[DVD commentary][Had Hizashi been the older son AU] 11 - ninja academy take two
requested by lita_of_jupiter. btw, I'm sorry for not doing anything with the other meme requests you left, but... *shifty eyes* Er. I was working on fic projects?
Title: Things that could have happened had Hizashi been the older son. (or: a cage is a cage is a curse, dammit.)
Author: runespoor7
Rating: PG-13
Summary: series of unrelated drabbles/fics. So far, series include various flavours of implied Neji-Hina-Naru combinations, but it's really Hyuuga centered gen with occasional cameos of other characters.
Notes: just so you know, this was born out of my getting infuriated whenever it starts being said that Hinata would be happier in the Branch House. Rather than risking incoherence before my screen every time I came across the idea, I thought I'd play with it. :p
Reason behind the numbers? I hate coming up with titles so bad omg.
…And this sure came up and bit my ass when I tried to find a subject line. *wtf, Shika? Since when does laziness betray people?*
11.
This particular fic was written as a pure whim. I was making my merry way to the Starbucks for my day of ‘dead to the world, live to writing fics, biatches’ (which happens more or less once every two weeks and is a tiny dose of heaven as well as not as inexpensive as you’d think) when! Suddenly! The idea for this appeared. I was supposed to spend the day writing something else, but the idea appeared as I was waiting for the cars to stop so I could cross the street without endangering the laptop omfg, and I swear I practically started trembling with adrenalin. I wanted to skip to the Starbucks and start writing now go go go otherwise the inexplicable urge to write it would disappear.
Hinata is the only one who goes to the Academy.
Sudden-inexplicable-urge-to-write-this fic; the opening sentence isn’t anything I’ll gawk at. It was mostly needed so I could get to wri-tiiiiiiiiiiing, now, so my fingers were suspended a few seconds over the keyboard so I’d find something I wouldn’t actually cringe at, and then smashed upon it.
Deep Theme of the ficlet: Hinata doesn’t fit in. Pretext: Academy vs. home-schooling.
It makes sense, really; she's a lowly Branch House member, and Neji-sama is the heir. He is personally taught by his father, whose whole attention is devoted to him.
Originally there was a mention of Neji’s other teachers here, but for clarity’s sake, I got rid of them. Besides, I wanted to show Neji as the apple of his father’s eyes, so much that he wouldn’t mind having to cumulate the jobs of being both a quasi-full-time teacher and his duties as Clan Head. This is retrospectively important as regards to Hinata’s family, or lack of it, with her mother, but also with ‘Neji-sama’. In this verse, it’s clear that Hinata doesn’t think of Neji as her brother, even when she’s thinking to herself.
Also, she’s focused on Neji there, not his father. Take it as you will. For me it’s a sign of one-sided rivalry which she’s so much in denial about. (the comparison you’re looking for is Sasuke feeling thousand of miles behind Itachi, even if everything else is wrong.)
By contrast, Hinata has to make with a thirty-something class and teachers who are only chuunin.
For the record, I hate the cliché that seems to imply that only chuunin = non-elite teacher. Honestly, wtf? These people have never been to college at all, have they. There are plenty of great researchers, historians, literary critics, what have you, who make shitty teachers. Teaching a subject involves two components: mastery of said subject (that’s a given, and a rant for another day and not my fandom lj, yes I’m looking at you RL politics) and, yanno, the teaching part.
Hinata fails to realise this because she’s still a child and has been raised in pretty elitist surroundings, so she’s bound to see the Academy settings as inferior - without even broaching the issue of how she will see it as inferior because it is the system she attends. Hint as to what she feels: she’s not good enough for the good teaching, and she knows it - and she’s okay with it, mostly.
That makes it a lot of anvil-light clues about Hinata’s lack of self-confidence in the first four sentences.
When she comes back home in the evenings, she has to walk through the Hyuuga courtyard. Occasionally Neji-sama and his instructor, sometimes a Hyuuga specialist of some move or another, are still at it.
And she’s not.
Hinata hurries up then, and tries not to see Neji's movements and techniques.
They are so above her own level she doesn't even know their names. It makes sense, she tells herself, because not only he is one year older than she is, but he is the heir. It is normal for him to be a genius.
This is Hinata’s version of canon!Neji’s blabbering about fate. She tries to rationalise it to herself and is a little more given to self-pity than I usually conceive my Hinata.
Still, some nights it isn't enough to soothe her.
And here is how Hinata’s lack of confidence in her skills becomes an asset.
When she cannot sleep, she dresses up and slips out of her room as silently as she knows how - and she knows how, she's one of the best in the class at sneaking around, and she doesn't even have genjutsu to fall back on; if she was even adequate at genjutsu, she might be the best, but this is another of her failings - though she knows it's useless; her mother takes sleeping pills. She could sleep through an earthquake, and has, in fact, slept through the calls of a messenger from Hizashi-sama's pounding at the door and demanding that she let him in.
My Hinata always sucks at genjutsu. I looked at official stats before making it one of her traits, and as a genin at least, she was worse at genjutsu than she was at ninjutsu, if I remember well, and I mean she must have had something like 0.5 out of 5 in genjutsu. I don’t take the databooks as the be-all and end-all of characters stats, but they provide useful guidelines.
Anyway, the reason why I never write Hinata as having become good at genjutsu is pretty much blatant anti-cliché time. Kunoichi in Kishimoto’s world appear to be all good at genjutsu (even Anko, according to the data book).
However, Hinata is not your average kunoichi because she is a Hyuuga. According to the databook, her taijutsu was the best of the Rookies at the time of the chuunin exams. Hyuugas are said to be the masters of close-combat, so genjutsu is unlikely to be one of the skills they’d spontaneously try to develop.
I’m not saying Hinata couldn’t be written as having devoted herself to improving her genjutsu - on the contrary, I have no trouble imagining her learning genjutsu to get an edge over her enemies they wouldn’t expect (this drabble is about Hinata mixing things that aren’t supposed to be mixed, after all) or to surprise her clan - but mine never does for two major reasons.
