Enjoy!
The clamor to view the tournament line-up had grown into an all-out rush toward the arena. The first ones there had already been given a peek at the matching, and with giddy excitement they discussed in whispers with friends and strangers alike. The atmosphere had been charged with the anticipation of battles between legendary shinobi and promising rookies. Papers that were roughly the size of a grown horse had been posted prominently onto the arena walls, and festival workers holding rolled scrolls seemed intent on laying copies all across the grounds. Still, there was a just-picked appeal in being among the very first to know the future.
Sasuke and Hinata were mixed in with those who were pushing their way toward the arena, albeit without the same urgency. Slow though her pace was, Hinata's heart was beating quickly, and nervousness in her throat caused it to swell. She whispered over to Sasuke: "Can you see anything up there?"
Sasuke peered over at her for a silent moment, long enough to blink with a flat face. "Can't you?"
Hinata blushed rapidly and remembered who she was. "O-oh, you're right." She felt embarrassment, which was followed by a sense of comfort when Sasuke's warm hand fell onto her shoulder and squeezed quietly. Hinata smiled to herself and triggered her Byakugan, looking ahead to the arena wall and seeking the text on the decorated poster. Lines branching out at 30 degree angles split from top to bottom, leading like a progressive spider-web from one blank rectangle to another, until there were hundreds of such lines all leading to names, their letters stacked vertically to ensure that they would all fit together. Aside each name was a small symbol, representing the shinobi's village of origin.
There were three versions of the poster, one for each tier of the tournament to come. Hinata's eyes shifted over to the Advanced tier first, more comfortable in learning about Naruto and Sasuke's battles than her own. She spoke in a hushed whisper. "You're fighting Lee first, after all."
Sasuke nodded, his eyes closed in contemplation. Rock Lee was excited to face him, and the feeling was mutual, in fact. "The very first match; Lee is a hero, almost as famous as Naruto." His eyes opened, brows slanted with a little bit of spite. "The crowd wants to see the villain fight a hero, but Kakashi is holding Naruto for last. If I'm not wrong, Naruto is on the opposite side of the tournament, isn't he? We won't be able to meet until the final match."
Hinata scanned the page and pursed her lips. Her soft voice sang into Sasuke's ears with a note of confirmation. "That's right. Naruto is facing Darui, one of the Raikage's bodyguards. Killer Bee, the Cloud's jinchuriki, is in the set next to Naruto—they might be fighting in their second round if they both win."
Sasuke hummed with interest. He had spent so much time thinking about Lee and Naruto that he had neglected to think about the fights which would come second, third, and so on. "Mm. What about mine? Who's in the bracket beside me?"
Hinata's eyes opened with a bit of shock. "It says...Shino Aburame and Kiba Inuzuka," she read aloud with hesitation. "I didn't think Shino was interested; what's he doing there? And fighting Kiba...?"
Sasuke smirked. Even without knowing for sure, he could guess the reason with perfect accuracy. "Kiba wants to prove himself against me, and Shino wants to save him from it. Kakashi probably had a hand in that."
Hinata furrowed her brow and let out a slight whimper of concern. Kiba was determined to hurt Sasuke, and she worried about both of them. She worried that Kiba might get hurt, and that Sasuke might feel guilty about hurting him. Further, she felt a particular guilt in knowing that Kiba didn't stand a chance. "Shino and Kiba. They're both very strong." She addressed the situation generically, unwilling to divulge too much of her personal dilemma in public. Eager to dismiss the thoughts, she scanned further across the page to search for more familiar names on the Advanced list. "There are so many people...shouldn't there have been a qualifying round?"
Sasuke folded his arms across his chest, giving a customary flex of his left to test the response. Still sluggish, but he hadn't done enough fighting with it yet. If nothing else, a full-tilt battle with Rock Lee could serve as a jump-start. "I think Kakashi wanted to maintain the celebration of it; this isn't just a fighting contest, it's a victory lap." Sasuke looked up at the imposing architecture of the improved arena, admiring the stone and wood-work that had been hastily prepared by hundreds of hands, with not a thing out of place. "Win or lose, this is the chance for every shinobi to feel like a famous hero."
Hinata's concern turned to soft appreciation. "Some of you are already famous," She whispered while she looked to the massive artwork dangling from the archway into the arena, emblazoned with a stylized, oil-painted version of one of Naruto and Sasuke's most energetic photos. They were preparing to clash a Chidori with a Rasengan. Sasuke's expression had been 'artistically enhanced' to appear just a bit more menacing. Slanted eyebrows, dark shadows around his face.
Sasuke followed Hinata's gaze to the gently swaying tapestry; while she smiled, he frowned. "Famous, sure, but some of us aren't heroes." He turned a palm up, opening his fingers to show himself the Uchiha symbol which had been so lovingly etched into the leather by a skilled hand—the very same soft, pale hand that found its way to his other for a gentle and reassuring squeeze.
"You're a hero to me, Sasuke." She tried to lean her head against his shoulder, but he seemed to lean away from her. Afraid to be reassured, afraid to admit that she was right. He was more of a hero than he was ready to accept.
"Don't get distracted, Hinata," Sasuke sternly huffed as cover for his stand-offish tilt. His hand didn't close onto hers; something was bugging him, but not what he spoke of. "It's time to look at your opponent."
Butterflies left their cocoons in Hinata's stomach; a thousand of them at once, bashing the inner lining like lava chunks erupting from an angry volcano. She had always thought of the insects as a metaphor, but for the briefest few seconds she could swear that butterflies were genuinely fluttering around in her gut. She trembled when she saw her own name: "Hinata Hyuuga versus..." she trailed off, eyes narrowing. "Kaine Hamasaki?" She breathed shortly. "Who is that? It shows that he's from Konoha, but..."
Sasuke concurred, slightly disappointed by the revelation. "I've never heard the name."
Hinata breathed a sigh of relief. Her first opponent was going to be an unknown; maybe even an easy win. Though she felt a twitch of guilt for thinking so, she was actually glad to fight a stranger. "I hope I do well against him," she whispered.
"I've been training you as well as I can, Hinata. You'll defeat him, and you'll go on to defeat anybody else who comes up against you." He set his mind to work, picturing potential threats in the General tier. "Can you see Hanabi? What about Sakura?"
