Note: Keep reading, it goes full moon.
------
Hinata fell.
It was not a good fall. Her hands were numb: she couldn't catch herself and her face banged against the ground with jarring force.
She lay there, dazed, then coughed, once, twice, and forced herself to rise, trembling, fingers leaving a tracery of blood against a block of limestone green floor. Above, in the sparsely inhabited stands, the only spectators were her fellow genin, the judges and the instructors. They were deathly quiet.
"Why do you stand?" cousin Neji asked.
Hinata sucked in a greedy breath and rose slowly, creakingly up past her knees. Her limbs were aflame as she took up the classic stance: muscles deprived of chakra acted very nearly like muscles deprived of oxygen; her eyes, meanwhile, were painfully hot, coils pulsing with pent-up energy. Breathing hurt. She knew what a healthy heart looked like. Hers was not. It beat sluggish, irregular, too many associated tenketsu plugged, pressure uneven and dangerously unsteady.
When she coughed, the spittle which dribbled down her chin was bloody.
"If you keep pushing yourself, you'll die," cousin Neji said.
Maybe, thought Hinata, trying not to gasp for breath. But the difference was today was, someone important was watching her. The difference today was-
"YOU CAN DO IT, HINATA!!!!"a blond boy screamed from the stands.
-the difference today was, she wasn't going to give up.
She smiled as her opponent ground his teeth, annoyed.
They rushed at each other once more, two users of the gentle fist. It was almost a dance. Strike, block, strike, block, back and forth, no strength wasted, no savage blows, just violence and energy exchanged with painful precision. With her own chakra mostly inaccessible, she could not attack, but she
could deflect. Three exchanges passed, then four, then, upon the fifth, when hope had stirred, when she began to think of what she could do with the tools at hand, she felt a blow spike through her guard, hit her chest and something went ba-dump and
ruptured.
Once more, she felt a moment lacking weight, followed by a bruising impact against the ground. Her heart stuttered agonizingly in her chest.
"You don't understand anything," her opponent said, coldly contemptuous. "From the beginning, your attacks have done nothing."
'I know,' she wanted to say. 'That's not the point,' she wanted to say. 'I need to change,' she wanted to say. 'I have changed,' she wanted to say. Instead, she struggled back to her feet, taking long, long seconds to pick herself up. Her vision wavered.
"It's not over…"
His eyes were cold. "It is. You can barely stand. You can only push yourself so far. It is time to admit it: you are
weak, Hinata Hyuuga. You are weak and this will not change.
People do not change. That is your Destiny. Let go of your suffering."
Her knees buckled. She wanted to. Truly, she did. What would Naruto say? Probably 'That's crap!' or 'If that's Destiny, I'll beat it to a pulp!'
But she couldn't refute cousin Neji. Not like that.
"Aren't you…" her voice cracked and broke into a long series of bloody coughs, echoed by the proctor. "Aren't you the one suffering the most… cousin Neji?"
Neji snapped, hands blurring with a blue haze of chakra as he sprinted towards her.
Four jounins leaped to stop him.
Inconceivably, they failed. The blow stopped her heart, and sent her spinning to the ground, in so much pain all she could do was try to breathe. Four jounin were wrapped around him and spoke in that very calm, very even way that suggested they were fine when they most definitely were not and even cousin Neji seemed to be in shock.
As she struggled, Hinata wondered, distantly: '
I hope… I…'
Then she took her Second Breath.
It was like breathing in the world.
Energy suffused her limbs while wild, impossible memories attacked her mind's eye. She coughed, spraying blood across the ground. A cold, silvery heat kindled itself near her heart. She didn't know how, but the world
changed.
Fingers slammed into stone.
"It's… not… over…"she panted.
"Hinata," Kurenai said, as alarmed and relieved as she had ever heard her jounin-sensei, turning away from Neji whom she held, "you need to-"
The words died away, stillborn.
Hinata rose. Leaking through the pores of her skin, silver light eddied from her like smoke out of a pipe. Her chakra coils, usually a soft lavender, had been choked off by Cousin Neji's barrage of attacks, began to be overlaid by a network of silver that started near her heart and quickly spiraled throughout her body.
It was chakra, but not. Something else. Something
more.
With a sound like a cork popping, she felt one of her tenketsu flare open, the plug formed by Cousin Neji's chakra unable to stay closed in the presence of so much raw power. Then, like it had released the floodgates, one by one they all started to go. Cousin Neji's eyes widened.