First, it provides her with a weakness, and it’s something that she has to work around and worry about, and it keeps me from suddenly turning her into Hinata!Sue (I try).
Second, it makes for potential angst - a weakness in her character (not the technical stuff there), and that’s good, because I like Hinata-doubting-her-senses. (Hi KabuHina, how are you?)
I also imagined that the Byakugan would be generally useless against genjutsu, for which I thank ”edenfalling” and her Way of the Apartment Manager, but which also ties up with my primary disposal of Hanabi in Celebrationverse.
On Hinata’s quietness: it’s good for a ninja to know when to be quiet. Really, it is. I think that if Hinata has spent the better part of her life trying not to attract the attention of Hiashi/Hizashi (same difference as far as this point is concerned, wut), she’s not going to be that much of a klutz, really.
And I needed a mention of Hinata’s mother unless I wanted to deal with her being an orphan, and keeping the woman alive turned out to involve a lot less of digression and explanations and crappy crappy angst. It also shows that the relation between Hiashi and Hinata’s mother is a strange one, as I deliberately left out any repercussions her having slept through the messenger’s shouts could have had. It was my sentence of sardonic funny.
But it still is training.
And last point of the paragraph: Hinata never looks down on training, no matter the kind, no matter how ridiculous or unnecessary.
If anything, Hinata is even more cautious than if she was likely to be caught; she cannot afford to take bad habits and grow complacent. Thus she doesn't only avoid making noise, she also makes detours around any window or reflective surface that could cast her shadow on the floor or otherwise betray her presence.
Hinata’s her harshest judge; I hope it’s perceptible in the first part of the first sentence.
Then she goes to that same courtyard, and she trains until her shoulders start slumping with tiredness.
She used to stop when her knees failed her in sheer exhaustion, but now that point never comes anymore, and she is able to train for several hours on end without ever running out of breath. When she still stumbles, panting, after a sparring match at the Academy, she wishes she had a partner in the compound too, so she could improve her sparring skills as well. Fights, even mock fights, are harder on her stamina than any amount of personal training.
Kami forbid Hinata’s feeling lonely. Joking aside, I needed to find a reason why she could train that hard while at the same time not being all that exceptional at the Academy.
But at least she is able to bide her time and dodge her opponent's strikes until she can bring them to the ground, with a swift chain of blows she's always perfecting and devising variations of. Variety is her only weapon against opponents who otherwise surpass her on every ground.
Hinata in a nutshell. She has all the markings of a perfectionist.
(Hinata is well aware practically every area of her abilities is deficient. But this is no excuse for losing against Uchiha Sasuke in spars - against him she wins four times out of ten. She is the only one who manages to defeat him more than two-tenths of the time, but her results are otherwise mediocre at best, and generally more abysmal than not. So far she has managed to beat Aburame Shino only twice in their three years at the Academy.)
Hinata beating Sasuke 4/10 of the time was born because of the ‘this is no excuse for losing against Uchiha Sasuke’. She will not make excuses up for herself, ever, and if you think she’s displacing her issues about Neji on Sasuke there, you’re right on the money. Again, it’s about Hinata being a perfectionist.
At the same time, she won’t do good against everyone else. Sasuke likes close combat (note: I’m not saying he’ll never use his great fireballs or anything, but it seems to me that his first move is always to rush at the enemy and try to land a blow. I may be completely wrong, but so far that’s what I got from him), and Jyuuken (I’m guessing that she’s not actually using it during the Academy’s spars, because it’s a whole lot more deadly than a few bruises, but I imagine everyone is watching to take note of where she’s brushed against her opponent, and said opponent must be expected to play fair and say when he’s been hit too many times/has outlasted his stamina if the hits had been real Jyuuken) pwns normal taijutsu (at Academy’s level? You bet.).
On the other hand, Shino fights mid to long range and his chakra-eating insects would render Jyuuken useless.
On top of that, Shino wears sunglasses, and I think that not being able to see her opponent’s eyes and their expression would unnerve Hinata.
Anyway, she trains the only way she knows how - following her Academy education.
When she mentally compares with Neji-sama's form, she inevitably finds herself lacking. Her Jyuuken is a clumsy affair, a bastardised version mixed with the basic taijutsu taught at the Academy, with none of the grace and precision of the Main House's accomplishments.
This was originally the place for the ‘embarrassment of a cousin’ image re: Hinata’s Jyuuken, but I decided to keep it for later, when I could use more words to say the same things at a moment that’d make the melodrama okay. :)
On top of Hinata’s usual finding herself lacking (she’d find herself lacking against a fungus at this point in time) and ‘Jyuuken is graceful and pretty and Main House are graceful and pretty and I can’t do that so I’m not a real Hyuuga’ (‘Main House’s accomplishments’ is just a long-winded way to mean Neji, and you know she knows it), note how she thinks that what she learnt at the Academy is ‘basic’.
But she still perseveres, because if she doesn't she is going to fall even further behind Neji-sama, and he may be the heir and he may be a genius, there is only a one-year gap between them.
From times to times, when she is at the Academy laughing with the rest of the class at Naruto's antics - her heart somersaults every time Iruka-sensei falls on him with his booming voice, but Naruto always manages to tear a laugh out of her even as he is being punished - or when she asks Ino for advice on flowers or on the proper way to throw a senbon, because Kiba has maintained that she wouldn't be able to and she refused to back down, she thinks that on some grounds she may have, not the better end of the deal, but maybe a few compensations for her not being taught at home.
I had to acknowledge Hinata’s crush on Naruto, because this Hinata is pretty close to canon!Hinata and to the 2verse (ninja academy take one, the one where she tells Hizashi she wants to be a ninja after meeting Naruto), so she had to have a crush on him. I’m mightily unpleased with how I went at it - it’s crude and it feels pasted on - but I like the verb somersault.
And lookie, here Hinata fits in! She speaks to Ino! She takes Kiba’s challenge! (more or less, as we’ll see right now.)