Hinata was still shaking slightly from the adrenaline of finding her own name, so her voice had a few jitters. "Sakura...she's fighting Choji first, and Hanabi is fighting someone named Tomi Minobe. She's from the Mist." As Hinata spoke, Sasuke's hand found the resolve to return to Hinata's shoulder, brushing gently through the thin fabric of her shirt, compressing her skin and muscle in a soothing way. Hinata shivered into a nervous, encouraging lean against the pressure. She gulped, and her fingers clutched into her palms. "A-and they're...far from me. If the three of us win every match, I'll only meet Sakura in the semi-finals, and won't have a chance to face Hanabi until the final round."
The order caused Sasuke's brows to relax slightly. "Sakura before Hanabi...interesting." His massaging fingers dug against the soft-firm texture of Hinata's shoulder, now finding himself quietly obsessed with the make-up of her. "We shouldn't think too far ahead. I've never heard of the name Hamasaki, but you shouldn't take him lightly. If I get the chance, I'll ask Kakashi about him tonight."
Hinata was trying hard to keep her breaths steady while Sasuke's fingers played at her tense shoulder. She was relaxing slowly into his impromptu massage. "Y-you're good at that..." she let slip, all but accidentally.
Sasuke's hand froze in place, but he didn't pull it back. He just held it there, mid-squeeze, and looked off to the side. He had been caught in the act of exploring. "You've got a lot of tension," he remarked as if he were a medical professional. Dispassionate, unaffected. "You shouldn't carry so much of it around."
Hinata breathed slow, resisting the urge to let out a groan of pleasure under Sasuke's fingertips. Such a sound shouldn't come from a lady, especially not in such a public place, but it was hard to avoid. The things he did to her—for her—were sometimes unspeakable. She quivered and rolled her shoulder, as if signaling for Sasuke to let her go—not because she wanted him to stop, but because she found herself wanting a little bit too much for him to continue. When she turned to him, looked him in the eye, and spoke, she was bright red all over again. "It's...it's been a rough couple of months...my body's not used to it."
Sasuke looked her over, as if taking a cue from the word 'body' to have a short study of her frame. All the excitement of the crowds flooded his ears, but the words meant nothing—he was hypnotized by beauty that was undeniable. His hand had fallen away from her shoulder as she had silently requested, but in his mind he had not stopped caressing her. "You're stronger than any woman I know," Sasuke warmly breathed. "Your body is fine. You just need to relax."
Hinata held a temptation within herself, a pull to accept a silent offer. As she locked her eyes to Sasuke's, she could still feel his fingers on her shoulder. She imagined the same touch on some of the other sore, aching parts of her body, and she wore the shame of it on her watermelon-tinted face. A princess should be poised, resistant to that kind of provocation. She failed herself and everyone who had taught her to behave like a lady when she utilized her new-found confidence to say something she couldn't even hear through the blood surging in her ears: "S-sometimes I need a little help...relaxing, I mean..."
Sasuke caught a wave of unfamiliar feelings, and he lacked the strength to respond without deepening the hole—a hole that was conveniently sized for two—that was being dug around them both. Sasuke inhaled long and slow, flooding his lungs with fresh air in an attempt to cleanse his bloodstream of the sensations rushing through his body. It accomplished nothing but to load his senses with her soft-scented perfume. Next, he closed his eyes and shook his head left to right a handful of times, a short, jittery jolt. The backs of his eyelids showed him the outline of Hinata; he had been looking at her so long that her silhouette had been impressed by the light into his vision. His hand came to his nose to pinch the bridge of it, trying anything he could to clear his head. He felt the texture of the hand-stitched Uchiha symbol against his skin. Why now? Why that moment? He could taste her lips on his, even as she was blushing as if ready to hear him say something. Something he wanted dearly to say, but his conscious mind hadn't admitted to the truth of it.
The pause between them became pregnant, then grew to be awkward as neither of them possessed the courage or resolve to step forward and speak what ought be spoken. The crowd flowed back and forth around them. The masses had been chattering eagerly about Rock Lee, about Naruto, about how the Raikage and the Kazekage were both participating in the Advanced Tier—news to Sasuke, but news he could not react to. His brain would surely catch up later, but it had been clogged. The impulses that should have moved his muscles had all been forced instead to lock his every nerve into place. His heart was beating hard; he could hear it in his head, and a quiet but certain part of his mind could hear Hinata's heart as well. This was the moment which they had each been dreading and anticipating; the moment for the truth to be spoken...
But as moments often do, it passed in silence. The world around them, though they had been oblivious to it, had continued to move. And they had been found.
"Sasuke!" sounded the voice, a common greeting of the day. Often, it came with spite and venom. Were humans capable of poisoning others with words alone, Sasuke would have been especially grateful for Orochimaru's gift of immunity to toxins. But this voice, this one now approaching the blushing and muscle-tense pair of Sasuke and Hinata, was nothing but cheerful. Overly cheerful, perhaps.
Sasuke was broken free of his haze, and Hinata as well. They stared, now loose from the impulse of the moment, but not loose from the words and feelings that had been shared. Something had permanently changed between them again. All their hopes, all their dreams, everything that either of them had ever wanted, grew to involve one another a bit more concretely. Soon enough, Sasuke feared, he would be incapable of imagining a life without the woman who stood before him.
"And Hinata!" came the next part of the greeting. Had it been one sentence? One single stretch, pulled apart by the time dilation of a heavy heartbeat? They had both experienced it, surely, as Hinata and Sasuke both turned with hazy reluctance to see the dark green attire of Rock Lee coming toward them. His hand was waving high in the air, ensuring that he could be identified over the sea of the crowd.
Hinata swallowed the lump that had been building in her throat for an entire day, and she forced a dry response, half-ready to cough. "Lee!" she spoke up, as much as her naturally-soft voice could muster over such a cacophony. She waved in return to him, drawing him over. Rescue, or interruption? She hadn't decided yet, but either way she was glad to be free of the paralysis.
Lee was weaving in from the direction of the arena, wading through the outer edge of the crowd, coming into a clearing just beside the outer arena walls. Hinata and Sasuke had stopped there, too, realizing that the crowd had left them behind. Rock Lee, a young man who was roughly a year older than Sasuke, held the youthful expression of a boy rather than a man. The skin of his face was smooth and softly curved, centered with big round eyes and encircled by thick brows and stiff lower lashes. His hair shimmered in the late-afternoon sun, and his challenging grin was nothing but friendly. "It is so very good to see you both." Lee bowed formally, a stiff and practiced maneuver that matched the staccato of his speech. "I have been looking forward to meeting you again most of all, Sasuke."
