for she felt her face burn hot, his heat conducted by his lips, spreading down her neck and billowing flames deep in her belly and down to her toes. But then, any newbie apprentice knew that fever was a symptom, not some contagion to be passed around like cooties.
Cooties! Inner Sakura crowed. I finally get cooties!
"You should keep hydrated," Sasuke said, still eerily unruffled.
It was an advise she habitually forced on everyone, friends and incidentally-met strangers alike. She had to admit, she could a little pushy when it came to health.
He lifted her chin and, as if to cement in place the point he was making, quickly licked her lips, like one would do when sealing an envelope. Her mind blanked, but the rest of her reaction did not get a chance to play out, not when he decided to take her mouth in his.
It was. . . nice. She supposed, it was. It was awkward, too. He kept her at a certain distance from him, kept her in place with a pincer-like grip to her shoulder, close enough to feel the alarming heat emanating from his body, close enough for her chest to brush against his with every breath she managed to take. Her neck was craned at an odd angle, as she docilely followed his steady, almost wary, exploration. And there was this annoying little crick starting to form in her spine. . .
Easily remedied.
Concern speedily replaced the vague triumph she felt upon overthrowing his hold on her. The arms she threw about his neck twitched reflexively on contact. The searing of his torso against her was barely bearable, his muscles tensed and set, as if in preparation for battle. He was uncannily bone-dry to touch, his quietly-muscled back an arid desert landscape, and she could feel his heart thundering in a frenzy through his thin undershirt--or was that hers?
She was able to steal a tiny smidgen of clarity.
What happened to trying to control his temperature, she mentally yelped in panic.
"Sasuke--" she managed, successfully ripping her face from his.
He ignored her--
ohellyesss
--and merely latched on somewhere lower, some part that was either neck or chin or jaw. She felt him in too many places to definitively tell, really. The hands she had earlier shrugged off had found better places to grip, places evidently designed to give him places to grip. Not that she could pinpoint a given place at a given time, only one or the other. She could say, "today is Thursday, midafternoon, Konohagakure no sato," or a cloudy "his right hand is on my left hip and his left hand is where it shouldn't be. . . oh, oh, but his face really shouldn't be where it is right now, and I don't think I give a flying f--" but not both. And something about cats drowning.
She figured, through some strange disjointed deduction, that it would probably be safer if she had some control over where his lips wandered, so she sought him, melded hers to his, and tangled her fingers through his hair, clinging stubbornly, and allowed herself to be kneaded into a blissful obliviousness that went perfectly well with the heat and need and oh-so-good whatever the hell he was doing.
Nagging at the back of her mind was the need to stop.
Why?
Your uniform is in tatters, remember? She only had time to throw on an outer tunic she found lying about her office. Otherwise, she would have been traipsing about half-naked. Or rather, she would be soon, because his free hand was fumbling with buttons now and she couldn't even begin to think what the hell happened to her brassiere, god, what dexterity. . .
(while the other still kneaded her, molded her into a boneless mass of sensations and pulsations that quivered and sang and waxed and waned and)
No no no no no no no!
That was a reason to stop.
For crying out loud! He's sooner kiss you into a seizure, before you do him, you lump of coal--
Seizure. Seizure.
Febrile seizure.
That was one reason to stop.
Of course, that wasn't the only thing that could happen. Sasuke was unwell. Sasuke was reacting to one or more of the drugs he had been receiving the last few hours. His temperature was deadly high. His breathing was fast and shallow. His heart was wild, running at a breakneck speed it would soon beat itself out of. Worst of all--
He wasn't acting himself.
Sakura closed her eyes, loosened her grip on him, and gently pushed him away. But then this was the Uchiha Sasuke. He was stubborn, tenacious, and relentless, so he ended up receiving the favored right hook he had been anticipating just minutes (what? not years?) earlier.
Five seconds later, Uchiha Sasuke became unresponsive and went into respiratory arrest, as his body finally gave way to the cumulative effects of the trial-stage chemicals he had received at 1118 hours in the plains of Armadillo country, after an aborted mission in the canyons of Harfang. Haruno Sakura was able to render emergent treatment, her call for help immediately answered by her colleagues. Upon resuscitation, Sasuke was found to be delirious and continued to be so for the following day. He was discharged from mednin quarters one week later, never having to go to Konoha Hospital the entire time.
That was the last time Sakura ever experimented with pink dust.
17:16 052908
end chapter 17
This chapter is so dry, it might just kill people. Geeze. How do I mange to conk out that many words without substance. Geh.
But now, I can work on more important things er people like Zack Fair and Cloud Strife. Only Ii have work for the next three days. Darn it.
And yes, it's 3 in the morning already and I should be sleeping. Shame on me. x__x
Chapter 17: Touch me not (the whole thing)
Series: Naruto
Word Count: 9000 or some ridiculous number like that x__x
November was cold. The days passed with surreal brevity, hardly making separate impressions on her mind. They were filled with some activity, for sure; she was out of the mansion all day everyday. Something as repetitive as weeding the local vegetable gardens with a newly-formed genin cell, as elementary as teaching a bunch of seven year-olds basic taijutsu skills occupied her. There has been a few more consequential chores than those she usurped from the chuunins and genins, but she couldn't think up one of the top of her head. Perhaps, her memory was failing her.
Yet evidence contradicted this melodramatic notion. She remembered well. Hinata herself was startled at the amount of information she managed to retain, merely by keeping in the background, blending with the scenery. She had always been very attuned to the goings on around her; this was how she remained a part of things, a rare contributor but a nuanced archivist.
Hyuuga Hinata wasn't accustomed to being the speaker, be it in a companionable duo or a sizable group. It took her a while to get used to it, but she seemed to be getting the hang of it, more easily slipping out of the awkward, halting beginnings her stories usually sputtered from. Sasuke seemed to expect those tales from her, ever since the day he unceremoniously and politely asked her to tell him about her life.
Her life. . .
Well, it revolved around being kunoichi, she figured, so she spoke of that mostly. Discussing her training habits was easy; he seemed to approve her rigorous, disciplined schedule. She only touched on her responsibilities as a Hyuuga very briefly, and he did not pry further. She didn't speak much of the Hyuuga, as a whole.
