“NANI!” Naruto yelled before rushing over to bang on the door. He could hear Sora laughing outside the door.
“I suggest just working on getting a conversation going and then talking about committing yourself to a partnership,” she giggled.
“What the hell! You said this was an exercise to help us decide whether or not we would make good partners!”
“This is it. It’s my special ‘locking-the-two-of-you-in-a-room-together- and-forcing-you-to-talk-it-out’ method. Have fun!” There were a few more giggles and then he could hear Yasu and Sora walking away.
“Why you little...!!!” Naruto’s scream could be heard all over the house.
“Would you like to play some poker?” Sora asked Yasu.
“Like I would be stupid enough to play poker with you.”
The sound of their voices faded away. Slowly, Naruto turned to look back at Hinata. She was standing in the center of the room looking shocked.
His face scrunched up and he started trying to force the door open again. “Damn it!” he yelled. “They must have put some sort of seal on it.” He turned around and looked at Hinata. “Can you...?”
She shook her head. “I don’t remember any room seals. At least, none that seal us in and let sound through.”
“You mean we’re stuck in here?” Naruto said in disbelief.
Hinata bit her lip and looked down at the floor, as if she was responsible for their predicament. She wanted to be able to do anything he asked of her, but she just didn’t know what was going on.
Suddenly Naruto was there next to her. “Neh, neh. Don’t worry, Hinata- chan, we’ll get out.” He patted her awkwardly on the back while she stared at him in shock. Then he walked over to inspect the door again.
She watched him from across the room. “Is it really that bad?” Her voice was so quite he could barely hear her.
“Huh?” he said, twisting around to look at her over his shoulder.
She was standing in a sunny patch of light from the window, her head still tilted down and her bangs obscuring her eyes. “Is it that bad...to spend a day locked in here...with me?”
A puzzled look came over Naruto’s face. “She locked us in here! Right when I thought we were going to learn something cool!”
“But,” she tilted her face up just enough to look at him. “But being locked in with...with me. That doesn’t make you mad?”
“No, why should it? Come on and help me look for a week spot in this seal.” Fire might do the trick. First he would try burning the wall of the room and see if that broke the seal.
But just as he was about to start, Hinata’s voice stopped him.
“Naruto-kun?” He turned to look at her again. “If- if being in here doesn’t bother you. Could we...could we try to do what Sora asked?”
“Huh?”
“Could we...stay in here and, and try to talk out the partnership?”
Naruto stopped. This hadn’t really occurred to him. He was so mad at Sora that it hadn’t entered his mind to go along with what she had suggested.
“I mean,” Hinata continued. “We have to come up with an answer anyway, so I just thought that maybe...that we could try...” Her voice trailed off.
Naruto stared at her. She looked back down at her feet.
She shouldn’t have said anything. She should have simply gone along with him and helped break out of the room. But she liked the idea of talking it through and she was worried that Naruto would just accept the idea of partner training automatically because it was going to make him stronger. She was already locked into a family for life; she wasn’t sure if she wanted to be locked in partnership with Naruto. She wasn’t sure if her heart would be able to take it.
Naruto didn’t understand any of this. He was locked in a room with Hinata and she wanted to stay there and talk about this partnership thing. Well, if that’s how she wanted to do it....
“All right,” he said, walking across the room to the closet. Hinata looked up at him in surprise as he opened the door to the closet. “Did they at least leave us some cushions to sit on? And ramen, I could really go for some ramen. Hey look!” He grinned and pulled out an electric kettle. “We have hot water and tea and RAMEN! We’re all set!”
Hinata blinked at him a few times and then numbly took the kettle from his hands and went to fill it in the bathroom. Returning, she saw that Naruto had put out cushions against the wall and was trying to pick out what type of ramen he wanted. He was still reeling from finally having some again after weeks of being out. “Hinata?” he asked, startling her.
“Hai?”
“Which do you think: chicken or miso?” he asked, holding the two cups out in front of him.
“Ano...I like miso,” she said quietly.
