Author’s Notes: This was an extremely had chapter to write and I am still not entirely happy with the way it turned out, so please let me know what you think.
Thanks again go out to David who actually
knows how to spell all the techniques in Japanese, which leaves
me in awe. It should be noted that I added a bit after I got
this back from him and that any mistakes are probably me adding
things and not him. Thank you David!
Naruto was suddenly woken up, just like every single morning for the past three months, by music. Loud techno music with a strong, pulsing beat that shook the floor could be heard all over the place. He could also hear the lead singer blaring out lyrics about love and broken hearts and, only slightly softer, he could hear Sora singing along.
He rolled over to stare bleary-eyed at the clock. Six thirty am. He groaned and buried his face in the pillow. They had been up until one the night before, while he tried to get a hold of some stupid chakra weaving thing that was on the scroll. It was skill number 60, but they had only completed about 40. Three months and he was only less than halfway done. He had thought that he would be finished by now. But the tasks had gotten surprisingly harder. The floor cleaning exercise was piece of cake compared to what she was having them do now.
On top of that, she had hauled them into the library one day and informed them that they were to begin school studying again as well. Then she had started piling them up with books to read. Mainly they were history books. Lots and lots of history, with dates and people to remember. Every morning when they would come down for breakfast she would be there and would start quizzing them. Who was the third Kazekage? What was he known for? What was his strongest influence on the development of the Hidden Village of the Sand? Why did he.....?
And that was all of their training. No sparring. No drilling. No new battle techniques. Nothing but that stupid scroll. He was starting to hate Sora. She was just like most of the people back in leaf. She didn’t think he was worthy of training.
He had tried to prove to her that he was strong enough to start training in the advanced stuff. He kept trying to challenge her to get her to see how strong he was. She wouldn’t even respond to a challenge properly. For the first three weeks she had simply told him he was stuck with her, rolling her eyes and ignoring his antics. Then one day she had held up her hand in a strange sign.
“See this, Naruto? This is one” She changed the sign. “This is two.” She changed again. “This is three.” She smirked. “And this is what happens if you get to three. Silence no Jutsu.”
And all of a sudden Naruto couldn’t talk. It was as if he had laryngitis and no matter how hard he tried he was unable to move his vocal cords. Hinata had stared in shock.
“That is a technique from west of the mountains. Mainly it is used to keep guards from raising the alarm during an invasion as it can be used from a great distance with a minimal amount of chakra. It also works for silencing brats.”
Naruto tried to decide which he hated more, the jutsu or the woman who performed it. He decided that what he really hated was that she wouldn’t teach it to him.
He sighed and rolled off the futon and onto the floor. He was at an impasse. She obviously wasn’t training him enough, but at the same time he couldn’t figure out how to get out of it. He was under orders, so he couldn’t go back home. He challenged her yet again and she shrugged it off.
Suddenly, an idea came to him. If she wasn’t going to train him, he would have to train himself. There had to be scrolls on how to do different techniques in that library, right? If he searched for them, he was sure to be able to find some that he could use, like when he had learned the Kage Bunshin.
He grinned. What exactly did she have in that
library? .
Sora was getting more than a little tired of waiting for them go come to breakfast. She briefly considered using chakra to dump water all over their beds, but that would only give Naruto something else to bug her about learning.
She sighed and looked out the kitchen window. She was started to see Hinata in the courtyard. She was crouched low, practicing punching and barely moving across the slate floor of the courtyard. Sora had never seen her practice fighting before. She paused and frowned as she watched Hinata move. Turning the burners on the stove off, she headed outside.
Hinata closed her eyes and concentrated. Memories of training sessions with her father started to come back to her. You thought of yourself as an unstoppable force. There was no stronger clan than the Hyuuga. Their bloodline was the most powerful and no one could stand before it. They could force everyone to their knees.
She imagined the targets: where she could hit her opponents in order to stop chakra flow. She had been told that she didn’t need to worry about precision at the beginning; the important thing was that she built up her power. She had never gotten to the point were she was allowed to concentrate on precision. Her power had simply never been great enough. Still, she kept trying, hoping for the day when she would be good enough.