"Maa, this is embarrassing," said Naruto's jounin-sensei, a book in one hand, the other clamped around Neji's wrist.
She took an unsteady step forward. The jounin-senseis relaxed, let go.
"It's
not over," she growled.
"FUCK HIM UP!" Kiba shouted excitedly while Shino whispered encouragement, below his breath.
"GET HIM! HINATA!!!!" screamed Naruto.
She wiped the blood beading at her lip, smiled and set herself back into her familiar stance.
Silver and lavender fire poured out of her soul.
----
The first blow knocked Neji off his feet and nearly into the stands.
There had been no art to the blow, just simple, decisive
strength.
"
You-"
She didn't give him time to voice the mingled fear and outrage in his eyes. Always, she had fought him on the back foot, one step behind, too weak, too timid, too
slow.
Not anymore.
She jumped – too far, too fast – the ground beneath her feet rising in a cloud of expanding yellow-brown dust, pelting her feet with shards of the great big cobblestones that underlaid the arena. Wind and noise howled into the stands, blowing back hair and loose clothes, and causing several of the spectators to put their arms up to shield their eyes.
Their loss.
She hit him again.
It had been an impossible blow, delivered before the consequences of the last had been fully realized, from a distance that exceeded Hinata's physical reach, from a position one could at best call ridiculous.
Neji deflected it.
They landed, near simultaneously, in the stands: Neji gracefully, feet alighting on the fenced railing, chakra permitting him stand perpendicular to the floor, herself crashing through it to land with bruising force on the wall, cracks radiating from her feet, shards of plaster and dust speckling her clothes.
"Holy shitting
-" said a heavily bandaged sound genin, the last man standing in his team, his one eye widening visibly as he reared – oh so slowly - away
Before she could apologize, Neji was upon her, forcing her to guard as his fingers slammed into her suddenly upraised arm, a plug of his chakra seeking and failing to find purchase among her tenketsu. Her leg swept out instinctively moving to deny him his ground, he hopped over it, sending another barrage of gentle fist strikes her way as he did so.
"Cousin Neji," she bit out, fist shining with argent light, blood dribbling down a corner of her mouth, canines sharper and longer than she remembered, "that - that will not work anymore."
His eyes widened, then, as if caught in such a disgraceful act, narrowed in concentration.
She punched.
Distantly she saw the Sound-genin, caught in the wake of her attack, get blown backwards as parts of the fenced railing crumpled, dry paint and plaster cracking off the wall in fist-sized chunks, the sheer physical might of her blow an attack all of its own.
Neji caught it again, deflecting it sideways, his blue-white chakra hazing the air. Passing air ruffled his long hair.
She stared.
He punished her for her audacity to spend her limited attention so frivolously, his hand curled up into a fist as it slammed into her solar plexus. Air exploded past her lips as she sailed out of the Sound stands: his punch had nowhere near the strength of her own, but he was a genius and his jounin-sensei a superlative taijutsu master. His form was perfect.
She tried to re-orient herself and choked back a cry as, in mid-air, another blow thundered into her back.
This time, when she hit the ground, she felt something crack.
Blurrily, she saw his feet as he landed lightly before her.
Somewhere, Naruto and Kiba were cursing Neji until they were blue in the face, but that was somewhere else, somewhere far, far away, where her heartbeat didn't thunder in her ears, and her own whirlpool of chakra didn't threaten to overwhelm her. Her fingers extended, claw-like, scrabbling slowly at the ground, silver lingering upon her fingertips.
It wasn't over.
It wasn't over.
"You are n-"
The height of rudeness, not to let him finish, not when he had so graciously given her the opportunity to collect herself, but she still launched herself at him.
He was ready for her.
"
Kaiten!"
This time, it was her turn to go flying, a pebble caught on the edge of a hurricane. For all his fatalism, for all his hatred, for all his cruelty, she could not help but feel admiration towards her cousin. For Neji to master the heavenly spin, the Hyuuga's ultimate defense without the tutoring of a main branch member, his genius was as vast as hers was shallow.
She flipped in mid-air, landing on her feet, skidding nearly twenty feet as she bled momentum.
Neji regarded her, calm and unperturbed, one arm raised, palm towards her, the other at the level of his waist, the classic beginning pose of the Eight Trigrams Stance.
"I was… wrong. You are not weak, Hinata-sama. If you push yourself any further, I will no longer be able to hold back."
