The Hyuga Clan Compound

Never before, in the history of the clan, had anyone ever run away. Being a branch family member was better than being clan-less; that was the general consensus. But now that their heiress had disappeared – well, not really; they'd be able to find her if they wanted to – it was causing a huge uproar within all levels of the clan.

For Hanabi, well, she didn't get why everyone was so surprised. For a clan so precious about their eyes, they were incredibly short on foresight. Anyone living under the constant threat of branding was bound to snap.

But there was no protocol for what to do if someone seceded from the clan. Missing-nin would be dealt with under Konoha law, but Hinata wasn't a missing-nin. She was still a citizen of Konoha, and was thus protected as a shinobi of the village. If they wanted to drag her out to court, they'd have to follow all the procedures just as if they were prosecuting another normal shinobi. The Caged Bird seal was specific to the clan only, not the rest of Konoha.

Konoha law specifically stated that anyone who was of age and wished to live separate from their family would be considered as an individual person. And since clans were just that – families – albeit very large and powerful ones – it meant that when Hinata had run away, she had become her own individual. Another run-of-the-mill ninja with no name or title.

If she was considered not a Hyuga, then the clan would not have the power to stamp her forehead. But she obviously still had the Byakugan, and Hyuga law stated anyone with a Byakugan not in the main line needed the seal. And yet, Hinata had not technically lost that spar, so she was not out of the line of succession yet.

But she was also no longer living within the Hyuga compound, and possession of a kekkei genkai did not automatically mean clan membership, as proven by Kakashi Hatake's case. Then again, he hadn't been born with those eyes…

Then there was the matter of dangerous implications for the clan. Should Hinata's secession be legally recognized by Konoha's higher-ups, it would set a precedent: if any branch family member wanted to secede from the clan, in order to avoid the Caged Bird seal on their children, they could do so, breaking up the power of the clan.

Konoha's major economy was from shinobi services, but lawyers made a good living anywhere. And Hanabi could foresee the legal quagmire about this piling up for months.

Her father, naturally, expected her to take the clan's side about this. Hanabi, naturally, was taking Hinata's side. And she knew, deep down, that every other clan member with a mark on their forehead was praying for freedom, too.

Konoha – one of Kakashi's few hiding spots not yet found by Gai

The most difficult part was already over, at least, in Kakashi's opinion. Most people never figured out how to breach the barrier between the three-dimensional earth-space and the extra sealing dimension required by teleportation. But Kakashi had had experience with Minato Namikaze's insane mathematical theories before, so it didn't take him long to catch on to that particular idea.

The tough part was in the execution. Kakashi just didn't understand how they expected this stuff to work. Sure, he could follow the numbers blindly and probably get the right result, but acting without understanding in seal work was extremely dangerous, and he wasn't taking any chances with his normally terrible luck.

Theoretically, teleportation was easy. Rather than drawing a line from point A to point B in earth-dimension, simply jump up to a higher dimension, cross there, and then jump back down to wherever you wanted to go. With the addition of a sealing dimension, bypassing time-dimension was easy (giving the illusion of instantaneous travel).

So the schematics were simple. Accessing bridge dimensions were one of the basic uses of sealing; anyone who could summon could understand this. But the execution was a different matter entirely.

There was still one part left for him to decipher, and that was, sadly, the center key around which the rest of the technique revolved.

Literally.

You couldn't teleport in space without a point of reference. But nowhere in his notes – and Kakashi had checked at least ten times − had Minato-sensei mentioned any points of reference.

In order to make the jumps accurate, one had to specifically define the location. Otherwise, you might just end up putting yourself in front of a flying kunai instead of behind it. Or worse, if for some reason the chosen coordinates were incompatible…there was no telling what would happen then. Maybe the user would be torn apart, or maybe they would become stuck in the bridge dimension forever, or maybe they might become wiped from existence because of some unaccounted-for dimensional anomaly.

Kakashi was many things, but suicidal was not one of them. Not after so many others had died so he could live.