She had a lot to say about her beloved Kurenai-sensei, and almost as much, her genin teammates. She spoke of Shino and Kiba and Akamaru, reminisced on old missions, their missions as chuunins, the safe ones. . .
She spoke of missions with the then Team Asuma, the then Team Kakashi, then Team Gai, mostly humorous little anecdotes that prompted a smirk, a snort, or even a short bark of laughter from her taciturn companion. He listened with more than passing interest about a number of licensure exams, of victors and losers, of what made the minutest difference between pass and failure. The one that made her a chuunin was of particular interest, it seemed, a tad more sedate than the ones they joined at age twelve, with much less drama, she supposed, though not necessarily technically easier.
He spoke back sometimes, adding a detail here and there from other versions of the stories she told, presumably from various retelling he had heard from others. He didn't talk about himself.
One day, he even asked about Naruto-kun.
"What about the dobe?" he said unceremoniously, after listening to how a badly scheduled "blind date" ended up in an all-out bar fight among several jounins. "Considering how he's always in everybody's face, where was he?"
She decided to tread carefully on this matter, not really knowing what to expect. "He wasn't here either, Sasuke-san," she stammered.
"Not only in this story."
Hinata became thoughtful. Come to think of it, she didn't really have a lot of stories that involved her and Naruto-kun. Oh, she had stories about him, of course, but those were stories she had collated as a by-passer, a spectator. She felt those tales were not hers to tell. "Hmm. . . The Chanting Falls--"
Sasuke gave her a rather dirty look. "I've heard five versions. If I hear another one, I'll puke."
Hinata took a moment to struggle with herself. "Er, Sasuke-san," she finally resumed. "Not to sound pompous or anything. . . I've always thought of you and Naruto-kun as close friends."
Sasuke didn't protest that, so she continued.
"I just thought I wouldn't really have any stories about him that you wouldn't already know about."
Naruto-kun did like talking after all. He was usually bursting with stories, and she could easily picture him forcing chronicles of his adventures on the Uchiha, no matter how unwilling the latter was to hear them. The ghastly look on her companion's face was confirmation enough.
"Aside from that time you weren't here, of course," Hinata murmured diplomatically. She didn't want to tell those. Even if she did, what she knew was fragmented and second-hand, half-jesting tales that tended to mock even the most impressive of Naruto-kun's exploits. Granted the stories were usually good-natured and slyly acknowledging, they were probably still colored by the general outlook of most of the villagers on the rowdy jounin, which was still mostly negative. (Plus, Naruto-kun himself tended to editorialize.)
"You think my life is that involved with that idiot's." It wasn't a question.
"Erm. Yes?"
"And yet, I don't know where you factor in."
A puzzled frown crossed Hinata's face.
"You."
"Me?"
"How did you become friends with Naruto?"
"Same as you. In school, then later as a comrade in missions." Hadn't she answered this question before?
"That's not very specific."
". . . I don't really understand the question," Hinata confessed. "I m-mean, how do people usually become friends?"
"The dobe isn't usual. He traps people to him."
"Traps?"
"Not consciously." She could have sworn he rolled his eyes. "He doesn't have enough brain mass for that."
"What do you want to find out, exactly?" she ventured timidly.
"Fate, someone, decided I needed a permanent thorn at my side. I was placed on the same genin cell as Uzumaki Naruto." He trained his unreadable eyes at her. "How are you oriented in his happy, squeaky-clean universe?"
"Damsel in distress?" Hinata suggested wryly, responding to the surprisingly sardonic undertone to her companion's voice. "Is that believable enough?"
"Considering he's as dense as a rock? Yes and no."
Hinata laughed, still slightly bemused. "Would you believe it, if I say I really can't remember?"
Sasuke didn't even blink.
"Fair enough," she murmured. "How about the time I started believing he could become a friend?"
"Why? Did he fall from some pedestal?"
"No!" Hinata reddened. "I m-mean--"
"I know all about your respective fights against Neji that chuunin exam," he said bluntly, straightening up from his slouch. "Hardly damsel in distress. I was there."
She supposed it was a roundabout way of expressing approval of sorts from her undemonstrative suitor. But she was distracted by the vague memory of Sasuke-san being somehow absent when those events transpired. She was pretty sure he was unconscious during her fight, and. . . well, she didn't get to see much of Naruto-kun's fight with Neji-nii to know if Sasuke even saw part of it. Still, it was the first time Sasuke-san even acknowledge the her from that time.
"I decided I wanted to stand straighter," she said reluctantly.
Sasuke nodded. "I'm listening." He reclined back on the tatami mats, eyes tracing what was visible of the drab autumn skies.
Hinata took a sip of tea and began.
"One day, I thought I was dreaming."
--
One day, she was dreaming. It wasn't really a strange dream, as far as dreams went. It wasn't much of a dream, actually. They were just a jumbled collection of images stringed together to form a repetitive, puzzling story. She supposed many of the images were drawn from real-life events, things that really did happen only recently: her fighting with Neji-nii, her losing horribly and painfully. What mystified her was the way the her in the dream kept on standing up and barely succeeding. She looked awful; she was dead on her feet and only her skin must be holding her together. It looked liked the Jyuken had virtually beaten her innards to pulp.
Yet, it was a pleasant dream, too. It was nicely romantic, like those magnificent adventures and fantastical epics she had read. If she hadn't known it was her swaying there, eyes glazed over, she would have thought her as another heroine in a dramatic last stand in some tragedic play. This time, however, the audience was riveted by her. He was riveted by her.
But it was so unrealistic, no matter what angle she looked at, on that silent movie. She wondered for the nth time whether she had merely dreamed up the fight, the entire chuunin qualification exam--she was only twelve years old, after all--whether it was possible to dream within a dream.
She must have shifted. Simultaneously, two sharp stabs of pain blossomed in her awareness. Her smarting eyes were soothed, almost as soon as she she shut them against the shaft of sunlight peeping from the half-drawn window, but the pain on her chest twisted deeper and knifed down to the rest of her viscera, lingered long enough to drive her to full consciousness. It was a harsh dose of reality.