"Hey," Sasuke said in return, still dazed but returned to normal function. Lee's arms caught his eye, constantly bandaged. "I guess it's...good to see you, too," Sasuke forced out. He was making an effort to be more personable, but the tone of it was off-putting.
Rather, it would have been off-putting to somebody other than Lee, who seemed to misinterpret social implications on the regular. Some would call it confidence, others would call it obliviousness, but at the end of the day, Lee was a better man because of it. "I have seen that we are to fight one another in the first match of the tournament." He lifts from his bow, smirking with a gleam on the edge of his teeth. "I have come to apologize for eliminating you so early."
Sasuke felt a twinge of something exciting, an altogether different feeling from what Hinata inspired inside him, but it was just the chemical he needed to wash his thoughts clear at last. "It won't be like the last time," Sasuke said calmly, a hand coming to rest on his hip as his posture shifted slightly. "I've become more powerful than you can imagine."
"You are not the only one who has become strong, Sasuke. Our fight will surely be the most exciting of all." Lee's hand stretched out, thumb and pinkie vertically aligned, palm flat. "Let this handshake be a promise to you that I will hold nothing back."
Sasuke paused, looking to Lee's extended left arm with a strange feeling of wariness. He reached his own hand out, clutching Lee's for a brief shake. A mutual promise. "I'll take you seriously as an opponent, Rock Lee."
The response was just what Lee had been hoping for, apparently, as he clutched Sasuke's bandaged hand in his own and grinned with that same sparkling show of teeth. "A rematch, then. If you win, then our scores will be tied. After I win, it will be two to zero in my favor."
Sasuke blinked. He was getting an eerie feeling somewhere in his brain. Didn't Guy keep score with Kakashi like this? The implications were somewhat worrying, but Sasuke had promised himself to be more open to the occupants of the village. Although he wanted to dismiss the idea altogether, Sasuke accepted the challenge and gave a final tightening of his left hand against Lee's. "We can figure out a tie-breaker sometime." He matched confidence with confidence.
For a moment, Lee's eyes shot down to Sasuke's squeezing fingers, as if making a short note of his grip strength. When their hands came apart, Lee stuck his thumb up and stretched his arm out. "Then I will return to training. I have a feeling that, to fight you, I will need every push-up that I can manage. Farewell, Sasuke; Hinata." He nodded politely.
Sasuke nodded in silence, then Lee turned and ducked down to a kneel, priming himself for the leap that came next and sent him high into the sky. An impressive show of physical strength, which probably landed him somewhere in the vicinity of the training field.
Hinata had been mostly silent since Lee arrived, but she sighed sweetly when he had passed from sight. "You're smiling," she told Sasuke quietly, as if she thought he hadn't meant to be.
Sasuke thought about protesting, but he couldn't. "Yeah...I guess I am..." he uttered, letting it remain so.
In the dark, dustless innards of the house of mirrors, Hanabi's rubber-soled sandals silently trekked over newly-laid wooden flooring. The building was only about two weeks old, built in preparation for the festival, but heavy foot traffic had already produced scuffs and chips in its surfaces. Strange, then, that it was stone-silent now. The voice had beckoned her there, but when she thought in those terms, she began to wonder if she was going crazy. A voice? Whose voice? Maybe the voice was a manifestation of her jealousy. It had lured her there by playing at her insecurities.
Or perhaps it was her guilt, instead? The formless speaker had mentioned the men she killed in the alley. Well-deserved; they had attacked her. Still, they were shinobi of the Leaf; men with family and friends who must have mourned them. The Hokage had suggested that Hanabi should attend their funerals and face the consequences of her ability to kill, but she did not do so. Her father forbade it. Likely, he wanted to express the Hyuuga Clan's clout. Refusing a helpful suggestion from the Hokage was hardly a major crime, but in a period that was defined by cooperation, it was a defiant move. Hiashi seemed intent on holding the Hyuuga Clan independent from the wave of peaceful, easy feelings swishing through the Leaf's other leaders.
Hanabi had protested at the time: I killed them; I should face the consequences. She had been told that there were no consequences for self-defense. An enemy is an enemy, isn't it? The Hyuuga weren't like the Senju, nor the Sarutobi, clans which often mourned for the deaths of their enemies. The Hyuuga were more like the Uchiha: stern and driven, confident in their position within the village—outwardly, at least. Strangely enough like the Uchiha, they had also never produced a Hokage despite their potent abilities. Hanabi stopped her thoughts and steps beside one of the tall, standing mirrors. In the glass, she could see the bruises on her skin behind her make-up. The Byakugan made that kind of coverage worthless.
Hanabi's eyes had been active since the moment she stepped inside the house of mirrors, but even her potent vision could find nothing meaningful, no clues as to who she was looking for. The inside of the building was painted black and was windowless, dotted with specifically angled overhead lamps which illuminated the mirrors. Hanabi idly wandered the different arrays, unfazed by the perception-bending reflections and general trickery of the light. Her Byakugan allowed her to see things as they were, rendering her immune to such basic deceptions. Though, curiously, she did notice that each of the mirrors had been infused with a form of chakra. Similar enough, the wood had a soft glow to it. No doubt, the wood and glass were created by shinobi using Mokuton or Doton, respectively.
As an unfortunate side-effect, it was difficult for her to perceive any subtle oddities of chakra in the rooms. Everything blended together as a soft glow. Hanabi guessed that was why the voice had chosen the place. That, and more so than the darkness and the concealment, Hanabi was bothered by the heat. The lack of windows and ventilation made the house of mirrors stuffy and stale. It was a hot day outside, and standing in a black, windowless building offered no reprieve. She wandered in silence for a few more minutes, but as sweat started to bead on her forehead she grew frustrated and raised a hand, ready to punch the nearby wall. "Hey, I'm here!"
Just as before, just as she started to move defiantly, she was spoken to: "Don't go cracking anything, little Princess. I told you that, right? Don't destroy, just talk."