The trouble was, a single fixed point of reference was impossible in a constantly changing world. One needed at least four non-coplanar points to define a single three-dimensional space. That was why the Hokage guard's transportation techniques took three people around a fourth person to work – because they were dealing with four seals at once. Meanwhile, techniques like Kawarimi or Shunshin didn't count because they operated with the basis that you, visually, already knew where you were going to go, in earth-dimension only.

But Minato-sensei had only used one seal to define a path of travel. What's more, he put them on mobile objects – his special kunai, for example – and always ended up in the right place even if he didn't know where they were. Which was, by all accounts, impossible.

Theoretically, someone could create a centerpoint and bury it deep underground in a secret location and hope that tectonic displacements didn't change it too much, but…no. There was still too much uncertainty; too much error. Minato-sensei had been nothing but thorough. A shortcut like that wouldn't have been good enough for him. And it certainly wouldn't be good enough for Kakashi.

Thus, Kakashi was forced to conclude that there was no such thing as a perfect anchor. In any event, relying on an anchor was too dangerous. The world was constantly changing.

You cannot have an invariable point of reference in a universe where all motion is relative.

But how did Minato-sensei do it, then? Did he just not have an origin? Kakashi certainly had never seen him use one. But how would that have worked? You needed an origin! It was just flat-out impossible otherwise. Was there some secret way to teleport without an origin?

No. Kakashi was crazy, and unconventional, but not that crazy and unconventional. There were certain facts of life that could not be disputed. If you held a match to straw, the haystack would burn. If he ignored Gai, Gai would come and find him anyway. If his heart was ripped out, he would die. And if he didn't use an origin, he'd just get himself lost in dimensional space forever.

There had to be an origin.

There had to be a fixed reference point.

There had to be something that Kakashi was missing.

Think, Kakashi! What is the one thing that remains constant every time the Hiraishin is used, regardless of everything else going on around the user –

Oh.

Oh.

God, he was stupid.

The one thing that remained constant every time the Hiraishin was used – it was the user, of course! The user himself was the fixed point of reference – hence the reason why Kakashi never saw Minato-sensei plant another one down in the earth.

And this was where it got confusing once again. How could the user – the moving person – be the anchor, the one thing that had to stay fixed? It seemed contradictory. How did the Yondaime continuously compensate for a continuously moving origin?

Because he didn't.

Motion was relative. Motion was always relative.

When using the Hiraishin, you don't teleport to another spot on earth. You stay fixed, and that spot moves up to meet you. It went against common sense – but when you were floating around in outer space – or, in this case, just another bridge dimension – with no other points of reference except for yourself, that was what everything would seem like. If he hung upside-down from a tree, he'd know he was upside-down because of gravity. Remove the earth, and now everyone else was upside-down, not him.

The user is the invariable point of reference!

No wonder it made no sense. He had been reading the whole thing with the earth as his point of reference, instead of the user, this entire time.

Talk about blaming the cartographer for reading the map upside-down.

If the origin had been a separate point from the start and finish, then of course the technique would fail – you can't change both start and finish at the same time to compensate for a change in the origin's location. You can't move only one point in a triangle and call it the same triangle. The origin was always fixed by definition; the world literally revolved around it.

Now this was why Minato Namikaze had been hailed as a genius. It was so brilliant. So brilliant, but oh so simple. With just that one realization, his late teacher had solved both the problem of finding a fixed origin of reference and making the origin something that could be kept track of without tampering by a third party.

Unless the user was also destroyed, taking that reference point with him, of course. But Kakashi was pretty sure that in such a situation, the lack of a Hiraishin origin marker would be the last of his worries.

Kakashi smiled triumphantly to himself.

Take that, Jiraiya.

And then he looked at his clock.

And his calendar.

And the stubble on his chin.

Shit…how long have I been working on this thing?

Tanyu

As I found out, the Butterfly was actually a title, a nickname given to Lady Arakawa's most senior member in her informant network. There had been multiple Butterflies throughout the years, but given the recent deaths, she, the current Butterfly, had been the last.

Both Lady Arakawa and the Head Secretary, gone. It had come as a surprise to both of us, really. She had not expected it to happen. Certainly not so quickly.

That she had expected it to happen at all, however, was what made me look twice at the situation.

