Sora had finally decided to take the two of them off the mountain, even if it wasn’t to civilization.
“I’ve got to make sure both of you can spin properly before I hand you over to Nori. So we’re going to go diving.”
“Diving?” Hinata had questioned.
“Mmmhmm. I know a great place we can practice diving so that ya’ll can get the hang of spinning around.”
“But it’s October!”
Sora shrugged. “So you’ll have to use chakra to keep yourselves warm. It’s good training.”
It was decided that Naruto would be able to get by in his boxer shorts, but Hinata was not about to go swimming in her underwear. She was wholly unconvinced that swimming was a good idea anyway. But, no matter how much Naruto protested, Sora would not be swayed. She had to teach them how to dive.
Unfortunately, Hinata’s lack of swimsuit meant that Sora was up in one of the storage rooms looking through her old clothes, declaring that she probably has an old bathing suit she could wear.
Hinta’s mind kept returning to the picture of Sora in the lace up dress and her stomach turned uncomfortably.
“Ano, Onee-chan? Are you, are your sure you want to...” Her voice trailed off.
Sora looked up from where she was digging through one of the boxes. “Geez Hinata, you haven’t sounded like that in months. Is something wrong?”
“Ano, no, it’s just that-“
“Ah HA! Here’s one!” Sora pulled out a handful of black scraps and tossed them to Hinata. “Go try that one on, I know I another one around her somewhere.” She moved to open another box.
Hinata tentatively took the swimsuit down to her room. Pulling a screen into one corner, she slipped off her clothes and pulled on the bathing suit. It had two pieces, neither of which had much fabric in them. The top tied in the front and seemed to push her breast up and together. The very small bottoms tied together on the sides.
One little tug and the whole thing would be off. She would have to use chakra just to keep the suit on, plus more to keep herself from getting hypothermia.
There was a loud knock on the door and then it slid open without waiting for a response. “Ne, Hina-chan, how’s the search for the swimsuit going?”
Hinata backed herself up against the wall behind the wall. What on earth was he doing here? “Na, Naruto-kun...”
“Do you have one on now?”
She blushed bright red. “Hai, demo...”
“Really?” And suddenly Naruto’s head peaked around the edge of the screen.
Hinata’s eyes went wide her blush deepened, her mouth opened in a gasp. Naruto had simply frozen. It hadn’t occurred to him that she would have on anything but a one piece swimsuit. That...was not a one piece suit. Wow. He hadn’t realized she had such nice-
Instantly sever embarrassment set in on both of them. Hinata began screaming while frantically trying to cover herself with her hands. Naruto was yelling “Ahhhh, So.. I mean, I’m sorry!” While he waved his arms around in front of him. Unfortunate this resulted in him hitting the screen with his arm, causing it to topple over. This coincided with Sora slamming the door open and walking into the room.
“Hey, Hinata-chan I’ve found two more,” she said holding up a suit in each hand. “Oh, that one looks nice though.”
Hinata looked at the suits in Sora’s hands. One was leopard print. The other seemed to be a mass of straps with metal rings. She looked down at herself and then over at Naruto who was still staring at her with wide eyes.
She squeezed her eyes shut. “NO!” she yelled.
Sora’s eyes sparkled. “No what?” she asked.
“It’s ridiculous for us to go diving this time of year! We’re going to use up way too much of our chakra just keeping warm, plus I’m going to have to use more chakra to keep these suits on. Surely there is another way for us to learn the summersaulting!”
Sora leaned up against the doorframe and grinned from ear to ear. “Phew! I thought I might have to haul you all the way down to the river before you said no.”
“Huh?” Naruto and Hinata said at the same time.
Sora laughed softly. They were starting to rub off on each other. “You need to learn how to stand up for yourself and your opinions. Naruto will always train, no matter how stupid the circumstances. You need to learn to think for yourself and not just agree with what he says.”
“But I don’t-“
“Oh you’ll give your opinion, abet hesitantly, if someone asks you. But actually protesting something?” She shook her head. “Not your thing.”
Hinata stared at her. “So you threatened to make me go swimming in October in one of your old bathing suits?”