“Cool. I’ll have the chicken then and if you get hungry later you can have the miso.”
Naruto was sharing his ramen? She was starting to wonder if the joke was all on her and this was some sort of fake Naruto.
“So,” Naruto said, plopping down on one of the cushions and waited for the hot water to boil. “What do you want to talk about?”
Carefully, Hinata lowered herself onto a cushion next to him. “We’re supposed to talk about the partnership.”
Naruto suddenly remembered everything that Sora and Yasu had been telling them. “I think it’s a great idea! It’s going to make us stronger, right? So we get partner trained and then we go back and wow everybody.”
“But Naruto-kun, it means that we would be stuck together forever.”
“So? How is that different from what’s going to happen anyway?” Suddenly his face darkened. “Hinata-chan, did you think that...when we went back to Leaf...were you going to stop...”
“NO!” she said, with far more conviction in her voice than Naruto had ever heard before. It sent warm feeling throughout his heart to know that she was that sure.... Although he didn’t know why....
“No, Naruto-kun, it’s not that, please don’t think...” She stopped and took a deep breath. “No, I always want to be your friend,” she said quietly. She wanted to more than his friend, but she couldn’t tell him that.
“Then let’s do the partner training,” he said.
“But, Naruto...my clan...”
“What about your clan?”
She took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. She kept her eyes squeezed shut. “My clan is very...traditional. They would not, would not take this well.” She looked up at him, eyes glassy. “I don’t want you to be, to be...I don’t want you to have to deal with their anger!” she said desperately.
He looked at her with disbelief. “They wouldn’t want you to become stronger? But you’re the heir! Don’t they want you to?”
“Yes, but...there are specific ways you are supposed to be strong. This isn’t the way I’m supposed to do it!”
He shook his head. “I don’t get the Hyuuga Clan,” he said, pouring the hot water into his ramen and her teapot. Suddenly his eyes went wide and he slammed the kettle down on the floor with a wide grin on his face.
“Neh, neh, I know! You can explain the Hyuuga to me!” He beamed at her as if it was the best idea anyone had ever thought of.
“Pardon...?” Hinata whispered in shock.
“Yeah, yeah, see I already told Neji that I would change the Hyuuga when I became Hokage because of that seal thing. And Nee-chan keeps complaining that I charge into situations without fully getting them. But, you get them, so if you’ll explain them to me, we’ll change them.”
“Change them?”
“The Hyuuga” he said happily. “Once I’m Hokage and you’re the head of the clan, we can make them change.” He opened the top of his ramen and blew on it before diving in. “So, what’s it like being a Hyuuga?”
She poured tea into her cup and brought her knees up to her chest. “Well, we all live in a big house together.”
“Even Neji?” he asked, his mouth full.
She smiled at the sight of him looking at her with noodles hanging out of his mouth. “Even Neji. One clan, one roof, as my father likes to say.”
“And your mother?”
A pained look crept into Hinata’s eyes. “She died shortly after Hanabi was born. She caught a fever.”
Naruto looked down at his ramen, unsure of what to say. “I’m sorry.”
Hinata smiled thinly. “Don’t be. These things happen. I have a few memories of her. She used to call me Hina-chan.” She looked over at him. “What about your parents? I’ve never heard anything about them either.”
“That’s..... because no one knows who they were.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, confused and suddenly worried.
Naruto shrugged and launched into the story he had been told as a child. “I was found after the Kyubi had nearly destroyed the village. They don’t know where I came from, so they just put me in the orphanage and hoped that someone would come for me. No one ever did.”
Hinata looked horrified. “That’s terrible!”
Again, he shrugged. It was worse than she realized. All anyone really knew was that the Fourth had walked out of the battle carrying Naruto in his arms. The plan of sealing the Kyubi inside a child had been explained to a select few, but no one knew where the baby in question had come from had come from. All that Yondaime had said was that it would be an orphan.