Opening her eyes again she stepped back and resumed her stance. I am strong and you will not move me. Breathing in she started to run through a series of punches designed to work their way along all of an opponents chakra holes. Even in her minds eye, she missed half of them. She sighed and began to start over again.
“What was that?”
Hinata stopped at the voice and looked over to see Sora sitting on the stairs, mug of tea in hand. There was a clear note of sarcasm in her voice. Hinata looked at her feet ashamed. Of course Onee-chan would be able to tell how horrible she was.
“Was that the great jyuken style that the Hyuuga clan invented in order to utilize their bloodline?”
Hinata felt like crying, but she was determined not to. She knew her execution was an insult to the form, but she hated when it was pointed out.
Suddenly she realized that Sora was standing in front of her, bending down so that their heads were even. “Let me guess. I am an unmovable mountain. None are stronger than me and all who challenge shall be vanquished!” Sora’s voice was deep and mocking, obviously parodying some old martial arts master.
Hinata stared at Sora, who rolled her eyes. “Sorry, Hinata-chan, don’t take this as an insult, but you don’t exactly seem like the unmovable mountain type.” When Hinata just continued to stare, Sora sighed. “Look, I’m not saying it’s a bad form. It probably works very well for a lot of people in your family. But it doesn’t fit your body type and it doesn’t fit your personality.”
Hinata was amazed. Sora thought that the form was the problem, that it was what was defective, and not her. This was awful; she had to set her right. “No, it’s me. I can’t do the form right. I’m just not talented enough.”
“Really? You can’t learn the form because you’re not talented enough?”
Hinata nodded, looking back down at her feet.
“Bullshit.” Hinata looked up shocked. “What? It is bullshit. Do you think I’m blind, I know how good you are. I’ve seen how hard you work at the jutsus and how well you are able to master them. Maybe you were able to convince yourself that you don’t have enough talent to master the form, but you are not going to be able to convince me.”
Hinata stared. Never before had she received such a loud vote of confidence. Naruto had cheered her on at the chuunin exam, but all he had told her was for her to do her best. Never before had anyone told her that they thought she was actually talented. She felt like crying, but she realized that Sora was talking again.
“Now, I don’t know whatever special Hyuuga form that is that you’re using, so I can’t help teach you that. However, I generally use Shina-To-Be, which works well for people who are fast and lightweight. I could teach you that.”
Hinata couldn’t believe it. Thoughts were running through her head at 100 miles per hour. She actually wanted to teach her a whole new style, one the Hyuuga clan didn’t use. She couldn’t remember an heir ever doing anything other than the traditional style.
‘Of course it’s not easy. It’s all about movement and flexibility. There’s a lot more acrobatics in it than most other forms. Mostly it’s done in the west, so no one out here will have seen it, which is an advantage.”
For generations the Hyuuga clan had been learning this form. It was specially designed to work well with their bloodline. You had to get in close to use it, which made it dangerous and difficult to master, but once mastered it was almost unstoppable.
“It would take a little bit of effort to figure out how to incorporate the use of your bloodline in, but I’m sure we could do it. What do you say?”
“But, but I’m a, I’m a Hyuuga,” Hinata managed to stutter out.
God damn it! This was why she hated clans, bloodlines and things associated with villages in general. Here was a girl who probably didn’t even want to be a ninja, who would probably be better off being something like a doctor or a teacher. But because of a cruel trick of birth, she had to be heir to a backwards clan that was so set in its ways that it wouldn’t even consider that maybe not everything worked for everyone.
“Yes. But you’re a Hyuuga for whom tradition doesn’t work. Sometimes things have to change.”
“But no one has ever...”
“Are you going to have children?”
“Hopefully...”
“Then are you going give your children the exact same type of childhood you had just because it’s Hyuuga tradition?”
Hinata thought about the seal on her cousin’s forehead. About sleeping alone in her big room, curled up into a small ball. About lectures on family responsibilities and expectations and her inability to measure up. About the endless days of drilling when most girls her age were out making friends. About living her life isolated, away from the village, in the ghost filled halls of the Hyuuga house.