The Daimyo's palace was still in a state of shock. Naturally, that meant gossip was everywhere – though, amazingly, none of the stories were even close. Apparently, our lockdown on all information sources was doing better than I thought it would. Meanwhile, the ANBU teams investigating the Head Secretary's murder had come back stating that the trail had gone cold a few kilometers into the Earth Country border.

Which basically told me jack all, because any competent assassin would do that if they wanted to make their story even slightly believable.

Once again, I was reminded how dangerous shinobi were in the minds of men. Boogeymen, in the night. Ghosts, phasing through walls. And you are training to become one of these monsters. That someone could sneak past a whole platoon of guards for multiple silent kills was something that would keep even me up at night, let alone someone without chakra. Even the most intelligent and observant people, civilian or shinobi alike, could disappear in a second.

I could could only hope that the other nations didn't take advantage of the new power vacuums to start something nasty. For all of their faults, the Head Secretary had been a very intelligent man, and with Lady Arakawa's help, they had undoubtably been an unstoppable power in the capital. They were the two pillars that held up the strength of Tanyu, and now they were gone and the Daimyo was struggling to fill the voids they left behind.

Well. With Lady Arakawa gone, leadership of her flock of chambermaids naturally passed to the Butterfly, so that was one half of the gap gone. Without a noble title or property to call her own, however, the Butterfly didn't have the protection or privileges Lady Arakawa had. If she was going to keep her head, she would need allies. Force, to go with her mind.

"Hello, shinobi-san," she said, holding up significantly better than Lady Arakawa had under the stress of interrogation. "I hope your mission is going well."

"As well as it could go," I replied. "Does the death of your mistress sadden you at all?"

She shrugged. "She did a great wrong to an innocent man. Sometimes we must accept that the people we looked up to did a bad thing. In that case we must also accept the consequences."

"You're surprisingly well-versed for a simple nameless chambermaid." From what I had gleaned about her during our cleanup sessions, she had no name. If she had been given one, she did not know it, for her parents had died before she could remember anything, and among the upper class she was only another speck of dust on the ground. She had not been important enough to have any name, other than "you there". I leaned against the wall, letting the light from the oil lamp glint against my sharpened kunai. "Let's stop dancing around each other, Butterfly. What do you want?"

She smiled. "I want a lot of things. You'll have to be more specific than that."

"Let's start with Lady Arakawa. You told her that the Head Secretary was going to turn against her. Was he really, or were you lying to cause trouble? And who was he conversing with, that made you so sure it was Konoha nin?" Ino asked.

"I would never lie to my mistress," she protested demurely. "I have served her faithfully for many years, since she was but a little girl. As for the 'who' – if you children don't know then I could hardly tell you."

"You know what I think? I think you planned this," I accused. I was guessing at this point, but it was a very logical guess. "You weren't as loyal to Lady Arakawa as she thought you were. You had your own agenda – to break the power monopoly Lady Arakawa and the Head Secretary held over the rest of Tanyu. And it worked. Too well, I'm afraid, because now they're both dead."

As Ino was still new to her family's mind-reading techniques, she couldn't shift through memories very quickly yet, and required someone else to externally prompt her targets to efficiently find the right answers. I only meant for my questioning of the Butterfly to be a blind shot, but I must have hit close to the truth because her carefully composed face twitched. Ino's mouth shot up into a smirk – she'd found something.

"Well?" I pressed.

She looked as if she wanted to continue speaking in riddles, if only to extract more information from me, but one look at my blade disabused her of that notion.

"I expected Lady Arakawa to cause trouble over it," she whispered. "I didn't plan for anyone to die. I thought, that if they both lived and started plotting against each other…"

"…They'd cover your own movements. You failed to recognize just how quickly and strongly Lady Arakawa would react to the betrayal. So where does that leave you?" I had to get the truth from her. It could mean life or death for us, depending on what she knew, and who she would tattle to. "Where are you from? Who do you work for?"

Unlike Lady Arakawa, she hadn't done anything that would legally warrant an execution. She was only following orders, and it wasn't her fault that her employer had overreacted. She hadn't killed anyone or sold state secrets.