At least that’s what Jiraya told him. As the Fourth’s sensei he probably knew everything. So, no one really knew anything. He was just a boy with a Kyubi sealed inside him and no past. But he was determined to have a future.
He glanced over to see Hinata still staring at him. “Like you said, these things happen. Besides, now I’ve got all sorts of people who matter. Ikura-sensei, Kakashi-sensei, Sakura-chan, Sasuke, Ero-Sennin, Obaa-chan, Nee-chan and you. I’m fine.” He grinned.
But what had he done before? She had been watching him for years and she knew that up until a year and a half ago, he had been a loner. She had always presumed that it had been by choice; she would have given anything to have less family. But now, after having experienced a different sort of family feeling with Sora and Naruto... now she wasn’t so sure.
“What was it like before?” she asked softly.
“Before what?” we asked, trying to dodge the question.
“Before all of us.”
“Ah, well you know. It was dark.” He scratched his head, then shook it. “But it doesn’t matter now. That’s all over.” He continued to stare at his feet.
She should have offered her friendship sooner. She shouldn’t have waited for fate to force them together. All of those years when she had stood passively by, watching him from afar, it never occurred to her that he might be hurting because she didn’t.
She reached out her arm, hesitated, then forced herself to complete the gesture and lay her hand on his shoulder. He looked up at her and she could see the pain in his eyes, as much as he tried to hide it. She swallowed. “You’re right. That’s all over.”
He stared at her for a second and then broke out into a smile. He reached up to grab her hand on his shoulder. “Arigato, Hinata-chan.”
She smiled shyly, then pulled her hand out from under his and settled herself back in on her cushion. There was a long and awkward pause, both of them unsure what they should say.
“Ano, you were going to tell me about the Hyuuga, right?”
“Umm, yeah so when I was little because I was the heir, I learned fighting from my father and traditional arts from my mother.”
They kept talking, working through their
childhoods and years at the academy. Naruto knew almost nothing
about her history, but he was surprised by the number of his
pranks that she could remember. Soon the stack of empty ramen
cups at Naruto’s feet had grown almost a foot tall and Hinata
had two of her own sitting next to her. The light coming in
through the high window began to redden and then faded, but they
didn’t notice. They had never gotten to tell any of this before
and the time seemed to slide past.
“Not a bad view, huh?” Sora smiled and took a sip of her sake.
They were lounging in the bath watching the sky turn colors. The sun was actually setting behind them on the other side of the mountain, but the sky was still lovely. From their position at the very top of the house they could see the valleys and rivers sparkle in the setting sun.
Sora sighed and sunk deeper into the water. “Nanashi was a genius for putting a bath up here.”
“I agree.” She smiled. “So, am I going to have to beat it out of you?”
“Beat it out of me?”
“Why you took those two on. And don’t give me some crap about how Tsunade asked you to. We both know that’s not the reason.”
“Well, Hinata reminded me a bit of myself, so I decided to rescue her from her father and take her away to get properly trained.”
“That’s a lie and was both know it! Goddamn it, Sora why won’t you tell me?”
Sora just smiled slightly. “You never would have yelled like that five years ago. Back in the days of the Ice Queen.”
Yasu sighed. “That was before I fell in love.”
“Does it really make that much of a difference?”
“Nori gave me an option I never even knew I wanted. I like being a wife and mother.”
“I just can’t believe you’re a farmer of all things.”
Yasu laughed. “I admit it’s not the first thing I would like to do, but for Nori and Miki I don’t think there is anything I wouldn’t.”
Sora sighed wistfully. “And I suppose that makes all the difference in the world.” She drifted across the pool to rest her arm on the far edge.
Yasu shook her head. “You’re not going to tell me why you took them on, are you?”
Sora looked over her shoulder and grinned at her. “Nope.”
“But they’re good reasons?”
“Very good.”
She sighed. “All right then, I’ll butt out. Just know that I’m dying of curiosity.” She smiled. “In any case, I’m glad you did.”
Sora laughed. “Really?”
“I worried about you up here all alone. I mean, your partner and the closest thing you have to a brother ran off with each other and decided not to live up here with you.”