She gently shook her head. “No.”
Sora sighed and looked at the ground. “You and I are strangely similar. I was raised into a destiny I didn’t want to fulfill. We were probably brought up in very similar ways. I decided to bust out. I can’t say I suggest doing the same things I did, but I think a little radical thinking on your part would be good.”
Hinata looked at her puzzled. “What do you mean you don’t recommend the way you did it?”
Sora shook her head. “That is for me only.” She flashed a grin. “One more question.”
“Hai?”
“Is that haircut a Hyuuga tradition?”
Hinata blushed and shook her head.
Sora gave an exaggerated sigh in mock relief.
“Hallelujah.”
He had been relieved when there was no one in the kitchen. Scrunching his nose up at the eggs and potatoes Sora had left in the skillet, he rummaged through the cabinets for some ramen. Putting the kettle on, he glanced out the window to see Sora talking to Hinata. Whatever they were talking about, it looked serious. Good, it looked like they would be busy for a while. He stuffed the ramen into his mouth and bolted up to the third floor.
Naruto was rather proud of himself for thinking of the whole library thing. The place was huge. Apparently Nanashi had been of the opinion that a library was a key part of her new ninja community and had amassed an enormous collection of books. It filled a large wide room with tall shelves pushed closely together. There was bound to be something in here he could use.
Reading the tags posted on the end of each shelf, Naruto was able to find a section entitled ‘Ninjutsu Praticum.’ He had no idea what practicum meant, but he was defiantly interested in ninjutsu and it wasn’t history. He started scanning through the titles. The Theory and Execution of Summoning Spells. One Hundred Basic Water Jutsus. Zen and the Art of Kunai Maintenance. The Complete Guide to Fire Jutsu’s: Basic through Advanced Techniques. Aha! Now they’re talking!
Naruto grabbed the book and moved over to a table. Opening it up he flipped directly to the back where the advanced techniques were. He frowned in disappointment when there were only five techniques listed, but her immediately brightened when he started reading the descriptions.
Fire Cliffs no Jutsu: This technique produces a thin wall of fire up to fifty feet high. For all but those closely associated with fire, this wall is impossible to pass once executed. It is used to divide up army and erect defenses around buildings. Significant historical uses include...
Yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah. Naruto stopped reading and started scanning down past the boring part, including the warning statement. He looked at the list of hand seals. Damn there were a lot of them. Sighing he started running through them. Ox, dragon, ram, hare, ram again, horse...
A hand came down and slammed the book shut. “What the HELL do you think your doing?!” a voice screamed.
Naruto slowly looked up to see a Sora with eyes on fire with anger. Oh shit. Busted.
Once Sora had convinced Hinata to start training taijutsu, she had gone to get Naruto. The boy needed to learn some of it too anyway, although she certainly wasn’t going to teach him the whole form. It was a woman’s form after all. But they could start out working on some of the basic exercises together.
She had been impresses when she found the boy in the library. Maybe he was finally starting to take the academic stuff seriously. It would indicate reaching a level of maturity in which he understood that he wouldn’t be able to be Hokage without knowing there things. However her heart had stopped when she saw what he was reading.
No one but her or Yasu and her husband had been living here for the last 14 years and before that it had only been Nanashi or the occasional guest. So it never occurred to her to take out any of the more dangerous books from the shelves. She had simply never expected anyone to start looking through them to find the most dangerous jutsu’s possible.
She couldn’t believe what he was going. How could any be so stupid as to try a technique like this unsupervised and without learning the lower ones? In a library no less! The worst part was the terror which had sliced through her to the core the moment that she saw what he was reading. Naruto had more than enough chakra to perform this technique but not enough control. If she hadn’t come at just the right time...
She waited for Naruto’s reply, glaring at him down in his chair.
She was so stupid, not teaching him anything and then getting mad at him when he went off and taught himself things. He was a shinobi after all and a shinobi was measured by his skill in battle. He wasn’t getting any better here while she made him read history and wash dishes. “Well you weren’t teaching me anything,” he grumbled.