She has classmates with whom she can talk and who often talk around her about things she had previously never heard of, even in the Hyuuga compound; she wouldn't really call them friends, because she knows most people call her 'creepy' behind her back, but she finds she likes the sound of that a lot better than 'weakling'. In the Hyuuga, this is what she is.
It’s very interesting, because on the one hand Hinata wants to be normal, and on the other she wants so badly to be acknowledged. On the one hand she wants to fit in, on the other she wants to stand out.
she knows most people call her 'creepy' behind her back, but she finds she likes the sound of that a lot better than 'weakling' is a sentence I’ve been wanting to write in a fic for several months, and I’m very glad that I could put it there. Hm, maybe that’s what sparked the fic in the first place.
She is inadequate.
She knows it.
Lol, that’s my usual subtlety shining right through. I must’ve read too much Zola in my formative years.
This is why when the call comes from Hizashi-sama that she is required to attend Neji-sama's training session that day, she blanches and feels utterly, utterly powerless.
What does she have to prove?
Nothing.
Neji-sama is so above her level that Uchiha Sasuke once came up to her and asked about him. He is the genius of the Hyuuga clan.
Sasuke has Itachi-related problems. I also suppose this was either before either at the beginning of his crush on her.
By the way, if the last three sentences don’t hurt somewhat, then I’ve done things horribly, horribly wrong.
Hinata is nowhere near that, as her stats and report card state for the world to see. And - Hinata doesn't think that Hizashi-sama would pay enough attention to her to remember her grades, but - surely he'd have realised that he receives no letter of glowing praise about her?
When she arrives on the courtyard, Neji-sama and Hizashi-sama are already there. As well as several persons Hinata recognises as members of the Council.
She wants to curl up and die. There is losing, and then there is being humiliated bad enough to consider going missing.
I see Hinata as having a strong sense of pride. It’s pretty much the one thing she has.
She is quickly reassured, though, when she hears Hizashi-sama explaining the goal of this encounter to the Council members; this match is to show Neji's prowess against an average genin. She breathes a little more easily; she's in no way expected to shine. This is a relief, she judges as she takes position in front of Neji-sama.
Of course, it doesn't entirely erase the burn of humiliation that she is going to get her ass kicked, but she consoles herself by thinking that she won't be the one the watchers will be focusing on.
In front of her, Neji-sama looks grave and serious, and gravely nods at her in acknowledgment.
…WAIT, WHAT. ‘grave’ and ‘gravely’ in the same sentence and I didn’t even notice? asklsjlsdjdsk.
Let’s focus on complacent!Neji and pretend it never happened. Right there, he’s neither nice nor not-nice - he’s just pompous, and has never been allowed near kids his age. Pompous! or complacent!Neji is something I can easily infer from canon - along with how passive I tend to write him. My Neji tends to conform a lot more than my Hinata, at least pre-shift in paradigm due to Naruto.
The butterflies in her stomach are making her slightly nervous, but she nevertheless bows back. He's much more serious about it than most of the people at the Academy - generally they smile at each other or exchange at least a few words before starting (and in some cases even after they started; a sparring match can just as easily change into a match of wits) - but Hinata is starting to get used to stoic geniuses.
He's not all that different from Sasuke. Or at least from what he used to be. Now Sasuke's not as professional.
Sasuke’s crush on Hinata was the farthest thing from my mind when I started writing (much like Ino’s crush on Itachi in Strange Kind of Sanity), but somehow… I included the last two sentences because I wanted Hinata to be perceptive enough that she’d feel differences between Neji and Sasuke, and for that I needed her relationship with Sasuke to be more than non-existent, because if she’d been able to pick up on differences from that, I’d have given her way too much credit. And for Sasuke to act differently - well, given what I’d written sooner in the fic, it seemed to make sense. omg why am I thinking syaoran/sakura from ccs here help me my brain askares meeeee ;_;
Well, he still only just nods solemnly, but then he immediately undercuts himself by starting to talk before Iruka gives them the signal to start. He only does that with her, though, and Naruto, of course, and she almost wishes he'd do it with other people, but then she sometimes feels like she's the only one who isn't offended by what he says, so maybe it's not that bad.
I’m still hoping it doesn’t sound too much like something a Sue would do/think, but I couldn’t resist Chibisuke undercutting his own effects.
Sometimes they even eat together (he makes really good onigiri, which is an unspoken promise between them that she'll never mention in front of Akimichi Chouji).
The first time they did it was after Hinata had been kicked seven ways to Sunday by Yamanaka Ino and her blood was pounding into her head, so she didn't know how to react but was somewhat grateful for the quiet - even if it was bewildering that Sasuke would want to eat with her. But then again, Iruka-sensei had told him his mid-range taijutsu needed more work, so maybe it made sense.
Again a nod to how, even if Hinata gets the best results against Sasuke, she’s far from being a flawless fighter. And in Sasuke’s mind, this was totally ‘underdogs unite’, I’ll have you know.
She wasn't been sure what to call him after that, but then she took to mirroring the way he called her, without honorific at all. She feared she was taking liberties, but she'd thought long and hard about the issue of 'Sasuke-kun' and had come to the conclusion that he didn't seem to enjoy it when other girls called him like this. He didn't remark on it at all, which she'd taken for Sasuke-approval.
He seems to work mostly by not talking a lot. She's getting better at reading him, she thinks - at least he doesn't glare at her like he does when people annoy him, not a lot. At least she thinks that's what it means when he glares at people.
More of Hinata’s lack of confidence plus my trying to make her not come across as Sue!Hinata.
The goal of this is for Neji-sama to show off what he can, so Hinata obediently does her best. She's here as an opponent, because you can't demonstrate your skills against a log.
So she avoids and jumps backwards and does everything she usually does when she's fighting someone. She's very concentrated, but she's not especially aware of whom she's fighting. Well, she realises at his fighting style that he is Hyuuga, but she's not faced with his personality, the way it's always the case against Naruto - and increasingly against Sasuke, whom she's getting to know rather well now.
And suddenly Neji disappears. He was ‘Neji-sama’ in the last paragraph, now ‘he is Hyuuga’ and after that he doesn’t even have a name any more.