She remembered that she did indeed participate in the chuunin exams, and thanks to Kiba-kun and Shino-kun, had even passed the first and second tests. There were too many candidates for the third test, so the sensei had staged an elimination match-off. She lost to Neji-nii.
Neji-nii must not have gotten the chance to kill her, she realized ruefully. She woke up, days later she was told, in the intensive care wing of Konoha hospital, strapped to wires and surrounded by a dull, annoying beeping. (It had been her dull, annoying heart, being monitored by the machines.) They discharged her only two days ago, so it must have been two weeks since the fight. She had overheard some of the grown-ups talking about how they couldn't get the rhythm of her heart to normalize and that was why it took so long for them to release her. As she had been doing since she became genin, she stayed in Kurenai-sensei's home.
The Hyuuga had sent word permitting her to go home, so she figured there were still concerned enough to want to keep her alive. Kurenai-sensei relented enough for the branch families to hear Hinata herself say no. They haven't come back thereafter, but she realized she was still the Hyuuga heiress, even if only in name, since they had bothered with such a formality.
As far as she was concerned, however, Kurenai-sensei's home was the homiest home she had ever had. Even though it did sometimes smell of cigarettes (which was funny, since her teacher didn't smoke), she didn't want to go back to the Hyuuga mansion (maybe she would later, when she felt a lot better. Much later, for sure.) Anyway, she didn't think they really wanted her back yet.
See, that was another thing that convinced her she didn't dream any of it. She would have dreamed it much better, if it was so. She wouldn't have been so pathetic, for one thing, so easily duped into thinking she even had a fighting chance against the Hyuuga genius. Some of her Jyuukenho attacks would have reached their mark and she would have noticed the decreasing efficiency of her chakra release well before most of her chakra network become occluded. Taking it a step further, she wouldn't have been in such a fight in the first place. Neji-nii wouldn't hate her so much in a dream world. Otousama wouldn't despise her as much.
Neji-nii's hatred had always been there, as far as she could remember, though she hadn't always identified it as such until she learned of what happened to his father, her uncle, when she was around eight or nine years old. If she had ever doubted her rightfulness for the position of Hyuuga head, it has never been as strong, as nearly incapacitating, as then. She couldn't imagine killing someone in her place, much less Hanabi-chan, even if it was to protect the clan or the village. Logically, she eventually realized that it wasn't her fault, but it was so hard not to think about it, so hard not to agree sometimes. In the end, she decided that she could live with Neji-nii's hatred. It was just another burden of the Main Family. She was going to try to be as strong as she could be, but she was only twelve years old.
No.
She was already twelve.
What else could she do then? Training was the obvious answer. They--Kurenai-sensei, Kiba, and Shino--all said she was improving. But it was obviously not enough to make a difference in actual missions, not enough to make otousama happy, and wasn't that what counted? And yet, she could still go back to the training fields, even now. She wanted to go right that moment, but her body felt too heavy to budge from the futon. Instead, she went through the forms of the Jyuuken in her mind.
Tenacity was the word, if she remembered it correctly.
She must have fallen asleep again, because she started violently when a solid thump made her whole head vibrate. She rolled away from her attacker with surprising agility, only to freeze halfway, pinioned by the explosion of pain yet again. She would have conveniently passed out right then, but there were other, more mortifying things going on.
"Hot--!" A string of bad words. "Hot, hot, HOT!"
Naruto-kun's voice. He sounded upset.
"Man!" More colorful words. "This sucks!"
He sounded very upset.
Hinata opened her eyes, and there he was, doing the strangest. . . He was bouncing on his haunches, clawing at his face, and basically just flailing around. There was gooey white material dripping down from his spiky head.
"Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit!"
. . . Naruto-kun. Naruto-kun was in her room. Panic immediately overrode the pain, streaking her need to stay still with an overwhelming urge to bolt. But movement seemed an impossibility and she found her heart suddenly far outpacing the rest of her body. Its heavy pounding footfalls sped up and slowed down in turns, but always maintaining a maddening speed that swallowed her ears, devoured her chest.
From a distance, she could still hear Naruto talking, trying to defeat whatever unseen enemy he was dueling with. . .
The force was sudden and brutal--it knocked the wind off her. At first, she struggled to get her breath back, but then she stopped, fettered by. . . the most horrible thing in the world! It wasn't the anxiety elephant sitting on her chest. It was Naruto-kun!
"Wah! Hinata-chan!" his voice crowed, oddly from far away. "Sorry, sorry! I tripped again. I tripped--"
She didn't dare breath.
"Hey. . . You still alive down there?"
Naruto-kun was shaking her like a rag doll.
"H-Hey. It's not funny. Hey!"
Hinata's head felt like a balloon. Filling up with hot air. La la la Floating up to the skies and bumping against clouds. Bam, bam, bam!
"Shit. I think-- I think I squashed her." He dropped her like a rock and scrambled back. "Oh, shit."
At least, she could breath again, so she did. Her heart was back to a reasonable pace and it no longer sounded like it was skipping around like a clumsy genin. Warily, she opened one eye.
"Oh, good." The sigh he released was explosive. "You're not dead." He began laughing sheepishly. "I thought I was gonna have freaky-eyed oldies after my ass with their canes and stuff."
"Won't." Hinata mumbled. Tired out, she simply went along with the strange non-dream.
"They won't?" Naruto repeated, frowning. "Why not?"
Because otousan hates me.
"Aren't you their all-important whatchamacallit?"
Once again, she didn't answer.
"I got you ramen," he announced loudly, before simmering down to a mutter. "It's all over you and me now. Hope you're not too upset about that. I mean, it's not like I'd blame you if you are, you know? I'm pretty pissed myself. That was the Ichiraku Thursday special, with extra bits of dried fish in it, and double the amount of pork rinds, and special kind of hot peppers that pop in your mouth. I ran all the way to your house, you know? And then they told me you weren't there when I got there. Good thing I ran into Bug-boy who told me you're staying with what's-her-name-sensei." He shuddered suddenly. "Don't tell anyone, but Hyuuga people are freaky. So. Are you mad?"
"N-no," she murmured, oddly serene. "T-thank you."