What the hell did he think she had been doing in the past three months? “Not teaching you anything? Apparently I haven’t been if you were so stupid as to try this!”
He jumped up on his chair so that their heights were approximately the same. “I’m not stupid!”
“Really? Read the warning, Naruto.” She opened the book again, and jammed her finger into the page. “It says right here, ‘This is a dangerous, highly advanced fire technique. No one inexperienced with mid and upper level fire techniques should attempt this jutsu. This should only be attempted under suitable supervision as improper execution of this technique will possibly result in highly volatile and uncontrollable fires.’”
And she would have been able to do virtually nothing to stop them. They would have killed him almost instantly and ripped through the rest of the house. She might have been able to save Hinata and herself, but that wasn’t a guarantee. He would have been...
She slammed her hand on the page again. “Would you like to tell me what your plan was if the fire got out of control?”
Why the hell wouldn’t she acknowledge that he was strong? And why wouldn’t she let him get stronger? Didn’t she understand that he had to? There was a whole village he get to acknowledge him and few people he had to protect. “I wasn’t planning on doing it in here! I was just learning it so I could learn something because you aren’t teaching me anything!” He started to throw a punch at her, but she caught his wrist in her hand.
She lost it. The combination of terror and anger had overwhelmed her and all she could think of was pounding into the kid’s brain just how stupid he was.
“You want to fight me?” she asked, grabbing the back of his collar with her free hand and starting to drag him out of the room. “You have been pushing all my buttons since the moment we stepped out of that goddamn village of yours. You seem to think that you are some sort of genius and at this point I am too pissed off at you to worry about your goddamn confidence!”
She slammed open the front door and started moving down the stairs, dragging Naruto behind her as he kicked and screamed. Hinata looked up in surprise from where she was practicing the chakra weaving. Sora pulled Naruto out into the middle of the courtyard then pushed him away, letting him land on the ground. “You think that I’m such a horrible teacher? You want to fight me and prove that you can kick my ass?” She screamed at him. “Fine then. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Naruto scrambled up from the ground, fists clenched at his sides. “Goddamn it!” he yelled, before crossing his fingers. He would show her! “Kage Bushinn no Jutsu!” he screamed at the top of his lungs.
Instantly the entire courtyard was filled with shadow clones. Glancing around, Sora assessed the situation. There were probably a little over a hundred of them. He wasn’t operating with kybui power yet. She smiled as they all drew kunai and charged blindly at her with a scream. She had discovered that he had never really put much effort into his formal training, relying on sharp wits, power and determination to get him through. Unfortunately for him, she had all three of those, plus years of formal training and battle experience.
Bending her knees, she jumped into the air, letting a dozen clones slam into each other underneath her. She twisted her body in the air in a graceful spiral before landing in the middle of another group. She immediately began to destroy every one that came into her range.
Hinata half hid herself behind a column as she watched. She had never seen anyone summon so many clones at once. However, even more incredible was the way that Sora was moving. Dear god, was that the Shina-To-Be Form she was supposed to learn?
It was as if the laws of physics no longer applied to her. Sora flipped onto her hands then swept her feet around, taking out three more clones. Landing on her feet, she jumped again, twisting high in the air. She released a shower of kunai that killed a dozen more. Landing again she began a series of flips, punches and kicks, twisting and turning, moving down close to the ground one minute and gliding through air next. But always, always moving.
It was the most beautiful form Hinata had ever seen, almost dance like in its execution. She would have sworn that Sora was floating, not even really touching the ground. Half the time Hinata wasn’t even sure what it was that Sora had done to destroy the clone. She would get near it and suddenly it would vanish in a puff of smoke.
Surely Sora didn’t expect her to master that?
As the last of the clones charged her, Sora simply parried with her left hand, then wrapped her hand around his wrist and pulled down and out, sending him somersaulting into the floor. Turning back to him, she smiled. “Ready to give up?”
Naruto scowled and began to start the Rasengan. He was not going to lose to her. He wasn’t stupid. He knew that she had a lot she could teach him. He still had to get her to teach him the chakra bind. If she needed proof that he was worth training, he would give it to her. He would make her acknowledge that he was able to learn the advanced stuff. He jammed all the power her could into the ball of charka and ran towards her.