But if she had even the slightest possibility of betraying us…I shot a glance at Jiraiya, who had the same worried look on his face. We had no excuse for killing her, not like Lady Arakawa. And yet I could strike her down right here, right now, and make it look like an accident, if I wanted. Then there would definitely be no potential witnesses left.

Of course, that would be a terrible thing to do, and no doubt Jiraiya and the other Jonin would put me on a watchlist for even suggesting it.

Fire country native. Born in Tanyu, and grew up poor, Ino told me over her mental connection. It was still weak, but considering that we were standing only a few feet apart and sharing eye contact besides, anything stronger was entirely unnecessary. Besides, she was twelve. This wasn't a matter of skill, but endurance. Only time and practice would grant her the ability to telepathically communicate over many kilometers like her father.

No shinobi contact? I asked.

None whatsoever. Ino smiled. The next Head Secretary is slated to be a more progressive man, if she gets her way. She's planning a revolution of the common people.

A peasant revolt? I couldn't believe it. That was treason, and a very stupid idea besides. They rarely worked because of a lack of training, supplies, and organization. Besides, Fire Country was already well-fed and prosperous. No one would risk their head to back one right now. It would only get put down quickly and bloodily, and do more harm than good. Not to mention, with anarchy and civil war came instability. They would devour themselves on the inside while leaving their backs exposed to the enemy. Even if they did win, they'd be facing opposition from loyalist factions – and from the neighboring countries wishing to strike them down before their own peasants got the same idea − for years on after.

Not a violent revolution, Ino corrected. More like…a gradual shift in policy. She wants the people currently in positions of powers knocked out so she can stack them with more progressive thinkers, who would be more open to her agenda. She sent me a list of the names of nobles that the Butterfly had anonymously assisted up to high positions in the past, many of whom were now in a direct position to fill many more recently vacated titles and offices.

And given that the Butterfly had been around this place for decades, that list was quite long.

She's been working her whole life for this, Ino told me.

To say I was impressed was an understatement. This Butterfly lady was smart – a good deal smarter than I had initially given her credit for, and I hadn't ever thought her to be stupid by a long shot. She might have gone through this completely undetected, too, had Ino not already learned her interrogation techniques. The mind-reading abilities of the Yamanaka, I decided, were just as ridiculously overpowered and unfair as the Sharingan under these circumstances – only far more subtle.

A mere chambermaid, influencing national policy. Forget killing her; this was someone I wanted on my side. A secret for a secret.

See anyone named Danzo Shimura in her head? I asked Ino.

Ino was confused, but looked anyway. Who is that? Is he a shinobi?

I'll explain later; I promise.

She hasn't come into contact with any shinobi. She only figured out the Head Secretary was dealing with them when she saw him reading a seal-activated note, Ino explained, sending me a memory. The Head Secretary, still alive, only a few days ago. He had a folded piece of paper in his hands, with random black squiggles on the outside.

I wondered what they were meant for, as they couldn't possibly hold together in a real sealing environment, before realizing that this was the Butterfly's memory, not mine. The Yamanaka technique was limited by the capabilities of their target, and human memory wasn't perfect. Her brain could only copy down what she could decipher, and since she was a civilian with little knowledge of fuinjutsu, that was what they translated to. As the Head Secretary opened the note, however, she could read the writing just fine, or what she could see from her vantage point.

Vote yes on proposal – wait for – [?]

So she hadn't been lying, then – though she had told the truth with deceitful intentions.

The Head Secretary in the memory closed the note, and it burnt itself. I exited Ino's mind, and returned back to the Butterfly, now with some more ideas on how to deal with her.

She was staring at the kunai in my hands apprehensively. Having felt the effects of Ino's interrogation, she knew she was caught. Even without being a Yamanaka, I knew what she was thinking now. Lady Arakawa had been dependent on one man – the Head Secretary – for survival. She had foolishly thought she could live without him, and as a result drove both of them to their graves. (That was a lesson, to pick and choose your allies carefully.) But the Butterfly wasn't dependent on anybody – rather, many people were dependent on her, now that Lady Arakawa was gone and she was managing the network.

"What are you going to do to me?" the Butterfly asked carefully.