The idea that someone’s personality of revealed by their fighting style is far from original, but I liked having Hinata mixing the two - getting to know someone and fighting them. It’s what a team is about, after all. And the reason why Hinata feels Naruto’s personality so strongly isn’t that they’re particularly close, but that Naruto’s character is particularly overwhelming and makes her inner Hinata swoon.
It's rather impersonal and distant, but strangely is had some familiarity to it.
Jyuuken.
Hinata is very concentrated on the fight and the movements; she rather likes the flow of it. The speed changes, but there's always a pleasing regularity to it - and after sparring against Shikamaru, Hinata can safely say there is nothing more gnawing on her attention and nerves than irregularity in a fight. Though compared to him, she never had trouble adapting to Kiba's feral style.
Shikamaru’s clever enough to be the first to realise how jarring it is to have an opponent break the flow of the fight. I’ll admit I was also playing at name-dropping through the whole fic.
She's not fighting a person; she's fighting a body, movements and techniques, sidesteps and dashes forward and things she has seen before when she passes through the compound after school.
She's following the pulse, though it drums less soothingly through her than it regulates her opponents, obviously, sometimes her pace is shattered by the clashes of the Academy's taijutsu. This taijutsu has its own music, less subtle and louder than Jyuuken, but it comes hopelessly mangled when it mixes with the Hyuuga clan form - and that is exactly what Hinata is doing.
Music metaphor for a fight. Will I never stop the cliché? Surprisingly, I think it works.
Still, she's long learnt that beginning a move as Jyuuken and ending it in Gouken, with a kick of the heel to finish up, jars her opponents at least as much as it does her, and she's become more used to the lack of harmony than them because it is the way she fights, so ultimately it gains her an advantage, even if it exhausts her, the parallel lines of concentration and instinct she has to switch and which sometimes throw even her when they run ahead of her.
To make an analogy, it would be like starting a sentence in English and ending it in Arabic Braille.
Finally the rhythm comes to a stop.
Hinata takes a breath and lets go of her fighting tunnel vision, the meditative pace of striking, blocking and dodging, and she blinks away the trance.
I apply the concept of tunnel vision to Team Seven and Hinata.
Memory comes back to her; she was fighting Neji-sama. Is the fight done? Hizashi-sama must have been satisfied that the Council had been properly impressed, then.
She blinks again in the utter silence. She slowly realises that every stare is fixed upon her, and blood slowly rises to her cheeks. Why are they all looking at her like that? She was only supposed to be Neji-sama's demonstration partner, that was all! They were never supposed to pay attention to her performance!
The stares are heavily weighing down on her.
She quickly looks down.
All this was never supposed to be misdirection, just reflect Hinata’s thought process.
It takes her a moment to register what she is seeing, in front of her on the ground.
The body.
I strongly debated about the word to use. I didn’t want readers to believe she’d killed him (based on my reaction to such a line, that’s how I would’ve interpreted it), but in the end I did because it felt more natural to first see the body, and then notice the future bruise, unless I wanted to make a longer sentence out of it. Which I didn’t.
Neji-sama.
Out cold, with an angry red mark on the temple that she knows would flourish into a beautiful bruise if unhealed.
That girl takes her training seriously.
"I - er, what?"
"You won," says Hizashi-sama as if in a daze.
Hinata gapes.
"I what?"
"You won," he repeats. He frowns. "You won," he says again as if he was trying to convince himself and not liking the conclusion he's coming up with.
On the one hand, I like this line because it’s funny. On the other, I feel like it’s verging on OOC.
"B-but how?" she splutters. It makes no sense.
She'd believe Sakura has wrapped her in a genjutsu without her realising, but she remembers there was no school today and they don't know enough genjutsu yet to distort someone's time perception, so it's a real memory and there really was no school today, so she isn't sparring against Sakura, so it's not genjutsu.
Yes, I hadn’t mentioned Sakura one single time. And I am aware that there are many, many canonical problems with Sakura using genjutsu when still at the Academy, but as I said before, Hinata sucks at genjutsu, and it makes her slightly warier than the usual student. So she’s exaggerating what Sakura can do.
Hizashi-sama looks almost annoyed now. "He was not expecting it."
Who is Hizashi annoyed at? Everyone. Later, he’ll resent Hinata a bit, but he’s honest enough not to wish her ill because of it. Saying that Neji wasn’t expecting Hinata’s fighting style is as much a blame as it is an excuse; probably more, at least once Hizashi has had time to think.
"Oh." She blinks again.
The Council members are whispering among themselves, but she ignores it. She is trying to find a new axis for her world.
Cheap way to sum up her shock without using the word.
Neji-sama is the genius of the Hyuuga. He was not expecting it. But - how?
Hinata's Jyuuken isn't even second-rate.
It's a self-taught, watered-down version that is at best a distant illegitimate embarrassment of a cousin which borrows moves from even the Inuzuka fighting style and that has been influenced by more than a touch of the Academy's style.
Neji-sama's Jyuuken is so pure that when Hinata is trying to learn a kata from a scroll, she ends up closing her eyes and picturing him, and then she follows the moves.
I’m happy with these sentences.
…Oh.
Oh.
Originally there was a ‘Wow’ there but it was OOC and thus got scrapped. But until the last minute it was there. Finally I decided either I’d made my point well enough and the ‘Wow’ wasn’t needed, either I’d failed and the OOCness would’ve jarred the reader out of the story on top of him/her being confused with what I wanted to say. To be fair, the ‘Wow’ I had in mind was a sort of disbelieving Wow, but speech-tone doesn’t actually translate to writing, and it could all too easily be taken to mean ‘Wow I’m so great’.
Hinata is struck dumb by the realisation. Around her there's starting to be some noise - arguments, she distractedly hears - but that's not what she cares about.
All she can think of is how the people at the Academy will react when she tells them about it.