"Bah, it's nothing. I figured a hot bowl of ramen should help you get better. I kinda forgot about you being in the hospital, actually. Busy, you know?"
"T-tr-training?"
"Very hard." Naruto was nodding seriously. "My teacher is this weird old man who's also a shameless open-pervert. Which reminds me, you know that public bath in Mango Street? Don't go there."
There was another pocket of silence before Hinata could muster up the voice to speak. "W-work hard, Na-na-naruto-ku-kun," she was finally able to say.
"Of course," he promised. "Don't worry about that asshat, Neji. I'll beat the crap out of him and show him what a loser can do." His brow furrowed quizically. "Soon as I figure out how to make the froggie bigger, that is."
"H-hard."
"Yeah, very hard."
"T-tiring."
"That, too."
"T-they s-say I c-ca-can die try-t-trying."
"Nah," he answered sagely. "That's what ramen is for, ne?"
"R-ramen?"
"As long as you get the kind with everything in it, specially meat and veggies. You gotta stay healthy, you know?"
"Sleep?"
"Uh-huh. Speaking of sleep, I gotta go. I'm gonna try sleeping for sixteen hours tonight. Maybe that'll make the froggie summon get bigger."
"Uhn."
"Get better, 'kay? And you have to watch the finals."
"Y-yes."
"And, uh, I cleaned up the mess with this old shirt here. Whatcha want me to do with it?"
". . ."
"Okies. I'll leave it here," he said hastily before he took off.
Hinata became sure it wasn't a dream later, because Kurenai-sensei went ballistic when she came home and discovered her favorite night gown crumpled up in a mush of noodles and the slimy stench of fish.
Naruto-kun was. . . nice. Well, nicer up close. And she even talked it him! It wasn't so bad. Maybe she didn't have to always just watch him from a distance. Maybe they could even be friends, one day, someday.
About a month later, after a gazillion sad things happened, Hinata agreed to go back home.
"Are you sure about this?" Kurenai-sensei asked her, worry palpable in the glaring furrow between her eyebrows.
"Yes," she answered. "It's not easy p-popping out froggies, much less big ones."
Kurenai had looked at her oddly, but in the end, let her student go.
Hinata was laughing.
The Hyuuga mansion could be likened to a puzzle box, a bewildering collection of rooms, partitioned by movable walls, interlaced by labyrinthine passageways. It made hearing and seeing so much easier, which was only appropriate for the secretive clan. It suited its members to learn that their only sanctum lay within their own skulls, to develop their ability to speak and act as discreetly as possible early in life. It wasn't, truth be told, a very comfortable way to grow up. Younger children, of course, were gifted by nature with a shielding obliviousness, but that only lasted till the child learned to look with their eyes, to listen with their ears, and to discern with their minds, what happened behind the moving walls, the shifting passages, the possibilities that lay behind the mask of a person's face. Neji himself couldn't remember much of such blissful ignorance.
The problem, as it ever was, was that he he saw too much, but always, always, a smidgen of a degree not enough.
He would grudgingly admit that he had spent his formative years hating his family. His hatred of the main family was well-known among the people who knew him and of him, but many didn't reach the obvious conclusion that he hated the branch family, as well. It had been the driving force behind the breakneck speed of learning, the fuel behind the exploits that made everyone bemoan his being borne of the wrong father. Without that hatred, he wouldn't have had the drive to explore and learn for himself, by himself, the secrets of the Hyuuga. (Which, objectively speaking, did not render the corollary automatically true, considering his relentless personality. His progress would have been at a more believable pace, however.)
Letting go of that hatred has been a long and as of yet unfinished process. It was no longer constantly there, hiding in the shadows of his every thought and action, but it was there. Once in a while, it still tinged his opinions, though never enough to deviate him from the clearer, sharper view point.
Perhaps, he had fallen into something he had never expected he would: complacency. He had become. . . satisfied with his station in life. He enjoyed an autonomy that enabled him to exercise a fair amount of power, to influence outcomes within and without the clan. There hasn't been a need to test boundaries, but he never doubted their existence. There were. . . differences.
Did it all boil down to power then? Was he bound to ambition as intricately as any other man? If indeed he was caged, the walls of said cage extended far beyond the constant detection of his senses. Was there then a need for escape?
Adaptation was a key survival skill for any species. No--to be alive meant being able to adapt. Perhaps, he had merely learned to maneuver well inside his bounds. That he had. . . accepted the possibility of no escape.
Until now, that is, with such a possibility tantalizingly presenting itself.
They, he, had known that a ninja may have possibly been able to reverse the effects of the Jyuuken while in battle. The news was slightly disturbing, anomalous, but nothing was done beyond routine investigation of the mednin Naga Yuuhi's background, which ended in a cold trail, an unremarkable career of a Stone nin. He never seemed to have had any contact with a Hyuuga (which didn't necessarily mean anything,) and inconveniently, the Mist nins had his body.
Inuzuka Kiba's revelation changed things. It meant the possible breaching of the impenetrable Hyuuga secrets. It meant that Yukimura Bloodshanks may have counteracted the Jyuuken through some method developed from research and study, a technique tested and practiced well beforehand. (His supposed ability to ape blood limit jutsu was far-fetched and largely debunked, but it had to be kept in consideration all the same.) It wasn't an anomaly, wasn't some peculiar bloodline ability. Neji's thoughts led speedily to his father's body in the hands of the Cloud nins, the Cloud nins who triggered the events that led to his death, and a compelling hypothesis formed in his mind. It was simple: the Cloud nins were able to bypass the Hyuuga curse.
The bird seal in his forehead was more than a constant reminder of his subservience under the main family. It was there to protect the Hyuuga secrets, to bind ones corpse in such a way that no secret could be divulged from it, ensured that the secret of the Jyukken, among many things, remained a secret.
Supposedly.
It appeared the Cloud may have benefited from the body of Hyuuga Hiashi after all. Perhaps, they have learned from a Hyuuga's chakra systems how to speedily reverse their efforts. Didn't that just as speedily nullify his father's sacrifice? Didn't that just make the fact that he lost an entirely different kind of childhood and future utterly meaningless?
