Summary: Hinata runs. Her muscles scream their fatigue, pushed past the limits of their endurance. She ignores them. She does not have time to stop, does not even have time to slow down. If she slows down they will catch her, and that will be the end of that

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

--

Hinata runs.

Wind whips by her face as she half leaps, half hops from tree branch to tree branch in the odd gait of a shinobi. Her muscles scream their fatigue, pushed past the limits of their endurance. She ignores them. She does not have time to stop, does not even have time to slow down. If she slows down they will catch her, and that will be the end of that. She runs.

Sometimes it seemed like she had always been running; her entire life a speeded blur of images and events she barely caught out of the side of her eye before she was past them. She has always been running from one thing or another, the disappointment in her father's eyes, the glare of her cousin, the duty of a shinobi of the leaf.

A branch snaps by her face, cutting a line of red across her cheek. She has countless such scratches across her body. They are all forgotten in her desperate flight, even the one painted by an opponent's sword across her ribs. She didn't, and still doesn't, have time to properly bind it. A strip of tattered purple torn from her jacket at least holds the majority of her blood inside her.

The adrenaline that at first had pumped through her veins is now long gone, along with the tired determination that had followed it. Now all she has is fear, fear not of what follows her, but of what will happen if she stops, of what will greet her then. Running is all she has ever been good at, and now is not the time to try anything new.

The shinobi following her are as near silent as a human can be, and make her tired footsteps seem like the falling of boulders in comparison. She cannot bring herself to care. Speed is all that matter now, all that has ever mattered. Stealth had not helped Konoha, had not kept it from being gutted and torn down by the combined might of hidden sound and Akatsuki's missing nin proxies.

Stealth hadn't helped Naruto.

The memory still brings a lump to her throat, still causes her eyes to tighten in anticipation of tears that will not come. She has long since spent them all. The memory of Naruto's death is still clear in her mind; the look of surprise on his face as a black and red robed figure had driven a palm into his stomach, fingers bent like claws, chakra blazing from their tips. The fingers had pressed against Naruto's stomach for a sickening moment before sinking in, oddly bloodless, as if they were molding clay instead of human flesh. The seal on Naruto's stomach had blazed, liquid fire running along it, testing its boundaries. The man robed in black's hand had twitched, fingers drawing together under Naruto's skin, and in one swift movement he'd pulled his arm back, ripping something red and fiery and blazing from his stomach. Naruto had simply stood, looking oddly perplexed, a chunk of his stomach missing.

That was when the blood had come rushing back, gushing out of the hole in his stomach in a wave of crimson.

Naruto. She couldn't say she had ever really known him, and yet he had meant everything to her. He was the reason she'd made it through the academy, the reason she had never quite given up. One look at his sure smile, and she'd known that no matter how bad things were, he'd never give up, and that she couldn't either. Gone. All of that gone now.

A glint of steel flashes at her from one of the rare shafts of sunlight that filter through the leaf canopy. She is moving too fast to change her trajectory, and far to fast to stop. The blurred outline of the kunai whiz inches above her back as she rolls on her shoulder under them. She is back up again in the space of a heartbeat, legs still churning under her. She does not have the time to slow her pace, if she does the shinobi following her will end this just as fast as the one laying in wait will.

Her hands form a seal, and she focuses the little chakra that is left to her there. It is a technique for beginners in the academy, the very first ninjutsu technique taught, its only purpose to teach students to focus their chakra. It had taken her half a day of trying all those years ago to do it correctly, and it takes her half a second now. She channels the chakra up from her locked hands, up, up, up, until it reaches her eyes and unlocks the power sleeping there. Her foot launches her off of a branch just as her eyes activate, and the world slows around her, its every detail captured by the power of her eyes. Leaves swirl sedately to the floor, a spider spins it web, a squirrel scurries up a tree. The power of her eyes had always scared her, and now slips away from her almost as soon as it is activated, too little chakra left to sustain it. It has served its purpose though, and though her hands shake from exhaustion, she throws enough kunai that it does not matter, the shinobi falling from his perch testament to the fact that at least one found its mark.

Though barely ten seconds have passed since she first caught sight of the kunai, and her legs have not stopped moving the entire time, the shinobi trailing her are closer than they were before. They have split into a pincer, their pace increased. They sense that she is growing weak, and they are not far from the truth. Constant flight for nearly a day now has sapped her strength, and she had little enough to begin with.

