Unsung Story of the Inconspicuous
Yo.
Raiku came to with a groan, raising a hand to her throbbing head.
When she at last managed to get her eyes open enough to make out his features through the light behind him, the face of a stranger swam into view.
'What the hell was that?' a distinctly male voice demanded.
Raiku pressed away, only succeeding in squishing herself a little further into the dirt.
The young man raised his eyebrows. Somehow, aggressively.
A hand abruptly shoved his face to the side and out of her immediate range of vision. 'Get out of the way,' a rather lower voice instructed. It wasn't one she knew, per se, but it was… oddly familiar.
Raiku's brain, though still muzzy, was slowly adjusting to the abrupt end of the time skip. It was also, probably not coincidentally, beginning to suspect something rather unpleasant.
The suspicion was confirmed seconds later, when someone else appeared.
No matter how different he looked, Ryuu was always going to be Ryuu. 'How many fingers am I holding up?' he demanded, and his voice had definitely not been that deep before she'd woken up.
Stricken with horror and shock, Raiku just stared when he held up two fingers in front of her.
What.
What.
What.
Ryuu narrowed his eyes slightly and his mouth opened, probably to insult her, when—
'What happened to your face?' she blurted out.
She heard a bark of laughter and that guy had been Daisukenojo what the hell—
'Excuse me?' Ryuu asked, and she was too busy staring at him to really pay attention to his tone for once.
He was… he was…
Older.
Ryuu had always had angular features, but where he had previously had any sort of juvenile roundness had smoothed off into…
'Why are you so pretty?' she squeaked, unable to tear her eyes off him.
Ryuu's stupidly pretty face darkened with anger, but it didn't really make a difference to the overall effect. Suddenly desperate to take in her surroundings, Raiku shoved him aside (ignoring the resulting cry of anger) and sat up.
'Daisuke?!' she demanded of the young redhead standing a few feet away. Dear god, it had to be him. Daisukenojo could always be recognised by the freckles, but he was so much broader than he should have been?! Where had he gotten time to be muscular! 'Still shorter than me!' she cried, pointing at him. Still had offensively red hair, was still covered in freckles, but he was very distinctly…
Raiku scrambled to her feet and backed away from the two of them, though this forced her to keep looking at them.
'She's gone insane,' Daisukenojo announced, sticking his hands in his pockets. 'We all knew this day would come. Again.'
Raiku looked him up and down, willing him to lose a foot in height and go back to wearing his Genin clothes. He… he had been, only seconds ago!
There was only one way to deal with this sort of radical life change.
'Raiku.'
Raiku sat with her back against her closed bedroom door, arms folded stubbornly over her chest.
Her dad knocked on the door again. 'Raiku, we have to talk about this,' he informed her, voice muffled slightly by the wood. 'I can explain. I already did,' he added somewhat sullenly in a quieter voice, 'but I can again.' He was offering to go further into Exposition debt, like that would help his case.
'You didn't tell me that my teammates would morph into adults when the time-skip ended!' she complained. 'Didn't it hurt? They've grown by feet! In seconds!'
She couldn't hear him sigh, but he definitely did. 'That isn't what happened. I did say your perception of time would change,' he added reproachfully.
Raiku glared at the air in front of her, in lieu of her dad, who was still blocked by the door. 'Yes! To go faster!'
'Not just that, I never said that!' He tried the doorknob again. 'Let me in. They're waiting downstairs and I don't want to have to yell. Especially with your creepy teammate in the house. Ruin.'
'Ryuu.'
'I know what I said.'
Reluctantly, Raiku pulled herself up and unlocked the door, pulling it open so her father could get inside. He sat on one end of the bed and she the other.
'You knew that you had to be ready for the time-skip to be over,' he pointed out after a few minutes of silence.
'I was! Almost!' she said defensively. He held up a hand.
'Regardless of how ready you were, you had to have noticed how you weren't noticing your teammates in the last year.'
Raiku, as a Gairano, was very accustomed to strange sentences. But that was a new one. 'What?'
Her dad flicked his fingers in a characteristic dismissive gesture, but he was obviously put-out at being forced to explain every step of this process more than once. 'Time-skip. It's about skipping ahead for Naruto, so at the end—'
'I know all that already!' Raiku interrupted, and he shot her a narrow glare.
'So at the end,' he continued, 'everybody looks noticeably different. It's the Genematrix's way of gauging and then displaying the progression of time, so that no one questions why the last few years went so fast. There's physical proof of linear progression.'
Raiku carefully studied him. '…You don't look different.'
He smiled smugly. 'Thank you. But it's been making you ignore how your teammates have been physically changing, so that now the time-skip is over, it suddenly hits you how everybody's growing up, everything's different, etcetera, etcetera, milestones!' He fanned his fingers out like a magician, effect ruined by his obvious lack of pizzazz.
Only there was a problem. 'Wait. Why don't I look different?!'
He gave her a strange look. 'You do.'