Did it merely coat his every thought with paranoia and dab his tongue with that stinging, pungent bitterness?
Dwelling on the possibilities, on what came to be and what went wrong was foolhardy and overly theatrical. In every game, the level could shift at any given moment, could leave your whole life's work compromised one second or bring you absolute victory the next. Adaptation: the Hyuuga would simply evolve itself into something better, stronger, more powerful, and more formidable. The ancient Hyuuga pervaded the earth too deeply for it to simply dissipate away at every challenge it faced. It will endure.
But it did offer--
chance
--he sneered in spite of himself, for entertaining such a childish fantasy. The issue at hand was foremost Hinata-sama's safety. Yukimura Bloodshanks defected from Cloud. For what reason? His political viewpoints were contrary to those prevailing in Kunigakure no sato. Familial troubles ran rampant through out Bloodshank's life. What he knew of the Hyuuga was likely to be stolen knowledge and therefore likely incomplete. Was Bloodshanks then completely working independently of the Clan Sanada, of Kunigakure no Sato, or was it a concordant effort?
Was it one man's obsessive quest for revenge or something more insidious? Was it something as incidental as the Serrators running into Hinata's team in Marima that prompted Bloodshanks to come after Hinata-sama? Either way, it meant Bloodshanks found whatever he knew of the Hyuuga insufficient, meant he suspected only the elite members of the clan held the reigns to the family secrets, as it was in many shinobi clans. Given Yukimura Bloodshanks reception of Shinoda Iga, and vice versa, it seemed too convenient to put all blame on the missing nin. (Shinoda Iga and his team of children fit nothing and remained seemingly innocuous. They were somewhere in the west now, still under hire to the Prince Amarillo.)
Neji had also learned more about the tracking powder/poison the Serrators had used on Hinata. It was, as initially theorized, some engineered virus but the chemical malatanol, which was thought to have poisoned Hinata-sama, was not the vector, but simply a by-product. The vector was the yeast itself that produced it. The virus were parasitic on the malato yeast, a rare fungus in the jungles southwest of the continent. These yeast did not ordinarily infect humans, but the infusion of the infamous pink dust in the culturing medium seemed to catalyse the mutations being caused by the bioengineered virus on the yeast and even became a part of their cell wall (details Neji didn't really need). The yeast in their inactive form came as a powdery inhalation. Only a tiny amount actually reaches the lungs, but what little did lodged there, feeding off the excess chakra exuded by the dense pathways crisscrossing the thorax and thus able to indefinitely pulsate in reaction to Bloodshank's chakra. The by-product malatanol surprisingly stabilized the pink dust-infused cellwall of the yeast (again, more details than Neji cared for) and prevented it from disintegrating as rapidly as it usually would, thereby forming self-sustaining little parasites that Bloodshanks' body seemed perfectly in synch with.
The version Bloodshanks used in Chanting Falls, in conjunction with the Mist nin's technique, worked similarly. The Mist Technique activated the powder and kept it airborne, while Bloodshanks kept the cloud of spores pulsating by generating a constant trickle of chakra. It created the cloud of light that initially inhibited the Leaf & Cloud nins' sight, even Neji's, during the ambush.
The theory of the mednins was thus: Hinata inhaled the tracking dust in Marima, had reactedly badly to the malatanol and altered pink dust combination, which caused a problem in her heart's conduction system. Bloodshanks had to be within a certain distance of her to be able to track her down through the parasites in her body, which could either mean the had known Hinata-sama was going to Chanting Falls or they had been merely hovering about Fire Country, waiting for an opportunity. The time factor at the moment, supported the latter.
The technology, they all decided, was far too sophisticated to have been developed by a group as ragtag as the Serrators. It was a Cloud technique, no doubt, particularly because Shinoda Iga had been able to remove the tracking material from Hinata-sama's body. The question boiled down to, how aware was Kunigakure no Sato of all these events? Were they simply turning a blind eye to their prodigal son's escapades, or was it all orchestrated with their blessing? Considering how ignorant the rest of the Serrators were of Bloodshanks' plans on the Hyuuga heiress, it remained unclear to where Yukimura Bloodshanks loyalty and enmity truly lay.
It was all well and good to ponder over these things, but Neji didn't simply sit in one corner to think. Though evidence seemed to build towards the Cloud, it only raised questions about the Hyuuga involvement in the whole situation. Granted, a plot against Hinata-sama may indeed really exist, the Hyuuga clan seemed decidedly reactionary, even before Cloud's apparent involvement.
What happened eighteen years ago?
In that avenue, silence still prevailed. Nobody else dared at to Hiashi's story. He still found no documentation of anything relating to that event.
There was, however, a disgusting amount of satisfaction pervading the house over the seemingly good terms between Hinata-sama and the Uchiha. At this point, he supposed, there wasn't really any reason to oppose the match. At least, there was one thing going well for his besieged cousin. After all, Hinata-sama was laughing.
--
The vari-shaped glassware could morph her face into a number grotesque masks. This particular boiling flask, simmering with a glowing cyan liquid, rendered her an insect-like creature, her wide eyes dominating the girth of the transparent container. Sakura stared at her reflection absently, even as she mentally sorted through the rows of equation scribbled on the notepad before her, formulating and dismissing solutions as easily as she breathed. She could be pretty when she made an effort, she thought in between the numbers and variables floating in her mind. Failing that, she had a pleasant, non-offensive face, even with her prominent forehead exposed. Her hair color was unique enough to warrant her a second look from strangers and her eye color matched its flowery pink hue. The ruts under her eyes, however, were not permanent fixtures on her visage, and she found them unsightly. They reminded her of a certain somebody who probably had chronic sleep problems, though he always denied it so. Her sleeplessness, unlike his, was mostly elective.
She's practically lived in the mednin quarters for the past couple of weeks. She hasn't seen much of anybody, with the exception of Hinata, who had been visiting in her office for their usual Clique meetings. Ino dropped by once to berate her for missing yet another of her infamous blind dates. Naruto was probably off wandering with the Toad sennin or whatever it was he did whenever he felt the village walls too stifling, and they haven't really talked since they parted in disagreement over a mutual friend. She hasn't seen said mutual friend yet either, but then Sasuke was like the moon, who came in phases. He'd turn up at some point, so she didn't think much of it. Her worrying was simply a force of habit, see.