Hanabi tensed, tempted to punch through the wall anyhow. She was angry at the voice for what it had said; for its owner's association to the men sent to attack her. "I don't care what you said, I'm here to teach you a lesson." Her eyes strained, searching for the man in every corner. His voice was in her ears, now, not her head. That meant he was most likely somewhere in the room. She baited him into speaking again. "Why don't you come out and take a shot at me? First one's free."
The man replied from somewhere. To Hanabi, he seemed to speak from everywhere, but if she plugged her ears she could muffle his speech. It was a real voice, coming from somewhere physical. Rather, multiple somewheres. He echoed from multiple directions: "Listen, Princess Hanabi: I appreciate your spunk, but I don't want to fight. I've been instructed to offer you an opportunity."
Hanabi's jaw was tight with stress. If he chose to attack, would she be ready? She could tell by listening to his calm voice that he was experienced; likely an assassin, one who could kill a target without leaving a trace. Anbu? Root? She continued her feigned interest: "Tell me your name. If it's an opportunity, we should build a little trust."
"That's the idea," he returned. "You can call me Nissho," he tacked on as an afterthought. "I've got no reason to hide anything from you. You'll have accepted my offer before leaving this room today."
Hanabi smirked with defiant luster. "Nissho, huh? I've already killed two of your buddies. What's a third after that?" She was still scanning the room, scrutinizing the chakra signatures. In the process of doing so, she saw the circular array of mirrors she had wandered into.
"Since we're being honest, you should know you're not capable of killing me." From the other side of—no, not the other side, but from within every mirror at once, a figure came into view, as if in another identical room within. He was there, but not there. "We, as an organization, have one intent—we seek damaged souls, and we fix them. We give life meaning again. We restore lost purpose."
Hanabi saw him step 'into' the mirrors, so she searched her surroundings for 'the real one,' thinking that he must have been abusing the mirrors to conceal his real self. "You're pretty brave to step into the open against the Byakugan," she murmured with quiet confidence.
For what Nissho was, he looked imposing. A large-framed man, probably six and a half feet tall, wearing a dark black robe that stopped just a handful of inches from the floor. His face was a white mask that was smooth like an egg-shell, nothing but a trio of small slits for a mouth and two round eyes to differentiate it. Nissho answered her confidence without a change in pitch: "Byakugan or not, it doesn't make a difference. You won't lay a hand on me. You're not strong enough." He stepped forward, touching his black-leather hand against the inside panel of every mirror. There were dozens of him; the room Hanabi had wandered into was one of the larger displays, with slanted mirrors installed into a circular set of walls and corners. Somehow her mysterious host had stepped 'in front' of her reflection to occupy the visible whole of each panel.
"Not strong enough...?" Hanabi snapped, and her voice briefly cracked. "That's not going to work on me," she hardened herself, planting her feet. "I know better."
Nissho shrugged his shoulders inside the mirrors. His voice began to echo with a slight cadence, now speaking from every mirror with the slightest fraction of a delay between each voice. "Your sister...she has gotten a lot stronger, hasn't she? Strong enough, I'd say, to take your place again as heiress." Nissho lifted a hand, brushing the 'chin' of his mask to simulate a deep thought. "Didn't you wrestle that title from her to begin with? It'd be a shame if you worked so hard for all these years just so she can take it back."
Hanabi felt her buttons being pushed, and although she knew that there was no reason for this man to have such a profound affect on her emotions, she couldn't resist a further tightening of her fingers in her palms. Blood seeped again from her skin. Fingernails that had been nicely painted were now flecked by deep red. "I'm not going to lose my place to her...she wouldn't do that to me..."
"She wouldn't have, you're right. Not until she met him." Nissho asserted pointedly, knowing a little too much about the situation. "Everything changed when he returned to Konoha. Sasuke sent out ripples like stones in a pond, spreading out and disturbing the natural order. Overlapping, magnifying, disrupting. Now, little girls who used to be princesses are one misstep away from being tossed into the garbage." He softly sucked in a hiss, as if wincing in pain. "That's gotta hurt, kiddo. I feel for you; so does my boss. That's why I'm here."
Hanabi felt a push of anger in her, but she fought it back. Anger was easy; she had dealt with it before. What followed next was less familiar. Jealousy, yes, but something deeper. Self-pity? No, not quite. It was a fear of becoming nothing. A broken tool. Her entire life had been built around her place in the clan, and now it was being threatened. She denied it, fought back with a hard swipe of her hand through the air where she thought Nissho's invisible body must have been. "Shut your mouth, or you're gonna eat that mask..." Her voice was calm, but beginning to quiver.
Unbothered, Nissho continued to speak from the mirrors: "Do you know about the man who was sent to recruit Hinata to the cause?" he asked idly, evidently believing himself to be quite safe from harm, even as Hanabi flailed her hand through the air. "His name is Shell."
Hanabi paused at the mention. She recalled the story of the villain, the monster of metal that had been utterly broken by Sasuke. "Yeah...I know about him...he got busted up and thrown in prison." She sneered and breathed a little harder. The heat was making her uncomfortable, but her confidence wasn't yet shaken. "You wanna join him?"
A careless chuckle came out of the mirrors. "He's one of our prototypes...a test subject, of sorts, for a new technique. He was strong; far stronger than your sister was at the time. If not for the interference of Sasuke Uchiha, we would have chosen her instead." Nissho opened a palm, clutched thin air, and sighed as he opened his fingers again to let nothing escape. "Shell failed his mission, and now he's collecting dust on a shelf someplace. I, on the other hand, have never failed a mission. If Shell was a prototype, then you can call me the final product."
Hanabi rolled her eyes, folding her arms and throwing out a sassy dismissal. "Yeah, yeah, you're tough and scary. That must be why you're hiding behind glass."
Nissho shook his hundred heads slowly back and forth, the reflections and voices staggered. "I'm not hiding behind the glass; I'm protecting you from your own reflection." He stepped aside, then, allowing Hanabi to see herself in all the mirrors. Her light application of mascara had begun to drip down beneath her eyes due to humidity. With such a stark black framework, she could recognize doubt in her gaze as she stared back at herself—she looked around to see that her hundred selves were all glaring at her, a trick of the mirrors forcing the perception that she was being surrounded; judged. She was infinitely disapproving of her own self. Nissho continued speaking, again with one mirror sounding just slightly before the others. "You feel it, don't you? The weight of your coming inferiority." He sighed. "They say that your harshest critic is always yourself, but I think that's especially true for you."
