Authors Notes: It has become rather painstakingly clear to me that I need a beta reader. The problem with betas and me is that if you leave the chapter with me too long, I start adding and changing things around which, while not reducing the number of errors, renders the betaed version useless. So, if there is anyone out there interested in beta reading this for me and can get it back for me within a day or so from when I give it too them, I would be eternally grateful.
Thanks to Lady Onuk who let me know that somehow the corrected version of chapter one was mysteriously not posted. If that was bitching, then I’m glad you bitched.
Also Manga-lover123 asked me where the name
Nanashi came from. I picked it for it’s meaning, which is ‘no
name.’
They were walking along the road, Sora in front Naruto and Hinata trailing behind, when suddenly Sora turned off the road and went into the trees. Naruto and Hinata looked up from where Hinata had been trying to explain, unsuccessfully, how she pushed her chakra out of her hands.
“This way, you two,” Sora called out from the trees. They looked at each other and then followed their teacher into the forest.
“Ano, Onee-chan?” Hinata called out.
She started as Sora’s voice came from behind her. “Hinata-chan, do you start every question with ‘ano’?
Hinata blushed. “Ano, why-“ She stopped herself as she realized that what she had said.
Sora laughed, but it was a kind laugh that invited Hinata to join in. “Why?” she prompted.
Hinata swallowed. “Why did we leave the road?”
Sora smiled. “This is the way to my house. The next village is a few more hours down the road, but it will take less time to get home if we just go directly. From here on out, we can go ahead and use speed. Depending on how fast ya’ll can run, we should be there by the end of the day. ”
Naruto for one was relieved. Sora had been forcing them to walk along ‘like normal people’ for the past five days, claiming that it was essential to keeping the three out them ‘under the radar.’ It was almost painful for Naruto to travel this slow.
Jumping up into a tree, Sora looked down at them. “You two coming?”
The followed her up into the trees and across the forest, farther away from the road and further up into the mountains. The scenery flashed by as they jumped from tree to tree, blurring greens and brown together.
Suddenly, they stopped near the base of one of the mountains next to a broad cliffbase. “Here we are,” Sora said. She started to take her gloves off, puling back the Velcro straps around her wrist and tugging them off with the teeth.
Naruto looked left and right, even behind him, in confusion before turning back to Sora. “Huh? There’s nothing here.”
“That’s because you just don’t know where to look,” Sora said with a smile. Shoving her gloves into the pocket of her jacket, she walked up to the side of cliff and started walking along it, looking up and down as if she was trying to find something on the face of the cliff. Suddenly she stopped and faced the wall. Stretching her arm up over her head, she shook her shoulders out quickly. Then she brought her hands together and started running through a long series of hand seals. Suddenly she stopped and started drawing symbols down the face of the cliff, beginning just above her head and ending at her waist. Naruto and Hinata watched in astonishment as her fingers left a trail of glowing purple behind it. Sora quickly pressed her hands together, made two quick seals and slammed her palms into the wall on either side of the line.
A door sized portion of the rock began to move backward into the cliff face, as if Sora was pushing it. Then it suddenly swung to the side, revealing an opening into the side of the mountain. Sora dusted off her hands and went inside.
Naruto stared at the entrance, then looked at Hinata to see if she knew what to make of it. “Hello? Is it just me or are ya’ll unusually slow today?”
“Hey!” Naruto yelled and stomped off into the hole, Hinata trailing behind. “What the hell do you mean slow” he said, then started as the rock slid shut behind them. Naruto heard Hinata take a sharp breath behind him. “Hey! What’s going-”
He was cut off by lights flickering on. Exposed bulbs overhead buzzed in the sudden quiet of the cave. Sora smiled. “Welcome home!” she said. Turning, she started to walk up a seemingly endless flight of stairs.
“Ano, Onee-chan, when you said you lived in the mountains, I didn’t think...”
“Hinata, we really need to work on the number of times you say ‘ano.’ In any case I don’t live in the mountain. I live on it. But this is the only way up.”
Naruto looked around at the stone walls. “Why would anyone build a house like this?”
“For security. As I said, the only way up is through this passage; the area around the house is rather cliffy. It’s a nearly impossible position to attach on mass. But the main thing is that because there is no path leading up to a house, no one looks for a house.”
“Huh?” Naruto said.
“The house is surrounded protected by an illusion. Unless you know it is there and what it looks like, you can’t see it. Add to that the fact that most of the house isn’t even visible from the ground.”
