The Argent-Eyed Heiress (Naruto/Exalted)

She told him everything.

Beginning with her first visit to the hospital to confirm immunity - and ending with her current hospital stay to confirm life.

The ninja lord looked very grave when told him of the strange world of ash and walked her through her recollections backwards and forwards, as if searching for falsehoods - or memories modified through genjutsu. And yet, strangely, if Hinata had to guess, it seemed like the Hokage seemed more interested in the events preceding their entry into the Tower than the ones that transpired within it. What had happened within the Tower seemed to fit within a certain set of expectations. The forest itself, however…

It seemed to puzzle him.

After he'd assured himself of the truth of her experiences, he lapsed into a long silence.

"Lord Hokage, what… what was that?"

When he looked at her, as if from very far away. "Hm?"

"The-the world of ash."

"Ah," he said. "Good question."

"Sir?"

His eyes looked vague, like his mind wasn't totally present in the here and now. "It is something best left untouched. A place, once discovered, that needed to be sealed away."

Sealed away…?

Oh - oh no.

"W-was it the chakra orchid?"

"Hm?"

"Was the chakra orchid the seal?"

The faraway look vanished in an instant. "What makes you believe it is so?"

"Th-the more it was damaged, the more often we saw it."

"The world of ash."

"Y-yes."

The Hokage laced his fingers together. "While I will not confirm any speculation - I will say this: the Golden Chakra Orchid became a terrible creature. That you took part in killing it is no bad thing."

"But-" Hinata couldn't help but recall that other world with a shudder. There was value, there was beauty, even, in the hybrid lifeforms that the golden chakra orchid gave birth to. That other place, however…

It was all ash. Ashes of what might have been. Ashes of what had been.

Mere remnants. Nothing would ever grow there.

"But was it a good thing, once?"

"I would like to think so," said the Hokage, standing. "Certainly, the Two Brothers thought so. But that is not a topic you need worry about. I thank you for your effort in answering my questions, Hinata. Needless to say, everything we discussed here is classified. You may discuss the details with your jounin-sensei, the head of your clan and no one else."

He rose, knees creaking audibly.

"While I am here - do you have any questions of your own?"

"Mmm?" asked Hinata, puzzled.

"About Naruto, perhaps?"

"Naruto?" Hinata asked. She hadn't - she'd just assumed he'd been fine. But that technique of his Jiraiya was teaching him, the one with the red chakra, surely it had a potent cost to allow for such an incredible effect. Alarmed, she asked: "Is he - is he alright?"

The Hokage looked briefly surprised - then he smiled. "He is. Perhaps too much so: he's been forbidden from stepping foot within the hospital for the next seventy-two hours. Already, he has petitioned for me to intervene on his behalf."

"Oh - that's good?"

The Hokage looked at her strangely before letting out a soft chuckle.

"Ah, youth," he said cryptically.

Waving, he left.

With the Hokage gone, she could feel every one of her wounds and the exhaustion that accompanied them.

She closed her eyes and-

When she opened them again, the stars were twinkling in the sky while a cold plate of food and three bouquets of flowers lay at her bedside.

-----

In the morning, she tried visiting Shino.

Since Dr. Kurama had gone home at some point and the nurses categorically refused to believe that she should was 'well on the road to recovery' let alone releasable within the next three days, they wouldn't let her get out of her room, considering it far too great a strain on her existing injuries.

And they were not wrong, precisely. While most of her flesh wounds seemed to be healing at a truly remarkable rate, the tenketsu she had forced to expel chakra from were healing at a far more normal speed, leaving behind an imbalance in her chakra network that was difficult to compensate for. Chakra both supported and strengthened the underlying muscles - having areas where there was less chakra present weakened those areas, making her gait lopsided and her limbs clumsy. It was almost exactly what having those tenketsu closed through jyuken felt like.

She'd tried to compensate with her silver chakra.

That had been a mistake.

She had fainted in the corridor, head lolling in her wheelchair, and had to be brought back to her own bed, and then lectured at length about the importance of attending to her own recovery. The second time she was discovered napping by the side of the corridor, the Head Nurse, a redoubtable woman by the name of Toyotomi was brought in and threatened to strap her to the bed if she didn't behave.

She humbly acknowledged her fault and promised not to do so again.

Still, it was frustrating. She felt - she felt better. Not good yet, maybe not even 50%, but a simple trip down the corridor to see her friend was not beyond her abilities - especially with the silver chakra supporting her.

As it turned out, her silver chakra was part of the problem. One she was not sure how to solve just yet.