Sora sorted. “I wouldn’t exactly say you ran off with each other. Otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten stuffed into that god awful bridesmaid dress.” Yasu glared at hell and she rolled her eyes. “Seriously, I’m fine. How many times do I have to say that I’m happy that you and Nori got married.”
“I know you are. But I’m glad you let others in. You’d gotten colder over the past few year, wandering about by yourself. They seem to be warming you back up again.”
“I’d gotten cold! This coming from the former Ice Queen.”
Yasu quirked an eyebrow at her and then pushed herself up out of the water. “Come on, we should probably get those two some dinner.”
“Aw, look how sweet her mothering instincts are,” Sora said as she followed suite. “The former Ice Queen, worried about making sure that everyone is fed and tucked away in their beds at a decent hour. Such a fine upstanding member of the community.” She laughed as Yasu threw a towel at her.
“Fine upstanding member of the community or not I can still kick your ass.”
Sora grinned. They hadn’t fought each other with anything close to full force since Miki was born; they were simply too bad at making sure neither walked away injured. In fact, in a full out battle they didn’t know who would win. But the threat of kicking each other’s butt was traditional.
“I’m ready whenever you are.”
“You fell in front of all those people?”
Hinata blushed and nodded. “I tripped on the hem of my kimono and landed face first on the ground. Worse, I was carrying the tea tray. I spilt tea all over the dignitaries.” Her father had been incredibly angry at her, to mess up such an important meeting.
“What did you do?”
“I just lay there on the ground, looking at what I had done until I came to my senses and started trying to pick up the pieces of the cups. Father then ordered me back to my room.” He never failed to bring it up whenever she failed something. If she couldn’t even serve tea properly, how could they expect her to do anything? It always stung.
“Man I wouldn’t want to be a Hyuuga. It’s all rules, rules, rules.”
Hinata stared at him. She supposed it was all rules, rules, rules.
There was a knock on the door and then it slid open. “Hello!” Sora beamed. “And how are you two doing?”
Naruto jumped up off the floor, ruining the quiet rapport he had established with Hinata. “Why the hell did you lock us in here?”
Sora waved him off with a swish of her hand and set the tray and drawstring bag she was carrying down on the floor. “Quit yapping. You’re supposed to be talking to her not me,” she said, pointing at Hinata who blushed.
“I have been talking to her, but you don’t have to lock us in a room to get us to do that!” Hinata’s blush deepened.
Sora shrugged. “What can I say? It’s tradition.”
“Keh, like you care anything about tradition!”
She pressed her hand to her chest. “Why Naruto-kun, I am wounded that you would think such a thing of me.” She grinned. “Enjoy your dinner, kids. I’ll come and let you out in the morning.” And she slammed and sealed the door.
Naruto dropped back down onto cushion, arms crossed across his chest. “She’s the most annoying person I’ve ever...” he muttered.
Hinata just smiled and moved to take the
covers off of their dinner.
The only light in the room was the dim light of the moon shining in through the window. They had found their pajamas and toothbrushes in the drawstring bag and taken turns in the bathroom. Now they were tucked away on their futons a few feet away from each other, but they hadn’t said goodnight.
They hadn’t talked about the partnership yet.
All of a sudden Naruto, who had been so gung ho about the idea of the partnership at first, was plagued by doubts. Hinata didn’t know about the demon inside him, but her father did. And a man who called her a disappointment to the clan whenever she made the smallest mistake would surely have some choice words to say about him partnering with him. Staring up at the ceiling all he could think about was that he didn’t want Hinata to be hurt because her family couldn’t stand him. He never wanted anything to hurt her.
He watched the shadows on the ceiling and thought about the girl lying a few feet away. The way he felt about her was different than the way he felt about Sakura, he realized. With Sakura, most of the time he just wanted to impress her. Hinata brought up many more emotions in him, some of which he wasn’t even able to begin to identify.