Ruefully, Sakura admitted she didn't exactly have a battalion of friends at hand. Mostly, she blamed her rigorous schedule as a mednin, not to mention her additional duties: training the apprentices, taking part in the various research projects, and studying for her ever approaching exam. Of late, she hadn't been doing as much studying as she was capable of, needing something less passive and more consuming. (Ordinarily, she could study like a fiend, foregoing food and sleep for days on end. Nowadays she could get easily distracted). The studies on Mr. Walking Corpse wouldn't usually fall to her lap, but they needed her fill in for staffing deficits and she needed the hectic schedule it demanded, while it lasted.
Mr. Walking Corpse was probably now mummified by the body-cleaners and very discreetly buried somewhere he could easily be exhumed from. They were fairly sure he wasn't going to be doing any more walking, and that he was definitely, clinically, and completely dead, from the systemic down to the cellular level.
As Sakura had been explaining to Hinata (who seemed a safe enough bouncing board of ideas), the dead man did have another resurrection, a dangerous event that summoned even the members of the ANBU to contain the resulting clamor. The release of the seventh and final gate released such power that the corpse would have escaped from, no, decimated the laboratories, had it not been such a damaged specimen. Sakura was convinced now that it at least had the most basic awareness still present in that minimally functional brain, that it was the primal demand of fighting or fleeing that prompted the stilted attack. As her and the team earlier theorized, the attack was preceded by the sudden rise of the rose chains in the man's blood and followed by an explosion of monstrous amounts of chakra. The man was indeed powered by sheer spiritual energy. (In retrospect, it was such an irresponsible thing to have allowed the presence such a volatile creature within the village walls, within reach of innocent civilians. It still made her blood run cold.)
Gross tissue analysis was. . . well, it was gross business. Most of the guy's visceral organs have been reduced to something brittle and honeycomb-like, easily disintegrating into sludged when prodded. It appeared also, that particular kinds of his cells had all somehow mutated, consisting mostly of mitochondria, the part responsible for generating energy. It sure gave "power cells," a new meaning.
It wasn't an entirely alien find, truth be told, though Sakura was careful to keep her mouth shut. She had encountered such before, very briefly, on specimen stolen from Kabuto's laboratories. Okay, so the story was more roundabout than that. There was an escaped experimental subject, who bore an earlier, more unstable prototype of Orochimaru's curse seal, who managed to survive long enough to stay hidden in a remote civilian village in the Western continent. Sakura had found the man while in a sweep of missions geared on exterminating all traces of Orochimaru's activities for the last two decades (mostly to protect Konoha secrets--some of Orochimaru's discoveries, with some very careful tweaking, were actually beneficial in the medical and agricultural fields). She had pinched bits of his cadaver after he died.
The man was a once-famed Grass nin, universally thought to be dead. He was being kept alive by a witch-doctor in the village he sought refuge in. He was dosed by an interesting concoction of ordinarily, highly toxic herbs, which kept him living for at least five years after escaping from Sound.
Now with Orochimaru's curse seal, one thing determined the survival of the implanted specimen. That person must be strong enough to be able to force the curse seal back into a dormant stage, to keep it from spiraling out of control. The earlier versions of the curse seal did not develop into clear cut stages. They either exploded into a frenzied, one-time rush that literally burned out the carrier, or simply burned steadily and impotently, like a malignant cancer that slowly and excruciatingly devoured the subject. Back then, Sakura had reluctantly concluded that the changes in the body of that Grass nin was caused by the curse seal--Sasuke's curse seal did cause mutations, too, but only indefinitely, and the body's own defense mechanisms have the capacity to suppress them, given the right jutsu and the right supportive drugs immediately at hand. In light of her studies of Mr. Walking Corpse, however, Sakura was finding herself believing it was actually the toxic chemicals that gradually altered the body of the Grass nin.
Speaking of physiological alterations, the odd thing about the Grass nin was that majority of his nervous system was anatomically intact, which could be evidence to the possibility of some sort of awareness still existent in some deep corner of the Grass nin's mind. (Indeed, Mr. Walking Corpse could have very well been sentient, and she did, albeit only briefly, toy with the challenge of saving such a patient.)
Another problem of the earlier curse seal prototypes was that they did not lie dormant for long, unlike the ones Sasuke and Anko-san bore that were activated at will. The Grass nin probably had to be regularly dosed by the witch doctor to not simply die of energy exhaustion at the uncontrolled released of the curse seal. It eventually turned him into a zombie-like creature, which the witch-doctor apparently used to terrorize the neighboring villages. It was zombie reports that prompted her investigation of the area in the first place.
The herbs she used consisted of the shangrila rosettes, the flower from which the pink dust was manufactured from. It was mixed with other medicinal plants and, almost aptly, the venom of a rare snake native to the area. They either counteracted or controlled the more malignant symptoms of each other, for example, the effects of pink dust on the liver and kidneys. Which explained how the man managed to survive for so long.
She was able to use what she learned from that Grass nin. At some point, she did use various extracts from the shangrilla rosettes, not just pink dust, mixing it with a variety of other drugs. Some worked better than others. Some. . . well, some were definitely more trouble than they're worth.
--
She turned eighteen that spring for crying out loud, but she still didn't learned her lesson: some things were just more trouble than they're worth. Signing up for that stupid mission, for example, was much more trouble than it was worth. For one thing, it almost got her killed for practically no reason at all. For another, it almost got both Naruto and Sasuke killed, too.
Three chuunins assigned in to S-class mission. The elders had gone up in flames when they found out, bringing it swiftly and loudly to Tsunade-sama's attention. The Hokage merely washed her hands off the whole debacle and the mission planner happily gave them the green light, with the blithe assurance that it was all going to be a piece of cake.
Fact of the matter was simply this: the three of them were formidable as a unit. The client was having trouble affording the going rate for jounins, so he agreed to risk chuunins, signed a waiver form, and hired the trio. By no means was Konoha undercutting, assured the assignment coordinator. The three of them would be more than sufficient, he said, a glibly confident statement Sakura had calmly agreed to at the time. In the aftermath, she was more inclined to agree with the elders.