She grinned. Somehow it felt like the chains of the past dozen years had fallen away, leaving her both exposed and liberated, her weaknesses scoured by her new strength. "P-please do not trouble yourself on my account, C-cousin Neji."
"Ha! You tell him!" Kiba shouted.
"Very well. Prepare yourself."
The ground cracked beneath her feet as she shot forwards, her passage digging a furrow into the ground. Neji moved with more grace and less power, the flight of a swallow to her fusillade of fire and thunder.
But that did not make him slower than her. Sometimes a swallow outflew the storm.
While not every blow she dealt left shattered concrete and howling winds in its wake, each had more than enough power to end the fight, whereas his blows were all perfectly normal, all perfectly, painfully average, two users of the gentle fist, forced, for different reasons, to rely on the brute force of a strong fist style, one of them clearly more suited to it than the other.
But for all her strength and fury, she could not touch him.
"You… truly are… amazing… Cousin Neji," she said.
He grunted, dove under another earth-shattering blow, and clipped her chin with a lightning palm thrust that she only barely dodged, before transitioning to a half-kaiten that she was forced to leap away from.
"Why do you rail against your Destiny?"
Their exchange of blows was by now a constant staccato of violence, different from an Academy spar only in their volume and consequence.
"I-" she began. "I… like I said... I want to… change."
A flash of silver fire accompanied her words and fist, following him through an impossible twist in space which he neatly dodged.
"People cannot change."
"
You-!"
He kicked her in the midriff, doubling her over and interrupting her outburst. He followed the kick with another: she hit the ground rolling, and made it to her feet in one smooth motion.
"For all your sudden strength you remain the same person. You do not wish to fight, merely impress."
His disgust was very nearly a physical thing, roiling off him in waves.
"No, I-"
"Allow me to show you the difference between us." His stance changed, hands and arms sweeping into a new formation, one she had seen so many times before. Still, there was something subtly different, subtly off about it.
"You are in the range of my divination."
Hinata frowned. "Th-that won't-"
She was struck twice.
Her eyes widened.
Four times.
A dull ache had begun to throb where Neji had hit her.
Eight times.
Pain, minor, annoying, fatally disruptive, erupted like noxious blisters over the surface of her skin.
Sixteen -
Her fist slammed into the side of his face, but not nearly deep enough and by now every move she made tingled with phantom pins and needles as if her limbs had fallen asleep one and all. Still, it interrupted the barrage, forcing him to dance back as he spat a glob of bloody saliva, his sneering smile full of crimson teeth.
"Is this how the Heiress of the Main House fights?"
Hinata didn't answer. She could barely squeeze close her fist it was trembling so badly.
He hadn't blocked her tenketsu, which were as bright as ever, so what was it that Cousin Neji had done?
She breathed in.
Did it matter? She could still move. That meant it wasn't over.
She breathed out.
Slowly, her fists relaxed into open palms. Licking her lip, she swept a shaky leg backwards, raised one hand palm forwards, and kept the other one low, at her waist.
Her cousin breathed deep, flaring his nostrils.
They both kicked off the ground, hurtling towards each other.
-----
Kakashi had both eyes open.
They weren't both his, but life was a bitch like that sometimes. Besides, he could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he had found it instructive rather than amusing to watch two genins fight.
That the current fight was
both, well, that just gave him incentive.
He was one of the few, he knew, who could make out the shape of the young Hyuuga's seething silver chakra, both dark and deep, ancient in a way Naruto's passenger was ancient, horrifying in a way that made Gato's jibe about Zabuza being a baby devil very nearly true, a thing of twisted moonlight and tarnished silver with far too many hideously overgrown teeth and milk-blind eyes.
Curious.
At his side, the Leaf's most surprising genin was busy yelling equal parts encouragement and trash talk while his teammate alternately dunked on him and tried to join in.
Team Guy, despite having an actual teammate down there, was comparatively quiet, Lee watching in rapt attention whereas Tenten was holding on the railing hard enough to make her forearm muscles stand out and leave her knuckles white.
Next to him, Gai said, low: "She has the strength of a Sage."
Kakashi nodded. It was a perfectly fair assessment, if unforgivably incomplete. Like the slug princess on a drunken bender the sheer strength the Hyuuga heiress was mindlessly tossing around was almost as visually impressive as it was excruciating to watch.
In her defense, she did have her moments.
"Have you noticed…?" he began.