She deserved to know. She deserved to know about Kyubi, about why all the adults hated him. If she knew...he didn’t know what she would do. He had never told anyone about Kyubi. No, he couldn’t tell her, he couldn’t risk losing her friendship. Obaa-chan had told him you shouldn’t gamble with things that were important to you and his friendship with Hinata was too precious to lose.
So, he would have refuse the partner training and just get stronger on his own. Even with friends, there were some things he had to do alone.
He opened his mouth to tell her, when her voice cut through the darkness.
“Naruto-kun? I, I think we should do it.” Her voice was soft and it sent a shiver down his spine. “I mean, I, I know that my family is going to be mad, but then again, they’re always mad.” She laughed softly at herself. She was going to get this out if it killed her.
“My family has been...telling me who I should be. But, but I’m not. Not who they want me to be. So I thought maybe, I should try being me. And I like the idea of being your partner.” And hopefully, he wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire between her and her family when they returned home.
Naruto turned on his side to look at her. He could just make out her form in the dim light, a big fluffy blanket with a small girl curled inside.
“No, we can’t,” he said.
Hinata sat up in bed. “But, but you said that we could go back to Leaf and wow everyone together and that...”
He forced a cheerful tone into his voice. “We can get stronger without being partners, right? We can just keep training the way we have and still wow them.”
Tears began to run down her face. “I know there’s probably someone better, someone stronger but, I just thought that maybe, see I’m here and...I just thought that you wanted to...” She breathed in hard and tried to stop her tears. “You’re right. There is probably someone better than me. We’ll just keep going on the way we have.”
He was out of bed and by her side in a second. Shit, was that what she thought? “No, wait, Hinata-chan. I didn’t mean it in that way. You have nothing to do with why we shouldn’t be partners.”
She tried to dry her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Then what is it?”
He looked down at his knees, hands clenched together. “You know all the adults hate me. Your father would be furious and I don’t want to see him hate you because of me.”
Suddenly she launched herself at him, wrapping her arms around his waist and burying her face in his chest. “I don’t care! I don’t know why they feel the way they do, but I...” Her voice started to break up as she started to cry harder.
“Hinata-chan,” Naruto breathed, not quite sure what to do. Tentatively, he rested his hands on her back, then wrapped his arms around her and held her close.
She had let him be lonely for years because she was too frightened. Too frightened that he might not want to be her friend. Too frightened to go against her father. Too frightened that she might mess up. Looking back on her life, all of the times when she was most proud of herself, when she had stood up at the gennin exam, when she had kept climbing the tree, he had been there with her.
Where she once had been unsure that the partnership was the right thing, she now realized that it was the only way to go. Her inaction had kept them from being friends in the past and they had paid the price. She didn’t want that to happen again.
Naruto looked down at the girl in his arms. He had never had a girl in his arms before, much less a crying one. But if not being partners with him was making her so sad...
If he didn’t tell her about the Kyubi, when they returned to Hidden Leaf and her father asked her about it, she could honestly say she didn’t know. Then wouldn’t be to blame, would she? He would be the one everyone got mad at and that he was used to.
“Hey, Hina-chan...”
She pulled back slightly and looked up at him, startled by the use of her mother’s old nickname.
He grinned at her. “Partners?” he asked.
Her eyes widened a bit and moved the rest of the way out of his arms. “You mean it?”
“Yeah, yeah. You convinced me. It’ll be more fun to kick everybody’s ass with you.”
He grinned again and stuck out his hand. “So what do you say?”
She smiled back and slipped her hand into his.
“Partners.” .
Author’s Notes: Fluffy, no? Thank you so much
for your reviews! I am currently trying to decide between two
possible routes for this story. One is to keep it as a
stand-alone romance between Naruto and Hinata. The other is to
expand it into a three-fic story that would take the reader all
the way through the defeat of the bad guys. The divergence would
come soon; so if you have an opinion, let me know. My email is
dame(underscore)catherineyahoo.com . Thanks!!!
This site is published by Samizdat Express, Orange, CT
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