Right now, she simply had too much of it.

Like one of the Eight Gates left ajar, power would flood her system at the even the slightest prodding, and just like opening one of the Eight Gates, it came with a heavy physical cost. Even a few moments of such power made her vision swim, sent her heart hammering in her chest, and had sweat pouring down her forehead.

And while the Eight Gates were difficult to open, Hinata had more difficulty keeping this gate closed. Trying to tamp down on her inner energies was like trying to tamp down on a full-body blush. The more she thought about it, the harder it became.

She compensated by mostly napping and eating.

It felt like the height of self-indulgence. To keep her from running about the hospital like a headless chicken, the hospital was prepared to extend itself somewhat. Take-out from a shop she was fond of sent a regular supply of red bean soup to her which she consumed in massive quantities.

But with so little else to do to while away the time, she found herself contemplating the mission more and more. That other place. The World of Ash.

When she started to see it out of the corner of her eye, flickering lights, ashy air, dead vines and all, she very hastily put a stop to it. On that road lay madness. While all who shared a bloodline limit had genetic… quirks, reduced lifespans, dementia, a tendency to sociopathy, Hinata was well aware that Hyuugas began to see too much. In ages past they had been treated as prophets - these days, they were locked up, their schizophrenic hallucinations as much a danger to themselves as they were to others.

So she forced herself to investigate Jiraiya's stone kunai instead.

This involved some bargaining with the nurses, but she managed to get someone to sort through her personal effects and bring what remained to her. Along with her metal tools, it was the only thing that had. Nothing else had survived the decontamination procedures.

She poked at it a few times.

When it refused to do anything more amusing than remain inertly there, nothing more than a stone kunai, she let flow some of her chakra. While hers did almost nothin, it eagerly drank in her silver chakra, the surface dancing with wisps of energy. Colors became more vivid, the blade, the hilt and the ring gaining a subtle, opalescent sheen, becoming something subtly more.

Then, it fell apart.

The blade of the knife hit the blanket covering her knees, slicing through it with a tearing sound; the wrapped hilt rolled right off the bed and clattered to the ground; while the ring spun up into the air and then somehow slipped onto her finger. After gingerly picking the blade up and giving it a place of honor next to the flowers, she looked to the ring - which had become a carved wooden band, something that any ninja would instantly suspect had a clever mechanism within for delivering poisons.

She took it off - and once more it was a stone ring.

"Byakugan," she murmured, fascinated.

Putting it on her finger she noted how it seemed to draw in any peripheral silver chakra that happened to be circulating nearby, somehow awakening it. She wouldn't swear it, of course, but it seemed to - well, it seemed to be alive.

Curiously, she pushed some more chakra into it.

She shrieked as a bathtub worth of water splashed down onto her.

When the nurses, alerted by her cry, rushed in to see what was wrong, Hinata was slightly wild-eyed, but dry.

The water had vanished.

----

The ring crafted genjutsu. Except when it didn't.

Someone knocked on her door, sending her heartbeat skyrocketing. She tried to hastily hide the evidence of her transgressions, but making this disappear was going to be a task and a half.

There was another knock. Hinata continued to quickly and quietly work.

"Oi, please tell me you aren't still sleeping."

Looking in pained exasperation at the task left to her, she finally said: "I- I'm not! C-come in, Kiba."

The door creaked open.

"Man, you've got some scary-ass relatives downstairs looking at people like they're - the heck happened here?" asked Kiba, holding a basket full of fruit in one hand as he opened the door. Akamaru rushed in excitedly through the gap, scattering dried rice around the room as he bounded up onto her bed. "You get visited by an Inari or something?"

Hinata acknowledged the justice of the comment with a small sigh.

Inari were the gods of tea, rice, alcohol and blacksmiths. Some were said to carry bags of rice - and Hinata had to admit it did look a lot like a bag of rice had been upended over her bed. There couldn't be more than would fit in an average bag you'd find at the marketplace - twenty, maybe twenty-five pounds worth - but dried rice went everywhere. It looked like a small, briefly localized snowstorm had gone through, dumping rice instead of snow.

Hinata still wasn't sure how she was supposed to explain this to the nurses.

"Jiraiya gave me a, um, a project," she said, scratching Akamaru's head. The little ninja dog's wagging tail displaced more showers of the stuff onto the floor.

A normal dog would have probably stressed or re-opened at least one of her wounds, bounding up towards her like he had - Akamaru was a breed apart, however, and was very, very careful to stay away from her injuries even as he grinned up at her.