What rankled the most was that they were winning. It was a gigantic tortoise, for crying out loud! Sure, it had enormous amounts of chakra at its disposal, but it was also subject to its animalistic instincts. A careful, canny plan would have worked out, and they had exactly that kind of plan ready and in place. It would have worked flawlessly, had one Uchiha Sasuke followed through.
First, they altered the geography of the immediate vicinity, creating a monstrous fissure in the earth, something she's usually opposed to, due to its effects on the local ecosystem. It effectively trapped her with the gigantic reptile in a water-flooded chasm--which was what they wanted in the first place! She was the only one capable of delivering a massive, single-blow attack at close-space, close-range, without alerting the beast with a sudden rise in chakra that would have accompanied an attack from either Sasuke or Naruto. Besides, wasn't the creature supposedly susceptible to meek, nubile virgins?
Sasuke deviated from the plan, engaged the poor tortoise in combat, and eventually needed to use the power of his curse seal. Of course, the poor animal would have gone on a panicked rampage. It was a shrewd powerful monster, but it still felt trapped and terrified--what manner of creature wouldn't try to run away from the miasmic aura of the level-three curse seal? Not to mention, the reptile's supposedly helpless victim turned into a screeching, PMSing, unbelievably furious harpy. Naruto, who apparently didn't like the plan from the start, decided to join in at that point.
Men!
(Now listen to her. She was starting to sound like Ino! Ugh. But it was such a muggy day that day, too. High noon in mid-June had no business to be that hot and humid--not in that part of the world. Which probably explained why the tortoise was cranky from the start. They probably roused it from its estivating.)
Everyone attributed (i.e. blamed) the negative outcome of the mission on the biased viewpoint cultivated by her training as a mednin, including the ingrate brooding in one of the bunks in her office, following her movements with hooded eyes. She had given him what she had dubbed her "emergency" drugs in the field, and had gotten the team to safety as quickly as possible. Now, they were at the secure underground quarters of the mednins, in shishou's study quarters to be exact. It housed Tsunade-sama's immediate apprentices' offices, namely Sakura and Shizume-san.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
She chopped through the bones with deliberate ferocity, washed them under running water, and mashed them into the marinade so vigorously her mixing bowl got deformed (which only added to her stress. These days, her mixing bowls came and went to quickly for her peace of mind.) She set it aside for later, deciding she didn't want to risk cooking what she had meant to be her special steak dinner for the month, what with her temper still as volatile as it was.
She flashed a brief glare to his direction. He probably did it out of pride, she thought grimly. He probably couldn't handle the fact that it was Haruno Sakura at the crux of the battle plan, that it was her move, her time. He wasn't used to being relegated to the peripheries of a fi--aah, but that was her anger still talking. Grudginly, she would admit the it was more likely that she had overlooked some factor in the scenario that jacked up his near-instinctive paranoia, which cause him to instinctively (or so he claimed so often he didn't even have to say it anymore) decide the whole team needed to be saved and went off with his unnecessary heroics. Naruto was no help when she tried to talk to the Uchiha. Naruto enjoyed the fight, saying nobody got hurt anyway, and surmised with satisfaction that the tortoise would probably stay in hiding for decades because of this. He was probably right, but still. The mission was to eliminate the monster. Technically, it remained a failed mission and they were paid the rate for one. (Actually, it was downgraded to a B level so they were all paid even less.)
Way too much trouble for what it's worth. . .
She started. She had turned with another disgruntled grunt and had suddenly came face to face with his pale, grayish visage, with his dark eyes boring into hers.
"What are you doing, Sasuke-kun?" she asked in her patented mednin tone. "What part of, 'bedrest' can't you understand?"
"You cook here?" he asked in a gravelly voice.
It wasn't what she expected him to say--heck, she was well prepared to start a fistfight at that point. "This area is clean," she said defensively. "It doubles as my living space, so I usually don't treat patients or I perform experiments here, and you're obviously an exception. . . Besides, mednins have to eat, too. And if you're going to be confined here indefinitely, I suppose I'm required to give you some form of sustenance and--so what if I like boiled cabbages? Tomatoes are equally laughable to hanker for. I mean, what are you, chronically pregnant?"
"Just say what you really want to say," came the quiet interruption. "Say it to my face and get it over with."
"Who said I wanted to say anything to you?"
He grunted ungraciously. "This is annoying."
That word alone would have reduced her to the throes of depression years ago. Now, it merely reignited her simmering rage.
"And you think you acting as if nothing happened is any less so?" she asked, attempting to infuse her voice with a calm she wasn't feeling. It didn't work; her greens were now mush in her fists.
"Considering the circumstances, I thought I deserved a thank you."
"Since when did you start admitting you do deserve some things?" she retorted, foregoing her attempts at mature civility. It was under the belt, but she couldn't help it. "You don't have to martyr yourself for my sake, thank you very much. Are you happy now?"
"Not at the slightest. What happened out there?"
"It's called fucking up," she said sweetly. "Now, if you don't mind, I would like you to remove your face from my general vicinity, because I'm really tempted to smash my fist into it right now."
He stepped up nearer her, obviously taunting. This distracted her from her anger for a few moments, concern fleeting but gripping at her throat, claw-like. His flesh was burning, emanating heat like a furnace. He was dangerously feverish, probably from the drugs he's been receiving, who knew? She'd have to get his temperature under control.
"You really should go back to bed," she said. "I mean it."
"Won't you at least own up to your recklessness?"
"My recklessness?" was all she managed to bite out, the direction of her thoughts once again effectively derailed.
His criticism was double-edged. First, he was criticizing her action plan to draw the tortoise to herself in the close quarters she devised. Second, she was criticizing the fact she went for him, instead of chasing after the monster. In other words, he acted on some belief she needed his protection. Perhaps, it was just his usual paranoia acting up, but it also meant he didn't regard her with the same respect or confidence her other colleagues did. For example, if it were Naruto there, standing as bait, would he have interfered?
Eighteen years old and she was still the same Haruno Sakura: weak and troublesome, a burden.