Hanabi felt a new wave of fear. She looked upon her own reflection and saw the uncertainty of the past few months crawling on the surface of her skin. Her own pale, milky eyes stared at her, and she was disgusted by what she saw. "I'm not inferior. I'm going to beat Hinata like I'm supposed to, and we're going to keep being sisters...I don't care what you say." She doubted it. She had seen Hinata facing off with their father—Hiashi Hyuuga, pushed back and forced to lash out to save himself. When did the meek older sister attain such fearsome power?
Nissho seemed to latch onto the vulnerabilities in her thought process. "If you lose...will she still be your sister? Will you ever be able to forgive her for replacing you?"
Hanabi gulped, unprepared to hear her own insecurities spoken to her ears. She steeled herself regardless. "I'm not going to lose." She found it inwardly shameful that she couldn't say 'yes.'
"Mm, but you will lose if you fight her the way you are now. You're a killer, Hanabi, but you've gotten used to preying on the weak. You haven't been challenged." He stepped back into the mirrors from within, blocking what was behind, rescuing Hanabi from her own judgement. Then he stepped out of frame again on the opposite edge, this time revealing an image that Hanabi was not expecting. The mirrors now showed false reflections of the two men she had killed—smiling, laughing, an arm around one another's shoulders. "They were deep in debt, desperate to secure food and shelter for their families. Times are hard, so they took the only job that could pay enough to guarantee their futures. These men died together in a dark, scum-covered alleyway because you were their target...but don't mourn for them, Hanabi. They died with a purpose on their hearts. They were paid for their failure; their families fall asleep with tears in their eyes, but food in their stomachs."
Hanabi bit the tip of her own tongue, as if trying to clamp away a sensation in her mouth. The taste of blood that wasn't hers. "I don't feel sorry for what I did to them. They attacked me, so they died. That's how it goes."
Nissho came back into frame, nodding his masked head. "You're absolutely right. They deserved it. I'm not putting you on a guilt trip, Princess Hanabi—I love that you don't hesitate. It's what makes you a better person than your sister."
Hanabi shook her head. "I'm not a better person than she is. She's always been the nice one, the generous one, the pretty one..."
Nissho sighed regretfully. "Yes, but you were the strong one...the disciplined, the loyal, the daddy's girl. You ripped the inheritance from your sister's hands because you were strong enough to do it." He paused, letting the imagery settle into his target's mind. "But you're not the strong one anymore. She's going to rip it back from you."
Hanabi clenched her teeth hard, and she screamed for the first time at him: "No, she would not do that to me! She doesn't even want what I have!"
"That used to be true. But if it still is, why is she training to beat you?" Nissho asked, stroking his mask's underside. "If you lose to her, you won't be the strong one any longer. You'll have nothing to call your own." He echoed again, and as a result Hanabi finally obtained the information she had been waiting for.
Abruptly, Hanabi broke her cycle of self-imposed misery, and with a strategic lashing out, she clutched a fist and streaked toward the mirror which she now knew to obtain Nissho's real self—the one that always moved slightly before the others, the one from which the voice always rang the earliest. It was only a fraction of a second, perhaps a tenth of a tenth of a tenth, but the delay was there. She had isolated it. She knew that this was the mirror—and her balled fist struck glass with shattering force, breaking the flow of conversation and sending crystalline shards scattering across the wooden floor. Her hand found a flat panel of thick timber behind the glass, completely decimating the place where Nissho had once stood. She felt the pain between her knuckles, fragments of broken mirror stuck shallow into her skin. Little bits of blood trickled down between her fingers. She was panting, her hair all disheveled from the sudden burst of movement, but she had a ferocious smirk on her face.
For a moment, there was total silence. The other mirrors were empty. Hanabi's lithe body rolled and rose with heavy breathing, not from exertion but from the weight of both emotional turmoil and stifling heat. Silencing the voice was all she could do to prevent herself from spiraling down. She sighed with relief and pulled her fist loose from the dent she punched into the sturdy wood, then she shook her hand and brushed it with her opposite palm to dislodged the fragments she had been stuck with. "I told you to shut up," she proclaimed with a confident sneer.
Just in time to disrupt her surety: "You're still a rookie," Nissho echoed from every mirror simultaneously, absent from view but very much present. "But you're a skilled rookie. He told me you'd decode the bait, but I thought you'd lack the skill." The chuckle that followed was one in response to an old joke, a classic shared between friends. "Then again, I guess I should stop doubting him. He's never been wrong." Nissho appeared yet again, this time only present in a single mirror. His balled hand tapped the glass from the other side with two knuckles, making an audible knocking sound. "You passed the test; it's a rare gift to have that kind of perception. Even with your Byakugan disrupted by all the chakra in this room, you found me out."
Hanabi looked to the single mirror containing Nissho, and she did not hesitate to howl out and dive across the room to deliver another glass-breaking strike with her non-wounded hand. This time, the broken fragments continued to show Nissho's frame as they fell to the floor, projecting his likeness even on the shards that had lost the reflective backing. Hanabi began to pant again, the rush of the attack driving her adrenaline wild. Blood now dotted both of her fists.
"Look at all that latent potential...imagine the things you could do if it were unleashed all at once." The shards on the floor were speaking, and Hanabi's response was to stomp on them aggressively, breaking them into the smallest pieces she could manage.
"Stop it, stop it, stop it! I'm not going to betray my sister!" When the voice went silent, Hanabi didn't wait this time for Nissho to reappear, instead bolting for the nearest exit with a frantic sprint. The lack of windows meant that the nearest exit was to make a hole through the closest outside wall, so she braced herself to jump hard through the thick wood.
Abruptly, every mirror in the circle began to emit horizontal flows of light, beams zipping past her to meet at a singular point, gathering together in a bright vortex in front of Hanabi's face. Before Hanabi could escape the ring of reflections, she recoiled, brought her arms up to defend, and bounced backward to avoid the attack. As the crackling mass of energy grew, Nissho stepped physically out of the light as if it were a portal born of chakra.