Hinata’s family? The Academy. Rereading this, I realise this sounds like Hinata will be taking pride in her victory, when actually I pictured her more sharing her discovery with her friends. However, as explaining it would have made the sentence longer, and this is the last sentence of the fic…
Title: Things that could have happened had Hizashi been the older son. (or: a cage is a cage is a curse, dammit.)
Author: runespoor7
Rating: PG-13
Summary: series of unrelated drabbles/fics. So far, series include various flavours of implied Neji-Hina-Naru combinations, but it's really Hyuuga centered gen with occasional cameos of other characters.
Notes: just so you know, this was born out of my getting infuriated whenever it starts being said that Hinata would be happier in the Branch House. Rather than risking incoherence before my screen every time I came across the idea, I thought I'd play with it. :p
Reason behind the numbers? I hate coming up with titles so bad omg.
…And this sure came up and bit my ass when I tried to find a subject line. *wtf, Shika? Since when does laziness betray people?*
11.
This particular fic was written as a pure whim. I was making my merry way to the Starbucks for my day of ‘dead to the world, live to writing fics, biatches’ (which happens more or less once every two weeks and is a tiny dose of heaven as well as not as inexpensive as you’d think) when! Suddenly! The idea for this appeared. I was supposed to spend the day writing something else, but the idea appeared as I was waiting for the cars to stop so I could cross the street without endangering the laptop omfg, and I swear I practically started trembling with adrenalin. I wanted to skip to the Starbucks and start writing now go go go otherwise the inexplicable urge to write it would disappear.
Hinata is the only one who goes to the Academy.
Sudden-inexplicable-urge-to-write-this fic; the opening sentence isn’t anything I’ll gawk at. It was mostly needed so I could get to wri-tiiiiiiiiiiing, now, so my fingers were suspended a few seconds over the keyboard so I’d find something I wouldn’t actually cringe at, and then smashed upon it.
Deep Theme of the ficlet: Hinata doesn’t fit in. Pretext: Academy vs. home-schooling.
It makes sense, really; she's a lowly Branch House member, and Neji-sama is the heir. He is personally taught by his father, whose whole attention is devoted to him.
Originally there was a mention of Neji’s other teachers here, but for clarity’s sake, I got rid of them. Besides, I wanted to show Neji as the apple of his father’s eyes, so much that he wouldn’t mind having to cumulate the jobs of being both a quasi-full-time teacher and his duties as Clan Head. This is retrospectively important as regards to Hinata’s family, or lack of it, with her mother, but also with ‘Neji-sama’. In this verse, it’s clear that Hinata doesn’t think of Neji as her brother, even when she’s thinking to herself.
Also, she’s focused on Neji there, not his father. Take it as you will. For me it’s a sign of one-sided rivalry which she’s so much in denial about. (the comparison you’re looking for is Sasuke feeling thousand of miles behind Itachi, even if everything else is wrong.)
By contrast, Hinata has to make with a thirty-something class and teachers who are only chuunin.
For the record, I hate the cliché that seems to imply that only chuunin = non-elite teacher. Honestly, wtf? These people have never been to college at all, have they. There are plenty of great researchers, historians, literary critics, what have you, who make shitty teachers. Teaching a subject involves two components: mastery of said subject (that’s a given, and a rant for another day and not my fandom lj, yes I’m looking at you RL politics) and, yanno, the teaching part.
Hinata fails to realise this because she’s still a child and has been raised in pretty elitist surroundings, so she’s bound to see the Academy settings as inferior - without even broaching the issue of how she will see it as inferior because it is the system she attends. Hint as to what she feels: she’s not good enough for the good teaching, and she knows it - and she’s okay with it, mostly.
That makes it a lot of anvil-light clues about Hinata’s lack of self-confidence in the first four sentences.
When she comes back home in the evenings, she has to walk through the Hyuuga courtyard. Occasionally Neji-sama and his instructor, sometimes a Hyuuga specialist of some move or another, are still at it.
And she’s not.
Hinata hurries up then, and tries not to see Neji's movements and techniques.
They are so above her own level she doesn't even know their names. It makes sense, she tells herself, because not only he is one year older than she is, but he is the heir. It is normal for him to be a genius.
This is Hinata’s version of canon!Neji’s blabbering about fate. She tries to rationalise it to herself and is a little more given to self-pity than I usually conceive my Hinata.
Still, some nights it isn't enough to soothe her.
And here is how Hinata’s lack of confidence in her skills becomes an asset.
When she cannot sleep, she dresses up and slips out of her room as silently as she knows how - and she knows how, she's one of the best in the class at sneaking around, and she doesn't even have genjutsu to fall back on; if she was even adequate at genjutsu, she might be the best, but this is another of her failings - though she knows it's useless; her mother takes sleeping pills. She could sleep through an earthquake, and has, in fact, slept through the calls of a messenger from Hizashi-sama's pounding at the door and demanding that she let him in.
My Hinata always sucks at genjutsu. I looked at official stats before making it one of her traits, and as a genin at least, she was worse at genjutsu than she was at ninjutsu, if I remember well, and I mean she must have had something like 0.5 out of 5 in genjutsu. I don’t take the databooks as the be-all and end-all of characters stats, but they provide useful guidelines.
Anyway, the reason why I never write Hinata as having become good at genjutsu is pretty much blatant anti-cliché time. Kunoichi in Kishimoto’s world appear to be all good at genjutsu (even Anko, according to the data book).
However, Hinata is not your average kunoichi because she is a Hyuuga. According to the databook, her taijutsu was the best of the Rookies at the time of the chuunin exams. Hyuugas are said to be the masters of close-combat, so genjutsu is unlikely to be one of the skills they’d spontaneously try to develop.
I’m not saying Hinata couldn’t be written as having devoted herself to improving her genjutsu - on the contrary, I have no trouble imagining her learning genjutsu to get an edge over her enemies they wouldn’t expect (this drabble is about Hinata mixing things that aren’t supposed to be mixed, after all) or to surprise her clan - but mine never does for two major reasons.
First, it provides her with a weakness, and it’s something that she has to work around and worry about, and it keeps me from suddenly turning her into Hinata!Sue (I try).