She can almost hear her father's voice in her mind, berating her in a tone that swelled with disappointment, one that she had cringed away from, knowing that what he said was true but not wanting to believe it. She can almost feel Neji's cool gaze, the words he was not allowed to utter encapsulated in that gaze, fury and hate and utter disgust that he had to serve her, an inferior shinobi simply because she was born to a different father. She can almost hear Hanabi's whisper quiet voice, always so soft and polite and brimming with smug superiority, a voice that told her without words that she was weak. A pathetic, spineless wretch of a shinobi who had by some freak of nature been born to the Hyuuga.

Her foot snags on a trip wire and she hits the branch with a sharp crack. Her momentum won't let go of her though, and she's able to turn the movement into a roll, coil her legs under her and spring away just as the exploding tags activate. The shock from the explosion grabs hold of her, and tosses her through the air like she was little more than a fly. Ground and sky trade places, branches snapping around her as she tumbles helplessly through the air.

The ground rises to meet her and instincts that have been bred into her bloodline since the founding of her house allow her to shove just enough chakra into her feet so that her legs don't snap. They can only do so much though, and keeping her conscious is not part of that bargain. She comes back to only a moment later, the world refusing to simply fall away. Shinobi are in the trees above her. In a moment they will realize where she is and that will be the end of that.

Her limbs throb with pain, and the slivers from the exploding branch have adorned her with countless scratches. She does not think she can move, and has even less of an inclination to find out. What was the point? They were right, all of them, her father, Neji, Hanabi. She had run as fast as she could away from them back in her old life, had tried to avoid them, but now there was nowhere left to run. She should have realized that: no matter how fast you run, you can never outrun yourself.

The shinobi have noticed the path she carved through the branches on her way down. They flit down with an arrogance that is not misplaced. There is little that she could do now to stop them.

The wound in her side sends a spike of pain carving into her chest. She grits her teeth and snaps her eyes closed. In the darkness behind her lids she hears the shinobi alight on the ground with quiet thumps. Soon this would all be over. This was hardly how a Hyuuga should die, cornered and desperate, and too beaten to even put up a final defense, but she had never been much of a Hyuuga. The only reason she had even made it this far was because of Naruto. He had never given up, even when he'd been half dead, and Neji had stood above him and told him that his fate was too be beaten time and again. He had stood and fought and won. He'd shown her strength, and she had thought that if she only followed his example she could achieve it too. But in the end even Naruto had been defeated, his life blood spilled out across the ground.

Leaves crunch underfoot as the shinobi move slowly forward. Their pace is not set by caution, but by the sure knowledge that she cannot run anymore. The sound stops as they reach her. Silence reigns around her, and maybe that's why she hears him.

So?

Naruto's voice rings with an unearthly clarity, one that tells Hinata she must be imagining it. She is about to die, and would rather not spend the last moments of her life arguing with a voice in her head, but she responds anyway. You lost.

And? So what if I lost? His face rises to her mind, his half cocky, half arrogant grin plastered across it. I gave them a hell of a fight didn't I? You really just gonna sit there and let them kill you?

I

The silence is broken by the slow rasp of a sword being unsheathed, but Naruto's face stays firmly planted in her mind, his half grin challenging her.

I

Wind whistles around the sword as it begins its descent, swooping down like a falcon plummeting for its prey.

No.

The sword grazes the side of her cheek as she twists, jackknifing her body so that the legs of the shinobi are swept out from under him. The very last of her shuriken leave her hand in a wide arc of steel that forces the other shinobi to spring backwards, nicking the legs of the slowest. She meets the first shinobi as he falls, breaking his wrist and collapsing his windpipe in the same movement. She catches the sword falling from his limp grip and brings it up in a high slice that sparks as it meets the blade of another shinobi. Blades flash between them, striking with the sound of anvils, sparks lighting their trails. It is over in a moment, the other shinobi losing an arm and a throat in a succession of flickering slashes.

She has no time to think, no space to breath, as the other shinobi follow the first two, attacking her from every side like ravenous wolves. They outnumber her, outmatch her, and probably are not nearly as wounded as she is. She gives them no time to ponder their advantages. The Byuukagen answers her summons when she calls for it, and with it activated they are little more than a mass of flailing limbs and steel. It finds the patterns in their attacks and coordinates her movements to match. They tumble past her in a stream of slices and slashes, and she rides above all of them, a lily blossom taken by the currents of the rapids, tumbling and spiraling but never pulled under.

Soon it is over. She stumbles and falls to her knees, the world spinning around her. The line of broken branches from where she'd fallen earlier form a corridor through the air, allowing the sun to come to rest on the circle of forest where she is. She tilts her head back and closes her eyes, Naruto's face rising to her mind again.

This time she smiles back.

--

AN: Edited 5/9/08 for minor sentence reconstruction.