As he emerged, it became evident that he was not coming from a portal, but was shaping his body from the very energies that had gathered. He echoed through the light until his head took shape and spoke directly. "Come on, Hanabi, you think I'm asking you to betray your sister...?" Nissho tensed his fists, spread his arms out to flex his chest muscles, and groaned. "I'm offering an opportunity to hold onto your purpose, that's all there is to it. We can grant you power, but you get to decide what you do with it." Nissho spread the fingers on each hand, letting ethereal, glowing strings of yellow light dangle from each tip and sway in an imaginary breeze. "No strings attached."
Hanabi kept her guard up, but hesitated. "What do you mean by 'no strings?' You think I'm an idiot?"
He tsked. "You're not an idiot, but you're on the verge of losing your purpose. Our whole deal is to restore lost purpose. We've been working on people for years, and Shell was one of them. All he wanted was the chance to use his talents. We sent him after your sister; if she fought back, he'd have his wish granted. If she didn't, well, we'd have sent him your way next." During the exaplanation, Hanabi found an opening in Nissho's defense and struck forward, jutting her open palm in a strike aimed for the lower left side of his abdomen. Nissho reacted without delay, swatting Hanabi's wrist aside at waist level with a casual bump of the back of his left hand.
Hanabi was startled by the swiftness of Nissho's defense. All of her momentum had been sent aside, and she twirled impulsively, spinning to spare herself the shame of landing on her knees. Stabilized, she snarled. "So you admit that you sent him to kill her. If I work with you after that, it's a betrayal to her. To our family."
Nissho huffed. "Kill her? Nah, she wouldn't have died. Shell brought her someplace private to have the same discussion I'm having with you now. Problem was, she figured out the ruse before he could get his word out, and that turned pretty quickly into a fight. He got his wish, but he didn't plan on meeting Sasuke."
"How do you know what happened?" Hanabi asked with narrowed eyes. "And how do you know so much about me? Or about Hinata and Sasuke?"
Nissho put an upright finger over the slits of his mask, shushed. "I can't tell you any of that unless you accept my offer. It's a closely-kept secret, you know? Only four of us are privy to it, including the boss himself."
"Spies?" Hanabi guessed, her hands in combat pose, feet planted but twitchy. "Or maybe you were bluffing when you said that you couldn't hear my thoughts...you've been reading my mind all along, haven't you?"
"Don't I wish that were the case?" He sighed wistfully, dropping his guard and turning his back on Hanabi. "I never learned that trick, but not for lack of trying. It doesn't come easily if you're not one of the Yamanaka." He shrugged away from the young heiress, longing in his voice.
She tried to attack him again as soon as he broke sight, this time leaping silently from behind without a shout—without even a breath. Even without warning, Nissho effortlessly leaned his upper body to the left, letting Hanabi pass by at shoulder-level without touching him. She reached the mirrored wall on the other side of him, bouncing instantly off with hands and feet for a rebound strike. This time, Nissho stepped wholly to one side and lifted a knee, striking Hanabi square in the center of her rib cage and knocking her mid-air momentum off-track. She flipped and groaned and lost her concentration, clutching the center of her chest as she bounced off his knee and twisted to the floor, sliding on her shoulder a few inches across the smooth wood.
"Gah...d-damn..." She coughed, but she didn't wallow in the pain for long. She sprang back onto her feet with a feline's grace, facing Nissho without giving away just how much the blow had hurt. "You're not bad," she panted, "but my father is a lot stronger than that."
Nissho was silent for a moment, debating inwardly. "I don't know about that; I think I could kill your father if I wanted to." He rolled a shoulder, this time popping a stiff joint. "Anyway, that mirror trick cramps me up like nothing else. Thanks for helping me stretch."
Hanabi sneered. "You're not taking me seriously."
A yawn escaped Nissho, a hand rising to cover the slits of his mouth. He was now plainly mocking the young girl. "Good guess. You're not a threat to me."
Through a hard swallow of her pride, Hanabi resisted the urge to strike again in blind rage. It would do her no good to move randomly. She knew better. Instead, she relied on the fact that Nissho had not attacked her unless she attacked first. She bought herself more time by keeping him talking: "You're offering to make me stronger."
Nissho nodded. "That's right."
"No strings attached?"
"None at all."
Hanabi narrowed her eyes. "So you'll make me stronger, even though I'll just turn around and use it against you?"
The smirk under Nissho's mask was practically audible. "If that's what you want to do with it. The choice is yours."
"How?" Hanabi asked, trying her best not to grow intrigued by the proposition. She was just baiting him into answering, wasn't she? "How would you make me strong?"
"That's another secret. You won't find out the details until you meet the boss." Nissho was watching her closely. "Between the two of us, he's already told me how our conversation ends. If you'd rather skip to the end, that's fine with me."
Hanabi scoffed. "What, like how he told you I'd figure out your mirror test? That sounds like a lie."
Nissho cocked his head to one side, admitting the truth. "Yeah, it probably does." He relaxed and looked around the room. The mirrors had lost their chakra infusion when his energies bled from the glass, but they still reflected the room as intended. "Like a hall of mirrors, it's hard to make sense of it. How it all works; how it can be possible." He looked to Hanabi, and he didn't blink behind his mask. "Over time, you'll realize that anything's possible. Just say yes, and I'll prove it to you."
Hanabi felt light-headed. Was it the pain, the heat, or just her own indecision? "And if I do...if I say yes...what happens then? Hinata's waiting for me, and so's Sasuke."
"Then I'll tell the boss that you agreed, and you're free to go. We'll make contact again later to iron out the details." Nissho seemed to think that the danger had passed. That Hanabi was hooked into what he was selling.
The princess relaxed her hands, bloody but starting to dry. She looked down at her pale, red-etched fingers. "You said no strings...so if I accept your strength, I'd only use it to beat Hinata. Nothing else."
Nissho began to walk, patiently pacing the rim of the chamber. He dragged a leathery finger across the flat panes of mirror glass, zigzagging idly. "Stop worrying so much. I know it's difficult to believe, but we only want to help you achieve your goals. It's up to you to decide what the goals are."
Hanabi pursed her lips and breathed deep in her nostrils. "I don't believe you. You sent those men to kidnap me...you sent others to kidnap or kill my sister. Do you think I'm just some kid? I know when an offer's too good to be true."