She gritted her teeth in an effort to calm down.
"What's the matter?" he asked. "If you're that tempted, just do it."
She really did mean to head-butt him.
"I was bracing for your favorite right hook," Sasuke informed her as-matter-of-factly.
"You shifted!" she accused, horrified.
"So did the tortoise," he said, still as if commenting on the weather.
She was going to miss and would have gotten captured, he was saying. Well, did he actually think she neglected to calculate that into her plan? She supposed it simply bore down to him not trusting her. There really was no point in arguing over it, since he was so stubbornly set at making her admit she was less then proficient yet again.
"You have a cracked lip," he said, drawing her hand away from her mouth.
If he would just move away and stop stealing all the available oxygen she would have been able to think up a retort in a timely manner. At any rate, she got distracted again, for his eyes were blacker than usual--most of the time she could still call them a very dark brown, a brown tinged with enough red to match the rich damp loam that grew the giant sentinels of Konohagakure no Sato--but then his pupils were dilated into virtually holes, so cavernous her voice would have echoed, had she relinquished as much as a squeak. And there was something very important about this piece of assessment, but she couldn't remember what it was. She was occupied at the moment, or would be, semantics and just a little bit of innuendo notwithstanding.
And who would be contented with just one, anyway?
It didn't even count as one, that pathetic peck on a cheek. (His face was surprisingly soft, albeit a bit to prickly for her taste. But again, who's complaining?)
She kissed him.
Irrationally, she thought--when she could think again--that his fever must be catching, for she felt her face burn hot, his heat conducted by his lips, spreading down her neck and billowing flames deep in her belly and down to her toes. But then, any newbie apprentice knew that fever was a symptom, not some contagion to be passed around like cooties.
Cooties! Inner Sakura crowed. I finally get cooties!
"You should keep hydrated," Sasuke said, still eerily unruffled.
It was an advise she habitually forced on everyone, friends and incidentally-met strangers alike. She had to admit, she could a little pushy when it came to health.
He lifted her chin and, as if to cement in place the point he was making, quickly licked her lips, like one would do when sealing an envelope. Her mind blanked, but the rest of her reaction did not get a chance to play out, not when he decided to take her mouth in his.
It was. . . nice. She supposed, it was. It was awkward, too. He kept her at a certain distance from him, kept her in place with a pincer-like grip to her shoulder, close enough to feel the alarming heat emanating from his body, close enough for her chest to brush against his with every breath she managed to take. Her neck was craned at an odd angle, as she docilely followed his steady, almost wary, exploration. And there was this annoying little crick starting to form in her spine. . .
Easily remedied.
Concern speedily replaced the vague triumph she felt upon overthrowing his hold on her. The arms she threw about his neck twitched reflexively on contact. The searing of his torso against her was barely bearable, his muscles tensed and set, as if in preparation for battle. He was uncannily bone-dry to touch, his quietly-muscled back an arid desert landscape, and she could feel his heart thundering in a frenzy through his thin undershirt--or was that hers?
She was able to steal a tiny smidgen of clarity.
What happened to trying to control his temperature, she mentally yelped in panic.
"Sasuke--" she managed, successfully ripping her face from his.
He ignored her--
ohellyesss
--and merely latched on somewhere lower, some part that was either neck or chin or jaw. She felt him in too many places to definitively tell, really. The hands she had earlier shrugged off had found better places to grip, places evidently designed to give him places to grip. Not that she could pinpoint a given place at a given time, only one or the other. She could say, "today is Thursday, midafternoon, Konohagakure no sato," or a cloudy "his right hand is on my left hip and his left hand is where it shouldn't be. . . oh, oh, but his face really shouldn't be where it is right now, and I don't think I give a flying f--" but not both. And something about cats drowning.
She figured, through some strange disjointed deduction, that it would probably be safer if she had some control over where his lips wandered, so she sought him, melded hers to his, and tangled her fingers through his hair, clinging stubbornly, and allowed herself to be kneaded into a blissful obliviousness that went perfectly well with the heat and need and oh-so-good whatever the hell he was doing.
Nagging at the back of her mind was the need to stop.
Why?
Your uniform is in tatters, remember? She only had time to throw on an outer tunic she found lying about her office. Otherwise, she would have been traipsing about half-naked. Or rather, she would be soon, because his free hand was fumbling with buttons now and she couldn't even begin to think what the hell happened to her brassiere, god, what dexterity. . .
(while the other still kneaded her, molded her into a boneless mass of sensations and pulsations that quivered and sang and waxed and waned and)
No no no no no no no!
That was a reason to stop.
For crying out loud! He's sooner kiss you into a seizure, before you do him, you lump of coal--
Seizure. Seizure.
Febrile seizure.
That was one reason to stop.
Of course, that wasn't the only thing that could happen. Sasuke was unwell. Sasuke was reacting to one or more of the drugs he had been receiving the last few hours. His temperature was deadly high. His breathing was fast and shallow. His heart was wild, running at a breakneck speed it would soon beat itself out of. Worst of all--
He wasn't acting himself.
Sakura closed her eyes, loosened her grip on him, and gently pushed him away. But then this was the Uchiha Sasuke. He was stubborn, tenacious, and relentless, so he ended up receiving the favored right hook he had been anticipating just minutes (what? not years?) earlier.
Five seconds later, Uchiha Sasuke became unresponsive and went into respiratory arrest, as his body finally gave way to the cumulative effects of the trial-stage chemicals he had received at 1118 hours in the plains of Armadillo country, after an aborted mission in the canyons of Harfang. Haruno Sakura was able to render emergent treatment, her call for help immediately answered by her colleagues. Upon resuscitation, Sasuke was found to be delirious and continued to be so for the following day. He was discharged from mednin quarters one week later, never having to go to Konoha Hospital the entire time.
That was the last time Sakura ever experimented with pink dust.
17:16 052908
end chapter 17
This chapter is so dry, it might just kill people. Geeze. How do I mange to conk out that many words without substance. Geh.
But now, I can work on more important things er people like Zack Fair and Cloud Strife. Only Ii have work for the next three days. Darn it.
And yes, it's 3 in the morning already and I should be sleeping. Shame on me. x__x