Second, it makes for potential angst - a weakness in her character (not the technical stuff there), and that’s good, because I like Hinata-doubting-her-senses. (Hi KabuHina, how are you?)
I also imagined that the Byakugan would be generally useless against genjutsu, for which I thank ”edenfalling” and her Way of the Apartment Manager, but which also ties up with my primary disposal of Hanabi in Celebrationverse.
On Hinata’s quietness: it’s good for a ninja to know when to be quiet. Really, it is. I think that if Hinata has spent the better part of her life trying not to attract the attention of Hiashi/Hizashi (same difference as far as this point is concerned, wut), she’s not going to be that much of a klutz, really.
And I needed a mention of Hinata’s mother unless I wanted to deal with her being an orphan, and keeping the woman alive turned out to involve a lot less of digression and explanations and crappy crappy angst. It also shows that the relation between Hiashi and Hinata’s mother is a strange one, as I deliberately left out any repercussions her having slept through the messenger’s shouts could have had. It was my sentence of sardonic funny.
But it still is training.
And last point of the paragraph: Hinata never looks down on training, no matter the kind, no matter how ridiculous or unnecessary.
If anything, Hinata is even more cautious than if she was likely to be caught; she cannot afford to take bad habits and grow complacent. Thus she doesn't only avoid making noise, she also makes detours around any window or reflective surface that could cast her shadow on the floor or otherwise betray her presence.
Hinata’s her harshest judge; I hope it’s perceptible in the first part of the first sentence.
Then she goes to that same courtyard, and she trains until her shoulders start slumping with tiredness.
She used to stop when her knees failed her in sheer exhaustion, but now that point never comes anymore, and she is able to train for several hours on end without ever running out of breath. When she still stumbles, panting, after a sparring match at the Academy, she wishes she had a partner in the compound too, so she could improve her sparring skills as well. Fights, even mock fights, are harder on her stamina than any amount of personal training.
Kami forbid Hinata’s feeling lonely. Joking aside, I needed to find a reason why she could train that hard while at the same time not being all that exceptional at the Academy.
But at least she is able to bide her time and dodge her opponent's strikes until she can bring them to the ground, with a swift chain of blows she's always perfecting and devising variations of. Variety is her only weapon against opponents who otherwise surpass her on every ground.
Hinata in a nutshell. She has all the markings of a perfectionist.
(Hinata is well aware practically every area of her abilities is deficient. But this is no excuse for losing against Uchiha Sasuke in spars - against him she wins four times out of ten. She is the only one who manages to defeat him more than two-tenths of the time, but her results are otherwise mediocre at best, and generally more abysmal than not. So far she has managed to beat Aburame Shino only twice in their three years at the Academy.)
Hinata beating Sasuke 4/10 of the time was born because of the ‘this is no excuse for losing against Uchiha Sasuke’. She will not make excuses up for herself, ever, and if you think she’s displacing her issues about Neji on Sasuke there, you’re right on the money. Again, it’s about Hinata being a perfectionist.
At the same time, she won’t do good against everyone else. Sasuke likes close combat (note: I’m not saying he’ll never use his great fireballs or anything, but it seems to me that his first move is always to rush at the enemy and try to land a blow. I may be completely wrong, but so far that’s what I got from him), and Jyuuken (I’m guessing that she’s not actually using it during the Academy’s spars, because it’s a whole lot more deadly than a few bruises, but I imagine everyone is watching to take note of where she’s brushed against her opponent, and said opponent must be expected to play fair and say when he’s been hit too many times/has outlasted his stamina if the hits had been real Jyuuken) pwns normal taijutsu (at Academy’s level? You bet.).
On the other hand, Shino fights mid to long range and his chakra-eating insects would render Jyuuken useless.
On top of that, Shino wears sunglasses, and I think that not being able to see her opponent’s eyes and their expression would unnerve Hinata.
Anyway, she trains the only way she knows how - following her Academy education.
When she mentally compares with Neji-sama's form, she inevitably finds herself lacking. Her Jyuuken is a clumsy affair, a bastardised version mixed with the basic taijutsu taught at the Academy, with none of the grace and precision of the Main House's accomplishments.
This was originally the place for the ‘embarrassment of a cousin’ image re: Hinata’s Jyuuken, but I decided to keep it for later, when I could use more words to say the same things at a moment that’d make the melodrama okay. :)
On top of Hinata’s usual finding herself lacking (she’d find herself lacking against a fungus at this point in time) and ‘Jyuuken is graceful and pretty and Main House are graceful and pretty and I can’t do that so I’m not a real Hyuuga’ (‘Main House’s accomplishments’ is just a long-winded way to mean Neji, and you know she knows it), note how she thinks that what she learnt at the Academy is ‘basic’.
But she still perseveres, because if she doesn't she is going to fall even further behind Neji-sama, and he may be the heir and he may be a genius, there is only a one-year gap between them.
From times to times, when she is at the Academy laughing with the rest of the class at Naruto's antics - her heart somersaults every time Iruka-sensei falls on him with his booming voice, but Naruto always manages to tear a laugh out of her even as he is being punished - or when she asks Ino for advice on flowers or on the proper way to throw a senbon, because Kiba has maintained that she wouldn't be able to and she refused to back down, she thinks that on some grounds she may have, not the better end of the deal, but maybe a few compensations for her not being taught at home.
I had to acknowledge Hinata’s crush on Naruto, because this Hinata is pretty close to canon!Hinata and to the 2verse (ninja academy take one, the one where she tells Hizashi she wants to be a ninja after meeting Naruto), so she had to have a crush on him. I’m mightily unpleased with how I went at it - it’s crude and it feels pasted on - but I like the verb somersault.
And lookie, here Hinata fits in! She speaks to Ino! She takes Kiba’s challenge! (more or less, as we’ll see right now.)
She has classmates with whom she can talk and who often talk around her about things she had previously never heard of, even in the Hyuuga compound; she wouldn't really call them friends, because she knows most people call her 'creepy' behind her back, but she finds she likes the sound of that a lot better than 'weakling'. In the Hyuuga, this is what she is.