“Not swimming, diving. Trust me its worse. With swimming you’re in the water all the time. Diving you’re in and out of the water. Plus from the heights were talking about, the water feels hard.” She kept smiling.
Hinata just stared.
“Eh? That’s not very nice!!!” Naruto yelled, pointing at Sora. “What are you complaining about? You got see her in one of my skimpy swimsuits!”
A fresh wave of shock set in. They both turned bright red.
Sora was biting the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. “But I suppose that’s nothing special.” She pushed the swimsuits into one of her coat pockets, then quickly pulled out a camera and snapped a picture of the two again. “After all, this will be preserved in time forever.” She giggled and started snapping more pictures as the pair slowly starts to recover.
Hinata starts to move to grab the camera, realizes that she is still in the swimsuit and turns to move towards the closet where her robe it. This unfortunately brings her right into Naruto’s path; they both collide and fall together onto the screen.
They struggle to get up while Sora howls with laughter and snapped more pictures. They were only able to recover their feet as Sora finished off the roll. By the time they made it to the door she was gone.
“Oh no,” Hinata whispered. “If those pictures
ever get off this mountain, my father is going to kill me.”
“One handed seals,” Sora said.
Naruto looked up at her, ramen noodles hanging out of the corner of his mouth. “One handed seals?”
“That’s what we’re going to work on today: one handed seals. You two have enough theory now to get them plus it will make your time with Yasu far more productive.”
“What do you mean one handed seals?” Hinata asked from across the table.
“Like the ones Naruto saw done in Wave Country. They’re a bitch to learn, let me tell you. But it makes a lot of things quicker.”
“The ones Haku did?” Naurto asked. He whooped with joy when Sora nodded. “All right! This it going to kick ass!”
Sora smiled at his enthusiasm. “OK, kids pop quiz time. Why do we do seals?”
Naruto rolls his eyes. “That’s academy stuff. You use seals to mold chakra into patterns so that you can use it in jutsus.”
“We control chakra without using seals all the time. Why bother with them?”
Naruto snorted. “Easy. Seals automatically mold chakra in really complicated ways. Its possible to mold chakra from jutsu’s on your own without the seals, but it would be really hard and take really long.”
It was a simplification, of course, but basically he had the idea right. Sora decides to continue. “Then, starting from there, what could one handed seals be for?”
They sat there trying to puzzle it out. “More ways to mold chakra?” Hinata asked.
“Bingo. Either of you play piano?” They shook their heads. “Well tough cause this is the only metaphor I know for one handed seals.”
“Eh? But I just said I don’t play piano! How am I supposed to get it?”
“Deal, Naruto, it isn’t that hard. Now on a piano you have white keys and black keys. With me so far?” They nodded. “Now the distance between two white keys is generally a whole step. Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do.” She quickly sang a scale up. “That is a major scale. However if you include the black keys on the piano, you get a chromatic scale.” She sang the scale again. “Now the one handed seals are like the black notes. They’re sort of stuck in between the regular seals.”
They stared at her blankly. She put her head down on the table. It must not work very well if you didn’t know music. Damn it how could she explain this to them?
“So,” Hinata said hesitantly. “They’re like secondary colors. We’ve been using primary colors like red, blue and green and now you’re going to teach us secondary colors?”
Sora slapped her hand on the table. “Yes! That’s not quite how I was thinking about it, but it’ll work. So when you have more colors/notes you can create more paintings/melodies.”
The two women grinned at each other. Naruto looked back and forth between the two of them. “So they’re new seals so that we can do more things.”
“Well if you want to really simplify it,” Sora said.
He pumped one of his fists into the air. “All right! New seals to do new things! When do we start?”
“Right after breakfast.”
And sure enough the three of them were outside in the courtyard practicing the ‘half seals’ as soon as the dishes had been washed clean with the special jutsu. It was, as Sora had said, extremely hard. With music, the notes seemed almost naturally there; half seals were something you had to search for and they were not always easy to find.
Once you found them though, they got easier to locate with each try. By the time the day was almost over they had found three as were able to use the first with decent regularity.
At dusk, Naruto excused himself to use the restroom. Sora dismissed him with a wave of her hand and kept trying to teach Hinata half ram.