"Too good to be true, indeed...I'm a bit like you, really. I was never given a choice growing up." He leaned his back against a mirror, crossing his arms and looking at the princess. "Now, though, everything's my choice. Nobody's forcing me to do this job. I was instructed to meet with you, but I could have refused at any time. Nothing's better than the freedom to choose, right? So now you've got the choice—you can do whatever you want with your life. Tell me yes, or tell me no, either way you're free to go."
"You're choosing to rebel against the Hokage, Konoha, and the world as it stands? It's the wrong choice." Hanabi braced herself, arms gracefully propped into a combat stance. "I've seen your face behind that mask; I've heard your voice, and I know your name. I even know the signature of your chakra. All I have to do is tell the Hokage, and you'll be hunted down and imprisoned."
Nissho nodded casually. "Yeah, that's the risk of it. Luckily for me, you're going to say yes. You talk tough, but you know I'm not lying to you."
Hanabi breathed calmly, dispelling her anger and closing her eyes. Her arms gently began to rotate, spinning in clockwise and counterclockwise directions. She was centering herself. "You screwed up, Nissho..."
Nissho hummed. "Yeah? Next you're gonna tell me I picked a bad room to fight you in."
Painted lips flexed with hesitation. Those would have been her next words. "Good guess," she answered softly, her hands now shaped into flat palms with her thumbs curved inward. She stood at the center of the circle of mirrors, and without opening her eyes she began to twirl on her feet. Chakra was rapidly expelled from her pores, and the sacred technique of the Hyuuga Clan began to take shape around her body—a sphere of glowing blue chakra. A twisted, rounded cyclone.
Nissho watched in silence, arms idly crossed over his chest. The wind of Hanabi's chakra began to burst through the circular chamber; glass began to crack, and the sound of it all grew to deafening degrees.
Hanabi directed the shape of the vortex to spread horizontally outward, built by an ever-expanding layer of chakra. Nissho had trapped himself on the far end of the circle, and Hanabi's chakra stretched from floor to ceiling, splintering wood both above and below as it spread outward. "Kaiten!" her voice shrieked out, piercing the roar of wind and broken things. The attack siphoned the air from the room, pushing it out of the only doorway on the opposite side from her enemy.
The blue energies crept closer to Nissho's masked face, and only when it swirled at arm's length did he sigh and straighten his posture. "It's a nice light show, Princess," he murmured to himself lazily. "But let me show you mine." His right hand opened up, and in his palm there grew an orb of yellow light. It crackled with a black negativity like before, and as wind whipped his sleeves roughly around his arm, he clamped his fingers shut and stifled the yellow energy into his fist. From there, he braced his booted feet on the floor and then delivered a quick, effortless punch into the uneven surface of Hanabi's chakra. With a startling crack of energies conflicting with one another, Nissho's knuckles burned with golden light, nudging it against the Kaiten as if he were using a toothpick to test a fresh cake.
The wind picked up further as the energies clashed on the outer rim, reaching an intensity that managed to rip the mask off of Nissho's face, hurling it like a kunai into the wooden ceiling above him. After the moment of instability, Nissho's arm heaved straight, and his fist pierced directly through Hanabi's attack, slicing it open down the middle and causing an outward explosion of force. The boom of the impact shattered what few mirrors remained, adding broken glass to the unstable whirl. The light leaped from his extended arm, from which it pierced one end of the Kaiten to the other. From the opposite end, Hanabi abruptly burst into sight, carried forcefully out of her protective chakra by the solid yellow beam. Once she was knocked loose from the center of it all, the blue light dissipated into shrinking pockets, and the wind abruptly stopped. Glass fell violently to the floor, tinkling and cracking into thousands of tiny shards.
What followed was the thud of a body hitting wood; Hanabi landed flat-backed against the rear wall of the outer hallway. She took a moment to wince as she caught her balance. Her clothes were undamaged, and she was not bleeding. Her hands deftly assessed her ribs, her waist, her neck. Even after taking Nissho's attack square on the chest, she sustained no meaningful harm. How could an attack that pierced her full-power Kaiten deliver such a harmless blow? While she should have been thankful for her luck, she was instead stricken with a degree of irritation. "You..." she panted, slumped forward but staying on her feet. "You broke our clan's signature defense...while you were holding back...?"
Nissho nodded from deep within the room, looking like a small figure after such a distance had been built between them. "I tried to warn you, Princess—you're not strong enough." He flexed and relaxed his right hand, fingers coursing with jolts of energy that weren't quite lightning—rather, it was like light itself, raw heat energy. His face was revealed now, his mask patiently waiting on the ceiling overhead. His visage was littered with stripes of shallow scars, and his skin was darkly tanned. His hair was a mess of blood red, all falling around his ears and shoulders, short curls winding in various directions from the ends of nearly-straight locks. "Got any other tricks you'd like to try?" He asked, breathing calmly. He raised his left palm, fingers splayed like he was prepared to catch a thrown ball.
Hanabi clenched her teeth hard and stomped her feet on one side, then the other. Her heels broke into the wooden floor, bracing deep. The veins in her face throbbed with exertion as she maintained her Byakugan. Her hair began to roil and twist as invisible energy built within her and rose up. "Just this one..." She flattened her palm and drew her arm back, twisting her posture to lean into the strike that was to come. She thrust her palm forward, and from it launched a burst of vacuum—the absence of air created a suction that traveled forward. The thousands of jagged, heavy shards of glass that littered the floor were sucked into the swirl, and with the speed of sound a mass of chakra-slicing air and skin-slicing glass honed in toward Nissho.
Nissho, for his part, stood in place. Even a strong shinobi could have been overcome by the Hyuuga's Vacuum Palm technique. Its winds weren't harmless; the air itself was infused with Jyuuken, and the shards of glass were a nice touch. The improvised assault could have killed a number of others, but Nissho merely flexed his left palm in a similar fashion to his right, producing a ball of yellow-black energy. Rather than clamp it inward, he opened his fingers further and extended his arm to allow the ball to escape his grip. It floated steadily forward, rather than launched.
In the center of the circular room that used to be filled with mirrors, the small ball of light and the raging wall of glassy wind met one another. Hanabi used her left palm to fire off a follow-up vacuum blast of similar size, anticipating that the first one might be dispelled. To her surprise, the small globe of energy that Nissho sent forward didn't explode. Instead, it expanded in place and lost its color while it contorted, becoming a large rectangle of transparent energy—it resembled the surface of a soap bubble, nearly invisible but with a distortion of the air to show its position.