Kiba set the fruit basket down next to the flowers. "Akamaru, get down from there. This is a hospital - ya gotta show show some goddamn decorum," rice crunched underfoot, "and what, you need more carbs in your diet?"

As Akamaru jumped down to return to his master's side, she tossed the ring to him. He caught it between two fingers, then looked at it curiously.

"Focus on something you want, and, um, push some chakra into it."

She saw his chakra flow into the ring - but it remained stubbornly inert, not even turning into its wooden state. "...is this some sort of chakra test? Like the elemental paper stuff Lord Jiraiya gave you?"

That was a thought.

"I don't th-think so," Hinata said, opening her hand to catch the ring as Kiba tossed it back. "W-watch."

She breathed in, closed her eyes and focused.

There was a thump. When she opened her eyes, a fruit basket resembling Kiba's had landed in her lap - and was quickly evaporating, like a work of sand being blown apart.

Kiba was impressed. "A ring of illusions?"

It had been Hinata's first thought too. Genjutsu was Kurenai-sensei's passion - and although often derided as the least of the three branches of the ninja arts, less powerful than ninjutsu, less reliable than taijutsu - it was only as limited as one's imagination.

In many ways, its unlimited possibilities attracted the best craftsmen. There existed tools that could aid a ninja in casting genjutsu without hand seals - while the same was not yet true of ninjutsu.

However, no ring of illusions could make real rice.

And yet… she lifted a handful of rice and demonstratively let it trickle out of her fingers.

"You're shitting me," said Kiba, who scooped up a handful and examined it was ferocious, scowling interest, sniffing it carefully.

Hinata shrugged helplessly. "If it isn't real, I've put myself under a genjutsu. There's no residual chakra or sign it's a chakra construct. Maybe it's auto-hypnosis or-"

Kiba was not one for doubt.

"Nah, s'real. Smells a bit weird, but it's real alright," he let the grains fall from his fingers, shaking his hands to clear the lingering grains. "Why rice?"

-----

They went to visit Shino.

Kiba pushed her on her wheelchair that the hospital had given her. It was a sturdy contraption, anything designed for recuperating ninja - who tended to be exasperatingly active patients - needed to be. Still, Kiba put it through its paces, practically flying as he pushed it forward, Akamaru on his shoulder, tongue out as if to enjoy the breeze.

Hinata didn't mind, but the hospital staff did: they got a number of dirty looks from the nurses, and Kiba was forced to apologize once, but in the end they did make it to Shino's room.

Kiba didn't even bother to knock, just: "Dude, we're coming in - hope you're decent!"

Then they barged in -

And Shino's parents were there, looking very stern behind their sunglasses and high-collared coats.

Kiba went: "Oops."

Hinata's eyes had automatically gone to her teammate - and despite the presence of his parents - couldn't quite suppress a gasp of dismay. Unlike her, Shino looked like he'd been near death. His skin was pale and somehow looked stretched and his eyes were ringed with deep purple. While there were no bandages, tubes and wires crisscrossed his body and his mouth was hooked up to an oxygen machine that misted with condensation every time he breathed.

This was… this was her fault.

"Am I… decent enough… for you?" Shino asked, laboriously.

"Hinata, Kiba," said the Aburame patriarch greeted, nodding to the both of them.

Hinata automatically tried to nod her head in return: like the Hyuuga, Aburames were one of the four noble founding clans. While only the Hyuuga seemed to still take that status seriously, the Aburame and Hyuuga were supposed to interact in a certain way.

"Mr. Aburame. Mrs. Aburame."

"Sh… man, where'd all of this come from? It wasn't here yesterday," said Kiba.

No doubt there was more he wanted to say, but with his parents here…

"A hive… transp…" Shino replied.

"A necessary operation," interjected Mr. Aburame, too late: both Hinata and Kiba had heard.

Kiba sounded shocked. "I thought-"

"It was necessary," Mr. Aburame repeated.

The oxygen machine depressed and compressed. "Don't look… so… sad… Why? Because… I will be… better… soon."

"Shino," said Hinata, not quite knowing what to say. Had that been a joke?

If so, it was a bad one.

"Oi," Kiba said, "you'd better."

He said it lightly, but the look in his eyes was hard and grim.

"I'm sorry…" Hinata murmured.

She didn't think she'd said it loud enough to be heard, but she should have known better than to underestimate Kiba's ears.

"Hey, hey, If anyone should be apologized to, it's me. You two completed your first A-rank mission without me. So unfair."