"That depends on how much I can trust you. How do I know you're not working for someone else already?"

I knew that she wasn't, but checking twice was always a good idea. Perhaps I could glean some more about her, from her answer.

She thought about it. "If I had, I wouldn't have tried to give you that letter. You know how important that is. There are better ways to frame someone or buy their trust than give away something so important to his cause."

"And your cause?" I looked at her plain uniform, her calloused hands. "The common people," I inferred. "You have dedicated your life to upsetting these nobles."

She tilted her head and stared at me silently for a good ten seconds.

"You're a scary kid, you know that?"

"I've been called worse," I said, thinking of Anko. "The point remains…I am a shinobi. I work for the Daimyo, and said nobles. These are seeds of rebellion. You could face execution for this."

Okay, not really, but always best to enter negotiations with a strong hand.

She saw through me right away. "You'd have to prove it. Me, a simple chambermaid? What could I do? I am loyal, in that I serve Fire Country and the Daimyo. If my opinion of competent people differs from others, I am entitled to that right, commoner or not. I've been doing this for decades, darling. "

Konoha's clans held on to their advantages because of secret techniques and genetics. But also, because clanless shinobi, while at a disadvantage, still had the opportunity to rank above or marry clan members by their own merit. My mother, for example, and the majority of Konoha's Jonin. Revolutions were less likely if the option of social mobility was the easier and more available path.

Oh, there was still plenty of behind-the-scenes quarrelling and backstabbing, as I knew all too well by now, but they were based on ideology and leadership debates more than class structure. The divide between nobility and the lower classes in Tanyu, however, was much more rigid. Everyone got the same basic rights in theory, at least – the days of serfdom had disappeared at the end of the Warring Clans era – but someone like the Butterfly couldn't marry up.

"That's nice. You know, shinobi share similar opinions on class structure. Our ranking system is merit-based."

Mostly.

I neglected to mention the Hyuga clan.

"Is that so?" she asked.

"Sure," said Naruto, understanding just as well as I that at this point, we needed as many contact points as we could get in Tanyu. Trained shinobi with their easily accessible records on file could only go so far. Given our starting point, the Butterfly was our best option for a point of contact. We had to get her on our side now, before she decided to cast her lot in with anyone else. "We could help each other."

Because we were Konoha shinobi, and Konoha shinobi were loyal to Konoha. We didn't care about policies that went on in the capitol as long as they didn't affect us.

She narrowed her eyes at us. "How can I trust you?"

"You can't, not really. But let's face it. We already know what you've been doing, and if we wanted to turn you in or stage an 'accident' for you we'd have done it already," I explained.

"Really, we're giving you a heads-up in advance," Jiraiya said, understanding my intentions immediately. "Legally, you might be innocent, but that doesn't mean people won't try to protect their anonymity anyway."

She smiled grimly. "People like you?"

I shrugged. "People like us…or other people like us who aren't us. I promise you, we're completely in the dark about this, too. Either way, you'll have to be careful about who you reveal information to. Even if they are one hundred percent trustworthy, the mere principle of breaking the silence might be enough to call an assassin down on you. So. Either you go through this with at least a few shinobi who are willing to give you a chance…or you go through this alone."

"Fine. Deal." Her hand reached for mine, but then she warily drew it back again. "How do I know you won't betray me, like the Head Secretary tried to do with Lady Arakawa?"

I rolled my eyes. "Because I'm not an idiot, that's why. If I killed loyal allies every time they lost their 'use' like every other stupid tyrant, no one of talent would want to work with me anymore, and I'd be left with no allies."

She stared at my outstretched hands for a very long time. As in, long enough that my arm started getting tired. But I refused to drop it until I had an agreement from her.

My persistence paid off, and she took my hand with a smile. "Fine. I believe you," she said.

"And I you. We look forward to working with you. Butterfly."

A/N: No bonus this week, sorry.

Quick poll instead: before the reveals, who did you think was responsible for the "suicide"? (I remember getting lots of Danzos, the Guard captain, the Butterfly, and a few correct with Lady Arakawa.)

Also, who would win in a fight, Zabuza vs. Kisame? What about Zabuza and Haku vs. Kisame?