When the glassy burst of air struck the invisible barricade, it wasn't 'stopped' as one might expect. Instead, it was perfectly inverted, passing into the transparent barricade at one point and emerging identically from a position just above it, in perfect reverse. Hanabi's eyes flung open wide as she realized that her own assault was being reflected toward her. Just as she raised both arms to defend, she heard the hiss of conflicting wind patterns cancelling one another out. The second vacuum burst she launched had collided mid-air with the first, and given that the mirror had reversed the first completely, the opposing winds canceled one another out with minimal harm. Again, glass hit the wooden floor. By now, it was almost ground into sand after repeated abuse.
Hanabi lowered her arms from their defensive positions, and she took a deep breath. "How did you...?"
Nissho smirked loosely, oddly charismatic for a former Root member. "That one doesn't have a name yet. I'm still figuring some of these techniques out, really." He clenched and relaxed both leather-gloved hands. "Light Release? Mirror Release?" He walked over the dusty glass to stand about three paces in front of Hanabi. "What do you think? Got a good title for it?"
Hanabi gulped something down into her throat, keeping her tension hidden as best she could. In that moment, as that unguarded man moved toward her, she realized that Nissho had been correct from the start. She didn't stand a chance. His strength, speed, anticipation, and strange jutsu made him an insurmountable opponent. She could not possibly defeat him alone. "Cut the crap," she said as evenly as possible. Her chest was trembling from the speed of her heartbeat. Her confidence had been thoroughly shattered. "You've got your point across."
Nissho inhaled through his broad nose and closed his eyes. "Ahh, here's the part I've been waiting for..." He parted his lids, peering down at Hanabi and eagerly awaiting her next words.
She swallowed her personal pride, cast away the potential consequences, and said the words she'd been destined to say: "Yes, I want your help. I want to be strong enough to kill you."
Nissho chuckled out loud, and his large hand fell onto Hanabi's ruffled hair to ruffle it further. "Don't get ahead of yourself...I'm pretty exceptional."
Hanabi nudged her head down and back, escaping Nissho's condescending hand in her hair. "Will I get that ability of yours? Is that how it works?"
Nissho shook his head. "Nah, hate to break it to ya, but that's mine alone. Our method's a lot simpler than that—what'll happen is that your body's going to surpass its limits. Your muscles will work harder, your senses will work faster, and your chakra will flow more efficiently through your system. It's an all-around performance boost. Think of the Eight Inner Gates, except permanent."
Hanabi clenched her sweaty forehead and brought a sleeve up to wipe some of the salt away. "Don't the gates kill the person who opens them all?"
Nissho shrugged a shoulder. "It's not a perfect comparison. Anyway, it's not quite as potent as the gates, but it's more than enough to level the playing field with your sister." He pondered for a moment. "So, what made you decide? You seemed pretty stiff a few minutes ago."
She felt a chill in herself when she spoke the answer aloud: "I think...I think I was always going to say yes. I fought it because I felt guilty, but...I need to defeat her...and I don't care how I get it done." She felt a burn of tears welling in the sides of her eyes while she admitted it. "I don't want to lose my place." She fought the knot forming in her throat. This man was the enemy; why wasn't she fighting him? Part of her knew it would be a pointless effort, but another part of her shouldn't have cared—she had a fighting spirit to rival the best of them. A hopeless battle wasn't always a lost one...so why wasn't she fighting anymore?
Nissho nodded his head with a quiet acceptance of her spoken truth. He turned around, moving away from her to retrieve his mask. Even after being shoved two inches deep into reinforced wood, it hadn't been scratched. He secured it over his face and pulled his hood back up, hiding his hair within. "I know that, Princess. This was always how it was going to end." He looked at her through the small holes in his mask, now. "Go on and get out of here. We'll track you down again before the contest starts."
Hanabi was paralyzed by conflicting emotions. What had she just agreed to? Don't just stand there, you weakling, fight this asshole! Her internal voices were at war. But we need that asshole; he's going to help us win. The conflict wasn't settled until the voice of her father rang in her head, clear as a bell: 'Our purpose is to maintain the Clan. That means that we are to grow our influence, our reputation, and our bloodline. Hanabi, your purpose is to become my successor. ' Hanabi felt a new resolve. This was her purpose, after all.
Yeah, she thought. Why shouldn't I, as the heiress, be as strong as possible? A corruption spread in her mind, one of her and her father's making. The stronger, the better. As her father had always taught her, strength was paramount to a Clan's reputation. She had every intention of refreshing the world's memory of the Hyuuga. Not only in the battle against her sister, but against any who she happened to face. She offered an out-of-character bow of gratitude toward Nissho, putting her duty to maintain the reputation of the Hyuuga above all else. "Thank you for the opportunity." The words tasted bitter in her mouth, but it was a sacrifice she had to make. "Would you like me to help clean up this mess?"
Nissho shook his head. "It's fine, run along. Remember to keep quiet about what happened here. If you tell anybody, the deal's off. We're working for a noble cause, but the Hokage doesn't exactly see it that way. In his eyes, we're all wanted criminals."
Hanabi bit her lip to prevent herself from saying "as you should be," instead nodding her head and looking down to her bloodied hands. Aside from minor scratches on her fists and some bruises that were suitably covered by the layout of her outfit, she hadn't taken any visible damage. As if Nissho had attacked her in specific places, intending all along to keep their little tussle a secret. "I won't tell anybody unless you screw me over, Nissho. There had better not be a catch."
Nissho chuckled mirthfully. The dynamic between the two had shifted into calm. It was as if nothing resembling a fight had ever happened. Nissho took up a broom from around the corner and began to idly sweep up the glass around his feet. "Don't sweat it, princess. I'd never lie to a new friend."
Hanabi's upper lip twitched into a half-snarl. She still hated him, but she needed his help. Needed? No, more like wanted. Selfishly, at that, though she had convinced herself that it was for the good of the Clan. "Whatever," the determined heiress chose her parting word, then quietly turned to leave before the dangerous enemy decided to change his mind about letting her escape.
Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think. As always, leave a review with a question (and a registered account) and I promise I'll give you an answer as soon as I can. No spoilers, though! PMs are also an option, and I love receiving them. Not much else to say. Class and other responsibilities have been keeping me busy, but I'm still here and I'm still writing when I can!
See you next time!