It’s very interesting, because on the one hand Hinata wants to be normal, and on the other she wants so badly to be acknowledged. On the one hand she wants to fit in, on the other she wants to stand out.
she knows most people call her 'creepy' behind her back, but she finds she likes the sound of that a lot better than 'weakling' is a sentence I’ve been wanting to write in a fic for several months, and I’m very glad that I could put it there. Hm, maybe that’s what sparked the fic in the first place.
She is inadequate.
She knows it.
Lol, that’s my usual subtlety shining right through. I must’ve read too much Zola in my formative years.
This is why when the call comes from Hizashi-sama that she is required to attend Neji-sama's training session that day, she blanches and feels utterly, utterly powerless.
What does she have to prove?
Nothing.
Neji-sama is so above her level that Uchiha Sasuke once came up to her and asked about him. He is the genius of the Hyuuga clan.
Sasuke has Itachi-related problems. I also suppose this was either before either at the beginning of his crush on her.
By the way, if the last three sentences don’t hurt somewhat, then I’ve done things horribly, horribly wrong.
Hinata is nowhere near that, as her stats and report card state for the world to see. And - Hinata doesn't think that Hizashi-sama would pay enough attention to her to remember her grades, but - surely he'd have realised that he receives no letter of glowing praise about her?
When she arrives on the courtyard, Neji-sama and Hizashi-sama are already there. As well as several persons Hinata recognises as members of the Council.
She wants to curl up and die. There is losing, and then there is being humiliated bad enough to consider going missing.
I see Hinata as having a strong sense of pride. It’s pretty much the one thing she has.
She is quickly reassured, though, when she hears Hizashi-sama explaining the goal of this encounter to the Council members; this match is to show Neji's prowess against an average genin. She breathes a little more easily; she's in no way expected to shine. This is a relief, she judges as she takes position in front of Neji-sama.
Of course, it doesn't entirely erase the burn of humiliation that she is going to get her ass kicked, but she consoles herself by thinking that she won't be the one the watchers will be focusing on.
In front of her, Neji-sama looks grave and serious, and gravely nods at her in acknowledgment.
…WAIT, WHAT. ‘grave’ and ‘gravely’ in the same sentence and I didn’t even notice? asklsjlsdjdsk.
Let’s focus on complacent!Neji and pretend it never happened. Right there, he’s neither nice nor not-nice - he’s just pompous, and has never been allowed near kids his age. Pompous! or complacent!Neji is something I can easily infer from canon - along with how passive I tend to write him. My Neji tends to conform a lot more than my Hinata, at least pre-shift in paradigm due to Naruto.
The butterflies in her stomach are making her slightly nervous, but she nevertheless bows back. He's much more serious about it than most of the people at the Academy - generally they smile at each other or exchange at least a few words before starting (and in some cases even after they started; a sparring match can just as easily change into a match of wits) - but Hinata is starting to get used to stoic geniuses.
He's not all that different from Sasuke. Or at least from what he used to be. Now Sasuke's not as professional.
Sasuke’s crush on Hinata was the farthest thing from my mind when I started writing (much like Ino’s crush on Itachi in Strange Kind of Sanity), but somehow… I included the last two sentences because I wanted Hinata to be perceptive enough that she’d feel differences between Neji and Sasuke, and for that I needed her relationship with Sasuke to be more than non-existent, because if she’d been able to pick up on differences from that, I’d have given her way too much credit. And for Sasuke to act differently - well, given what I’d written sooner in the fic, it seemed to make sense. omg why am I thinking syaoran/sakura from ccs here help me my brain askares meeeee ;_;
Well, he still only just nods solemnly, but then he immediately undercuts himself by starting to talk before Iruka gives them the signal to start. He only does that with her, though, and Naruto, of course, and she almost wishes he'd do it with other people, but then she sometimes feels like she's the only one who isn't offended by what he says, so maybe it's not that bad.
I’m still hoping it doesn’t sound too much like something a Sue would do/think, but I couldn’t resist Chibisuke undercutting his own effects.
Sometimes they even eat together (he makes really good onigiri, which is an unspoken promise between them that she'll never mention in front of Akimichi Chouji).
The first time they did it was after Hinata had been kicked seven ways to Sunday by Yamanaka Ino and her blood was pounding into her head, so she didn't know how to react but was somewhat grateful for the quiet - even if it was bewildering that Sasuke would want to eat with her. But then again, Iruka-sensei had told him his mid-range taijutsu needed more work, so maybe it made sense.
Again a nod to how, even if Hinata gets the best results against Sasuke, she’s far from being a flawless fighter. And in Sasuke’s mind, this was totally ‘underdogs unite’, I’ll have you know.
She wasn't been sure what to call him after that, but then she took to mirroring the way he called her, without honorific at all. She feared she was taking liberties, but she'd thought long and hard about the issue of 'Sasuke-kun' and had come to the conclusion that he didn't seem to enjoy it when other girls called him like this. He didn't remark on it at all, which she'd taken for Sasuke-approval.
He seems to work mostly by not talking a lot. She's getting better at reading him, she thinks - at least he doesn't glare at her like he does when people annoy him, not a lot. At least she thinks that's what it means when he glares at people.
More of Hinata’s lack of confidence plus my trying to make her not come across as Sue!Hinata.
The goal of this is for Neji-sama to show off what he can, so Hinata obediently does her best. She's here as an opponent, because you can't demonstrate your skills against a log.
So she avoids and jumps backwards and does everything she usually does when she's fighting someone. She's very concentrated, but she's not especially aware of whom she's fighting. Well, she realises at his fighting style that he is Hyuuga, but she's not faced with his personality, the way it's always the case against Naruto - and increasingly against Sasuke, whom she's getting to know rather well now.
And suddenly Neji disappears. He was ‘Neji-sama’ in the last paragraph, now ‘he is Hyuuga’ and after that he doesn’t even have a name any more.