A slight, indignant nod of his head – of course he had. Below them, Hinata's fist flickered, folding time and space like an old shirt in its quest to reach her opponent.
At first, he had been certain it was a genjutsu of some sort. As he had continued to watch, it became increasingly clear that every fourth or fifth blow from the Byakugan Princess involved time-and-space
taijutsu. He shook his head, sighing to himself. If it had been anyone else…
"What a waste."
Gai tapped the side of his nose knowingly. "I think not."
"Mm?"
"Hers is not the conviction of an idler. It is the raging passion of youth in full bloom!"
Gai's voice, not easily suppressed, was on the upswing when, fortunately, it transitioned into a topic everyone had learned to reflexively ignore.
"Yeah, she is!"
…nearly everyone had learned to reflexively ignore.
Kakashi watched with mounting horror as Naruto and Gai turned towards each other, looking like they would begin the worst sort of alliance. With surgical precision, he cut through their budding bromance.
"You trained your student well," he said, pointing down towards the long-haired Hyuuga, who was currently spinning like the world's most dangerous top.
"You're that bastard's sensei?!" squawked Naruto who could really work on honing his basic observation skills a bit more.
Gai shrugged. "I am. He is much like you your sensei was at his age."
Naruto transferred his outraged look to Kakashi. "An asshole?"
Gai coughed into his fist. "A genius."
"I think I was both those things," put in Kakashi thoughtfully. "It's curious how often they overlap."
Naruto gave that answer a look of such utter contempt that Kakashi probably would have felt hurt if not for the fact that he had confronted Orochimaru not fifteen minutes prior. Good luck getting through
that mental trauma, kiddo.
"You're a lazy pervert!"
Owch. Touche, brat, touche.
His fellow jounin-sensei shot him a blinding, twinkle-eyed grin as he then turned to Naruto and said, solemnly: "You would know better than I, my hip and youthful rival's hip and youthful student!"
Naruto seemed oddly embarrassed by this, ducking his head down and gazing back at the ongoing match. A good thing too: the end was approaching. Neither of the two fighters below could maintain this frenetic output: one way or another the battle was going to end.
When it did, with a stupidly fantastic finale, blowing out half the lights in waves of shattered glass and leaving a crater in the middle of the arena that would do credit to a ninja taking their jounin exam, he sighed.
Life was about to become really,
really stupid.
-----
Ino had never seen Shikamaru so at a loss for words before, and she'd been there for when Chouji had told them that he was going to teach them his clan's secret techniques in a transparent attempt to trick get them to go to more barbeques.
"What the
fuck," he finally said.
"Language," she admonished. Despite her best efforts, there was maybe a shade more spite in there than there should have been. Dear, sweet, forgettable Hinata had gone and left not only the kunoichi, but the rest of their graduating class in the dust. Her own tie with Sakura had become, in one stroke, something of an embarrassment.
Not that she wasn't proud of Forehead Girl – there was a lot to admire there. Konoha didn't raise no quitters.
He sighed, massaging the bridge of his nose. "This is going to be trouble."
"Why?" asked Chouji, good stress munching on chips in the half-dark.
"Well, first, the jounins messed up, stopping the fight before it was actually over."
Oh. Yeah, they had, hadn't they? Even Asuma-sensei, who didn't usually jump the gun like that.
"Second," he gestured towards the opposing stands, "I think Hinata accidentally took out the last Sound genin when they were fighting in the stands."
"There isn't actually a rule
against attacking a competitor other than your opponent while fighting in the preliminaries," Ino pointed out.
"Maybe. But it means we're down to three remaining contestants. Lee, that crazy sand guy and Chouji. If it's the redhead-"
"Not fighting him," Chouji mumbled between increasingly frantic munches.
"Good boy. Third, the arena's toast. Not a big deal-" as he spoke, the Hokage slammed his cane into the ground. There was a flash of gold, then a wave rippled out from the impact point, washing through the arena, restoring everything but the most cosmetic of damage in a display of power more impressive than that which had wrecked it. For some reason, there was a scattering of exotic petals floating in the air like the flowery version of a body flicker."Okay, apparently
not a deal at all, scratch that."
"Fourth?"
"The Hyuugas tied."
Ino thought back to that ridiculous final exchange.
"So wh-"
Before he could answer her question, the screen announcing the match-ups flickered to life, displaying the names of the next round.
Gaara of the Desert
vs
Chouji Akamichi
The bag in Chouji's hand popped explosively, scattering bits of chip everywhere.