He ran up to his room to grab a bag of supplies before walking silently down the hall to the door to Sora’s room. Being a partner meant looking out for each other, right? He knew Hinata was terrified that the pictures of the two of them on the floor were going to somehow get off the mountain. So he would simply go into Sora’s room and get the roll of film for her.
Although part of him didn’t want to see the pictures destroyed...
He shook his head and concentrated on the task at hand. There was a ward on Sora’s room but it was only a light one. She probably would put a more formidable one on once she had found out what he had done, but that would be too late. He would have gotten that roll of film she had taken of Hinata in the bikini. And all the pictures of her ex-boyfriends. And any other embarrassing ones he could find. And he would have accomplished a few more interesting little pranks on her.
He slowly undid the ward and slid into the room. He started. It was red. A large bed covered in bright green material took up a huge chunk of floorspace along with an enourmous desk. Somehow he was not surprised. There was also a large bookcase which what looked like photo albums lining the bottom two shelves.
Naruto grinned and was heading right for them when something on the desk caught his eye. It was a framed copy of the picture Sora had taken a month after they had gotten here, the three of them sitting on the countertop in their pajamas. He was surprised to find it on her desk when there was another copy downstairs on the living room table. He knew it had to mean something, he just wasn’t sure what.
Putting that picture back on the desk, he picked up another one. It was Nanashi and Sora standing together in a forest, Nanashi obviously trying to explain something to Sora, bending down to look her in the eye. Sora just looked confused. Naruto smiled and put the photo back.
Then another picture caught his eye. Nestled between a photo of Yasu’s wedding and Miki crawling on the rug was a photo of Sora a little but older than the others, probably nine or ten. The photo was obviously taken by someone standing above her and she had turned her head up to smile into the camera. There was joy on her face and she was holding something up in here arms. He realized it was a tiny baby, probably just a few hours old. He squinted at the photo. Did that baby have...
No, that was impossible.
But then he saw another picture and his heard stopped. Letting the one of Sora clatter onto the desktop, he picked up the photo with trembling hands. It was Nanashi, obviously exhausted but beaming at the camera. In her arms was the baby and sitting next to her was Sora. But on her other side...
There was a man and a boy. The man sat half behind her half beside her, arms wrapped around her and the baby while he grinned from ear to ear, his blond hair shooting out in all directions. Standing on the ground next to him was a boy, slouching slightly, with his hands thrust deep in his pockets. Despite the fact that he was probably no older than 13 or 14, his hair was gray and both of his eyes looked sleepy from where they peaked out from over his face mask.
He had two normal eyes, but there couldn’t be any doubt as to who the boy was, nor the man holding onto Nanashi. But the baby...
He grabbed the other picture and looked once again at the baby’s face. There they were, three dark lines slashing down either cheek.
His mind was overloaded. Somewhere in these pictures were the answers to questions he had long ago stopped believing there were answers to. Frantically he tried to figure out how these two pieces could fit into the puzzle, but each bit of information didn’t seem to quite fit.
He put the pictures down to look through the other frames on her desk. Nothing. They were all pictures of Yasu and her family. There were no more with the baby.
He let out a noise that sounded almost like a growl. This all fit together somehow.
Then he looked down at the picture of Sora and the baby. His eyes narrowed. She knew he realized. She knew what this was all about: the pictures were in her room. That was her teacher.
Anger started to bubble up in him. She had to know the truth and yet she had kept it from him. He had been here for almost eight months and yet she had never even hinted that she knew anything about his past. The lines on the side of his face began to widen.
He snatched up the pictures and swept out of the room. She would still be in the courtyard practicing with Hinata. She would tell him everything. He would make her tell him.
The door to the house slammed open, causing both the women to turn and look. Their eyes widened. His anger was almost palpable, rolling off of him. He came charging down the stairs at them.
“Naruto what’s wrong?” Sora asked as Hinata took a step backwards, whispering his name softly.
Naruto thrust the group picture into Sora’s
face and watched her pale. He was breathing hard and his word
came in gasps. “You, Nanashi, the Fourth, Kakashi and... ME!!”
he said. “What the HELL is going on?!”
This site is published by Samizdat Express, Orange, CT
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