The idea that someone’s personality of revealed by their fighting style is far from original, but I liked having Hinata mixing the two - getting to know someone and fighting them. It’s what a team is about, after all. And the reason why Hinata feels Naruto’s personality so strongly isn’t that they’re particularly close, but that Naruto’s character is particularly overwhelming and makes her inner Hinata swoon.
It's rather impersonal and distant, but strangely is had some familiarity to it.
Jyuuken.
Hinata is very concentrated on the fight and the movements; she rather likes the flow of it. The speed changes, but there's always a pleasing regularity to it - and after sparring against Shikamaru, Hinata can safely say there is nothing more gnawing on her attention and nerves than irregularity in a fight. Though compared to him, she never had trouble adapting to Kiba's feral style.
Shikamaru’s clever enough to be the first to realise how jarring it is to have an opponent break the flow of the fight. I’ll admit I was also playing at name-dropping through the whole fic.
She's not fighting a person; she's fighting a body, movements and techniques, sidesteps and dashes forward and things she has seen before when she passes through the compound after school.
She's following the pulse, though it drums less soothingly through her than it regulates her opponents, obviously, sometimes her pace is shattered by the clashes of the Academy's taijutsu. This taijutsu has its own music, less subtle and louder than Jyuuken, but it comes hopelessly mangled when it mixes with the Hyuuga clan form - and that is exactly what Hinata is doing.
Music metaphor for a fight. Will I never stop the cliché? Surprisingly, I think it works.
Still, she's long learnt that beginning a move as Jyuuken and ending it in Gouken, with a kick of the heel to finish up, jars her opponents at least as much as it does her, and she's become more used to the lack of harmony than them because it is the way she fights, so ultimately it gains her an advantage, even if it exhausts her, the parallel lines of concentration and instinct she has to switch and which sometimes throw even her when they run ahead of her.
To make an analogy, it would be like starting a sentence in English and ending it in Arabic Braille.
Finally the rhythm comes to a stop.
Hinata takes a breath and lets go of her fighting tunnel vision, the meditative pace of striking, blocking and dodging, and she blinks away the trance.
I apply the concept of tunnel vision to Team Seven and Hinata.
Memory comes back to her; she was fighting Neji-sama. Is the fight done? Hizashi-sama must have been satisfied that the Council had been properly impressed, then.
She blinks again in the utter silence. She slowly realises that every stare is fixed upon her, and blood slowly rises to her cheeks. Why are they all looking at her like that? She was only supposed to be Neji-sama's demonstration partner, that was all! They were never supposed to pay attention to her performance!
The stares are heavily weighing down on her.
She quickly looks down.
All this was never supposed to be misdirection, just reflect Hinata’s thought process.
It takes her a moment to register what she is seeing, in front of her on the ground.
The body.
I strongly debated about the word to use. I didn’t want readers to believe she’d killed him (based on my reaction to such a line, that’s how I would’ve interpreted it), but in the end I did because it felt more natural to first see the body, and then notice the future bruise, unless I wanted to make a longer sentence out of it. Which I didn’t.
Neji-sama.
Out cold, with an angry red mark on the temple that she knows would flourish into a beautiful bruise if unhealed.
That girl takes her training seriously.
"I - er, what?"
"You won," says Hizashi-sama as if in a daze.
Hinata gapes.
"I what?"
"You won," he repeats. He frowns. "You won," he says again as if he was trying to convince himself and not liking the conclusion he's coming up with.
On the one hand, I like this line because it’s funny. On the other, I feel like it’s verging on OOC.
"B-but how?" she splutters. It makes no sense.
She'd believe Sakura has wrapped her in a genjutsu without her realising, but she remembers there was no school today and they don't know enough genjutsu yet to distort someone's time perception, so it's a real memory and there really was no school today, so she isn't sparring against Sakura, so it's not genjutsu.
Yes, I hadn’t mentioned Sakura one single time. And I am aware that there are many, many canonical problems with Sakura using genjutsu when still at the Academy, but as I said before, Hinata sucks at genjutsu, and it makes her slightly warier than the usual student. So she’s exaggerating what Sakura can do.
Hizashi-sama looks almost annoyed now. "He was not expecting it."
Who is Hizashi annoyed at? Everyone. Later, he’ll resent Hinata a bit, but he’s honest enough not to wish her ill because of it. Saying that Neji wasn’t expecting Hinata’s fighting style is as much a blame as it is an excuse; probably more, at least once Hizashi has had time to think.
"Oh." She blinks again.
The Council members are whispering among themselves, but she ignores it. She is trying to find a new axis for her world.
Cheap way to sum up her shock without using the word.
Neji-sama is the genius of the Hyuuga. He was not expecting it. But - how?
Hinata's Jyuuken isn't even second-rate.
It's a self-taught, watered-down version that is at best a distant illegitimate embarrassment of a cousin which borrows moves from even the Inuzuka fighting style and that has been influenced by more than a touch of the Academy's style.
Neji-sama's Jyuuken is so pure that when Hinata is trying to learn a kata from a scroll, she ends up closing her eyes and picturing him, and then she follows the moves.
I’m happy with these sentences.
…Oh.
Oh.
Originally there was a ‘Wow’ there but it was OOC and thus got scrapped. But until the last minute it was there. Finally I decided either I’d made my point well enough and the ‘Wow’ wasn’t needed, either I’d failed and the OOCness would’ve jarred the reader out of the story on top of him/her being confused with what I wanted to say. To be fair, the ‘Wow’ I had in mind was a sort of disbelieving Wow, but speech-tone doesn’t actually translate to writing, and it could all too easily be taken to mean ‘Wow I’m so great’.
Hinata is struck dumb by the realisation. Around her there's starting to be some noise - arguments, she distractedly hears - but that's not what she cares about.
All she can think of is how the people at the Academy will react when she tells them about it.
Hinata’s family? The Academy. Rereading this, I realise this sounds like Hinata will be taking pride in her victory, when actually I pictured her more sharing her discovery with her friends. However, as explaining it would have made the sentence longer, and this is the last sentence of the fic…