“An- why did you build a house with so much security.”
Sora smiled at the bitten off ‘ano.’ “I didn’t build it my first teacher did. She said that if you were going to call something hidden, might as well actually make it hidden.” She was grateful that it was Hinata asking these questions and not Naruto. She told herself that when she had to address questions about Nanashi-sensei, she would simply answer them and not swerve. However, she was finding it harder to do then she expected.
Hinata was puzzled. Things were very rarely given the word hidden as part of their name unless they were the capital of a country. “What’s the name of the house?”
“Generally, it’s referred to as ‘Sora’s house.’” She turned to look at them over her shoulder and grinned. Hinata swore she saw pain in her eyes, but she couldn’t be completely sure. “Her plans never really materialized. Originally this was going to be the base for a new group of ninjas.”
“Nani? A new group of ninja’s?” Naruto asked.
Sora nodded. “She didn’t agree with the way the villages were being run. She hoped that by founding her own, she would be able to change things.”
“What sort of things?” Hinata asked.
Sora shook her head. “It’s not really important. She was never able to start up the group.”
“Why not?” Hinata asked.
Sora’s eyes clouded in sadness. “She died young.”
“How did she die?”
Sora again shook her head. “Look. I will never lie to either of you. You have to be able to trust me in order for me to teach you. However, there are some things I either can’t or won’t tell you. Those you have to simply let go.”
Hinata and Naruto were startled by her response. It was so straightforward and serious that it almost seemed out of character. Perhaps that was the reason they accepted it so easily.
They followed another curve in the stairwell and suddenly had their eyes filled with sunlight. Climbing up the last few steps into the open.
They seemed to be on some sort of plateau. They had emerged in the middle of a small field covered in low grasses. The field sloped upwards gently, dotted with trees until it reached the house. Hinata and Naruto stopped and looked in amazement.
The house was built into a tall wide crevice in the face of the mountain. Three sides pressed up against the mountain wall with the fourth spilling out in a series of terraces. It was a traditional house with wide covered porches and green tile roofs. There was nothing ornate or fancy about it, but it was huge, rising at least four stories into the air.
“That’s your house?!” Naruto yelled.
Sora looked at him ironically. “I told you a whole group of ninjas were supposed to live here. She built it for 150 people.” She snickered. “If you think the house is impressive, check out the view behind you.”
Naruto and Hinata turned and gasped. It was spectacular. To either side of them were the mountains, rising to snow covered peaks. In front of them was the valley, laying out a patchwork of farmland as far as the eye could see.
“Wow!” yelled Naturo, running towards the edge of the field. Looking over the edge he realized that it simply dropped off. They were on a plateau at the top of the cliff. There were hundreds of feet between him and the ground. “This is so cool! Hey Hinata, come check it out.”
Hinata’s eyes went wide and she stayed rooted in her place. She shook her head vigorously. She could tell from where she was that they were very high up off the ground. Naruto was bending over the edge in a way that made her very nervous. What if he fell?
“Hinata.” She looked up at her teacher. “When Yasu had Miki two years ago we warded the whole perimeter. He falls off, he falls four feet.”
Hinata smiled shyly, grateful that she hadn’t had to confess her fears out loud. Yasu must be the partner who Onee-chan had mentioned. Hinata wondered what Yasu must be like.
“Onee-chan? Are we going to meet Yasu?”
“Eventually. Her and her husband live near the village we bypassed. The next time we go to get supplies we’ll spend the night at her place.” Sora turned and started walking up towards the house. “Come on, Naruto!” she yelled over her shoulder. Naruto looked up and scrambled up to run after them.
“Neh, neh, Onee-chan! Do you live in this whole house by yourself?”
“I only live in a portion of it. The rest I keep shut up. I’m afraid the two of you are going to have to clean out a couple of rooms for yourselves.” She walked up the few steps to the huge front gate. This one she simply took a key out for and quickly turned the lock.
It wasn’t a castle, but it was close. It was obviously not built to impress. There was no grand entrance, no intricate ironwork. It was a house large enough to accommodate a small crowd and that was it. The gate opened into a large courtyard, overshadowed by the house. The slate floor was scratched from weapons practices in the past. They crossed it and stepped up onto the first porch. Sora slid open the door and walked inside.
“Home sweet home,” she said. The room was large and airy with a staircase on the far side leading up. Looked more like a modern family room pulled out someone’s home than the entry room for a fortress. “Run upstairs and dump you stuff then come back down. Then I’ll show you around.”