"Yes… You… have… no reason… to… apologize…"

"You're-!" said Hinata, gaze encompassing the enormity of what had happened to him.

"It was… a good… ex… perience…"

But apparently this was too much physical exertion. His chakra was weak - his new colony was busy integrating itself into him and consuming a great deal of his energy. His breathing evened. His head lolled to the side.

Hinata looked to the two parents standing at their son's bedside. She opened her mouth. Closed it.

Everything seemed so… petty. A mere excuse.

And yet…

"Mr. Aburame, Mrs. Aburame…" she bowed her head, aware that she should have gotten out of the wheelchair first, "what happened to Shino was my fault."

Mrs. Aburame… twitched. In anyone else it would have registered as an unconscious muscle movement, but for an Aburame…

Like with a Hyuuga, it spoke volumes.

"I am sure there is blame enough to go around," Mrs. Aburame said, voice gentle.

"But it is not yours to bear, not yet. Sending genin on an A-ranked mission without so much as a jounin-sensei present… it isn't done. You did well, completing the mission objective and keeping everyone on your team alive. More than well: you should be proud."

Hinata could have dealt with blame and recriminations. She had dealt with it all her life.

This… she didn't know what to do with this.

Horrified, she realized that her eyes were burning.

"Thank you, but Shino-"

"Get some rest," said Mr. Aburame. "This will all seem better once you've recovered."

Hinata nodded her head. Kiba did the same, then carefully wheeled her out, Akamaru trotting at his heels. The three of them crept out of their sleeping teammate's room.

Once they'd returned to her room and the door had been shut with a quiet click, Kiba said, running a hand through his hair:

"You okay, Hinata?"

"...yeah."

"Sorry, I didn't know they'd be there. I just thought I'd swing by to see him like I did yesterday-"

"It's okay."

"Yeah. Yeah. I guess so." Akamaru yipped beside him. "Oh, right. Geez, with all that excitement… Hinata, I know this probably isn't the best time for it - but, uh, now who do we show the gold to?"

-----

It was a piece of gold smaller the end of her thumb.

Appraised, Hinata suspected it wouldn't go for more than 10,000 ryo. There were some D-ranks that paid better (though not many: officially, D-ranks were supposed to go from 5,000 to 50,000 ryo, in practise, unless you were rescuing Tora, babysitting the grandchildren of someone very important, or repairing a training ground, you could be paid as little as 500 ryo an hour for your trouble).

All that said - it was still 10,000 ryo that hadn't existed before.

And she still wasn't sure how it'd come into being. The second Hokage was famed for being able to use high-level water jutsu without a significant source of water - in essence, creating it through pure elemental conversion. The only element more impressive to convert would be earth.

But who'd ever heard of creating gold - let alone rice - through chakra?

Hinata hadn't mentioned it to Kiba, but she was pretty sure that the mass of what was created was not really a limiting factor, or at least, . A nugget of gold the size of her head versus a nugget of gold the size of her eye would be created with equivalent ease.

Not that it was easy. Doing so required a focus and imagination that Hinata currently lacked.

In the end, she gave the gold and a handful of rice to Kiba, pressing it onto him with a very serious-sounding explanation that perhaps distance and time had to do with the gold's appearance - and that if either disappeared, he was to record when and where it happened.

It having been a very long day, she took a cursory look at the remaining pieces of the stone kunai - the hilt turned into a black quill; the blade a simple, serrated hori-hori, a weeding knife. The quill, unsurprisingly, produced ink when fed chakra, while the blade… seemingly did nothing. Altogether, the three objects seemed to suggest a civilian's tools. It was a surprisingly humble appearance for such wonders.

Though she had done little in the way of actual work, the effort it had taken to use the ring had nudged open the source of her silver chakra and the physical toll quickly caught up with her.

Exhausted, she fell asleep.

-----

Lost: Stone Kunai ==> The Wooden Ring, The Black Quill, The Silver Weeding Knife.

Hospitalization is boring, during the next two days Hinata:

[x] Continues practicing with the Wooden Ring
[x] Investigates the Black Quill.
[x] Digs out a weed with the knife when no one's looking?
[x] Focuses on resting.

QM Note: Normally, there wouldn't even be a voting option here and I'd barrel on with the rest of the update, but it's getting kind of ridiculously long so I decided to make pause here and let people remember this quest exists. The next time this happens, I may forego having there be a vote at all though.

Next update hopefully early next week. There's already 2.5k words written, most of it fluff, but it gives me a bit of maneuvering room. No promises though, I am bad at keeping them when it comes to updating.