Sora simply dodged. She was impressed that he was able to do the third stage Rasengan that well, although he was using two hands instead of one. The fourth had always done it with one. Plus he didn’t know what situations he should use it under. He seemed to know no basic strategies. The boy had raw power and a few impressive techniques. She darted quickly to the side as he yelled and tried to tag her once again. He shot past her and crashed into on the columns.
“Watch where you’re throwing those things or you’re going to hit Hinata!”
Sora stood back and watched him. He was definitely trying to come up the plan. Maybe he wasn’t quite as much the idiot as she had originally thought.
Damn it! Unless he was able to figure out a way to trick her into staying in one place, he wasn’t going to be able to hit her. Plus she was just standing there calmly watching him while he was giving her everything he had.
He summoned more clones, then quickly dropped to the ground and transformed into a stone. He crawled towards her as she quickly destroyed the clones, but he kept one hanging back so that she would think it was him. As long as he was able to get one of her legs, she should slow down enough to be caught. Crouching a few feet away from her, he began to form the Ragensan.
Sora stared at the clone standing a few dozen yards away. There should have been one more. He had summoned twenty four, but she had only destroyed 23. That meant that there was one more plus the actual Naruto. The question was, which of them was standing in front of her.
Suddenly, he began to charge and she shifted into a better fighting stance. Then, out of the corner of her eye she saw another Naruto coming towards her low to the ground, Ragensan spinning in his hands. She only had an instant to figure out what was going on. She launched herself into a back flip, kicking the clone as she went over and narrowly dodging the real Narutos hand as she grasped the back of his jacket. Continuing the motion over, she landed on her feet and threw Naruto over her head towards the far end of the courtyand.
She refused to let herself give into the desire to rest her hand against her knees and pant. Damn it, he shouldn’t have come that close to getting her.
Hinata’s eyes were wide with fear. She didn’t know what to do. How could she get them to stop this?
On the other side of the courtyard Naruto stood up and glared at his opponent. He had no choice: Kuchiyose no Jutsu. Summoning Gama the boss should do the trick. He would squash her flat. Then they would see who she thought was worthy of learning the advanced techniques.
Growling, he brought his hand up to his mouth and bit his thumb.
Sora realized instantly what he was going to do. Shit, she couldn’t let him summon anything here. Who knows what he could summon. Anything large would destroy the courtyard, or worse, and it was already going to take a lot out of her to repair the damage done by the Rasengan. And with his chakra stores plus those he could possibly get from the Kyuubi...she had no choice but to stop him.
Her eyes darkened from light blue-violet to a deep, vibrant purple. She watched Naruto paint a stripe of blood across him palm. He moved his hands into the first seal.
Instantly she was across the floor, slamming her palm into the center of his chest. He choked and sputtered as she quickly bound all of his chakra.
Catching him behind the neck, she laid him down on the ground. She leaned over him, but didn’t look at him. When she spoke her voice was so quiet that Naruto could barely hear her. “If you summoned the kyuubi’s chakra now you could probably overwhelm the bind. However, the fact of the matter is that you’re ten years younger than I am with far less training. Other than trying to overwhelm me with power or trick me, there isn’t much that you can do to attack me. That might work, but I don’t think either of us wants to find out.”
She stood up and walked away up into the house.
Naruto squeezed his eyes shut. Damn it, damn it, damn it! Who the hell had told her? What gave her the right to know about that? He felt ashamed and humiliated. The whole fight had lasted less than ten minutes. He had failed. She hadn’t acknowledged him.
He looked over and spotted Hinata. She was still standing behind the column staring at him. He couldn’t read the expression in her eyes.
She swallowed and started to walk over to him. She knelt down next to him. “Can you move at all?” she asked.
“Me? I’m fine just taking a little rest!”
Hinata smiled. Leaning over she picked up his
head and slid her arm underneath his shoulders. She swung his
arm around her neck and slowly stood up. “Let’s get you up to
your room.”
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