With a muttered hai, they ran upstairs. Quickly she moved to a table in back of the couch and grabbed two framed photos. Knowing she only had seconds until they came back, she shoved the pictures into a drawer. It would have to do until she could move them to her rooms.
Her eyes stopped on a photo of her and Obaa-chan just a few weeks after they had started traveling together. They were sitting at the counter of some restaurant, leaning together over plates of food while the chef took their picture.
“Is that the Hokage-sama?” Sora looked up and scolded herself for not hearing the two of them comeback.
“Hai. I’m a little bit younger than ya’ll here. This was taken just after I convinced her to let me travel with her, so I would have been thirteen.”
Naruto eyed the picture suspiciously. “Is that really you.”
“I know, it doesn’t look much like me. I didn’t start developing my own sense of style until shortly thereafter.” She laughed softly. “If I remember right, the day after that picture was taken I snuck out and got my nose pierced. Obaa-chan was pissed.”
Naruto looked down the table of pictures. “All these all your friends.”
“Most of them are the same people, but at different ages.” She started pointing out pictures. “This is me as Yasu when we were in our teens, the two of us at her wedding and us and her daughter, Miki.”
Naruto looked from one picture to the other. Sora stayed basically the same, but the other woman went from being a sex kitten with heavy white curly hair spilling over exposed shoulders to a woman with a bun and a little girl in her lap. “That’s the same person?”
Sora shrugged. “She calmed down a great deal after she had Miki?”
Hinata held one picture up to her. “Who’s this, Onee-chan.”
She swallowed. “This is me and my first teacher. The one who built the house.”
“She’s beautiful. What was her name?”
She had to get it out. She had to make them think that there was nothing out of the ordinary. She breathed in. “Nanashi.” She looked over to gauge Naruto’s reaction and was pleased to see that there wasn’t one. He was still staring at the pictures of Yasu and her. “Come on, you two. I’ll show you the house.”
The house was even bigger than it looked from the outside, but Sora only lived in a few rooms. She showed them the kitchen and dinning room (which she said she never used), the living areas and the library (which she rarely used, but they were going to be using a lot). The bathhouse was at the top of the house and Sora spent a good fifteen minutes lecturing Naruto on how he was going to peep on her or Hinata in the bath while Naruto yelled he was not a pervert and Hinata blushed. Finally, they came to the bedrooms where she stopped.
“This is my room,” she said, pointing to the door. “Unless there is an emergency, you are not to come in here. And by emergency I mean Emergency. Foreign ninjas invading the house. Not, 'I can’t sleep' or 'I’m out of deodorant and I need to borrow some of Sora’s.' Clear?”
They nodded. “Good. Now, if you will excuse me, I have a few things I need to attend to. Just pick out any room along here and start cleaning it out. I’ve used most of them for storage of various thing, so you’ll need to move things into empty rooms. Okay?”
They nodded again. “Great. Just knock when you have the room cleared out.” And with that she stepped into her room and closed the door.
Naruto and Hinata stood there and stared at the door. Naruto snorted. “What crawled up her skirt?” Hinata giggled.
“I heard that!” Sora yelled.
“I don’t care if you did!” Naruto yelled back.
“Naruto-kun,” Hinata said softly, not expecting him to hear her.
“Huh? What Hinata?” he asked. Hinata blushed and shook her head. “Well might as well get started looking at the rooms. He grabbed her arm and lead her down the hall. He had done it a few time in the past week and it always made Hinata blush. It was close to her dream but not quite. When she dreamed, they were holding hands and they were walking side by side, not her trailing behind.
They opened the first door they came to and stood in shock. It was dark and dusty and full of boxes. Obviously it had not been opened in years. Moving down to the second door they discovered the same. In fact, further investigation proved that all of the bedrooms were in some state of disrepair.
“What the heck is this? Hasn’t she ever cleaned?” Hinata thought about trying to calm the boy down, but then realized that she didn’t even know where to begin.
Naruto looked over at the girl hovering in the doorway. He hadn’t really thought much about it when Obaa-chan had assigned her to the mission with him. In fact, he hadn’t thought about her much period the whole time they’d know each other. But after their talk before the chuunin exam and the past week of training together everyday, he was finding that she was kind of nice in a very quiet sort of way. He realized that not only did he like people like her, but he liked her herself.
“Neh, Hinata.” She looked up from where she
was twiddleing her fingers in the doorway. He grinned at her,
which made her heart stop. “Wanna’ start moving stuff out?”
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