Raiku blanched and her hands shot up to touch her face. It was still her face, she decided after a few seconds of panicked feeling around. That was definitely her normal nose and those were, on closer inspection, her eyebrows. She tugged at her hair and that was still white and completely unmanageable and everywhere-
'Not much,' her father allowed. 'But you do look a little more… grown-up.'
By the end of his sentence, he looked perilously close to experiencing an emotion. Eager to stop that before it could get started, she tried to clarify matters. 'So what you're saying is that my teammates,' she said slowly, still working through it, 'have been growing and changing for the last three years the way they were supposed to, like everybody is supposed to,' like everybody, who, during the time-skip, also seemed to look exactly as they had before the time-skip, she was starting to realize, 'and … I've only been able to notice little bits of it?'
Her father nodded. 'Exactly.'
The horror of this situation finally hit her. 'So … now that it's over, I have to relearn what everybody looks like?!'
'It's for narrative reasons, I know it's a bit strange to get your head around,' her father said with a shrug. He patted her on the shoulder and stood up. 'Come on then. Time to go pretend you've just had a bump on the head when you fell.'
Raiku gaped at him in undisguised horror. '… How can you be so blasé about this?' she asked after a few indulgent seconds of dwelling on this awfulness.
Her father shrugged again. 'It's just how things are.'
After taking another few seconds to calm herself down and process that, Raiku followed him out the door and down the stairs.
'This is good tea. Thank you,' Daisukenojo said to her father, from her kitchen table, which she now regarded as the nexus of all evil in her life. An idea only reinforced by how she was now forced to notice how her squeaky teammate's voice was deeper and strangely rough. Probably from all the yelling at Yamada doing damage to his vocal chords over the years. She began to notice how his hands were broad and immediately cut the thought off, refusing to acknowledge his physical changes.
If she could just ignore them, she decided, it would be less traumatic.
Tragically, her father had other plans.
'You're welcome, Hatori,' her dad replied cheerfully, almost bodily shoving her into the room and in the redhead's direction, forcing her to look at him.
It hit with the narrative inevitability of a Naruto Speech.
Daisukenojo.
Daisukenojo had always been short. He had always looked even younger than he was, with a slightly round but mostly inoffensive face. He had worn shorts and a t-shirt and he was more freckle than human. She knew this. She knew exactly what Daisukenojo was.
Daisukenojo was not some… average-height, square-jawed young man with, with biceps! She eyed his biceps with an alarm that bordered perilously close to hostility. When had this happened?! That didn't just happen!
But she had noticed him getting more muscle-y, she remembered distantly. She had. She just hadn't…? His hair was longer, long enough to actually be proper hair, but still close to his skull. He was wearing a green flak vest, because they were Chuunin, which was great, but not really her priority right now, and black knee-length shorts. Like a bastard. And of course he was reasonably good-looking, in a rather unusually masculine sort of way, because he was a shinobi and they were never really ugly goddamnit.
At least he was still shorter than her, she noticed, confirming her earlier (screamed) observation. Wait.
Wait.
Raiku hastily stepped closer to her dad and measured herself against him. When this informed her he was now a little less than an inch shorter than her, some part of her that clung to traditional ideals of femininity died a swift death. 'I'm taller than you,' she hissed, looking down at her father.
'You have been for a while, honey,' he gritted out through his suddenly strained smile. Her father was tall. Tall-ish. Not Kakashi tall, but a little over average height.
Which made her freakishly tall.
Raiku staggered into a chair and let her head fall back to gaze upwards in supplication for a sudden death from above.
'Everything is terrible,' she moaned.
'You're terrible,' Ryuu retorted. She knew it had to be him, because Ryuu could go die in a fire. And also because she'd heard his voice earlier, probably. It was almost incongruously deep for such a lean boy—young man, oh god—but his snarky tone was rather distinctive.
She decided to look at Yamada next.
He was exactly the same. Which, now that she thought about it, was still the size of about eight people and covered in scars, like those unsettling ones around his mouth, so she quickly bit the bullet and looked at…
At…
Ryuu.
Her father pushed a glass of water into her hands, and she very nearly dropped it.
Ryuu. Ryuu should not have been allowed to exist, she decided then and there. Still, she had to get this over with, so she started at the top.
Ryuu's hair was still grey, and it was still perfect. And oh look, she observed, feeling resigned; so were his eyelashes! Raiku, whose eyelashes were nothing of the sort (as far as she was aware), felt cheated.
Anyway, the Genematrix reminded her, realisation sliding over her mind like oil. Ryuu looked … well, he looked his age, actually, but while the cast of his features would always, somehow, be predatory and his eyes would always be eerie, the boyishness was mostly gone. It left only sharp and strangely handsome, almost beautiful features. He was lean and obviously taller than her even with both of them sitting down, all sharp angles that should have made him look gawky and ridiculous but instead combined with the pushed-back hair and tan to just…
Raiku glared. Ryuu returned her look of animosity with a far more effective one, his malevolence not diminished in any way by the fact he was looking at her with eyes framed with ridiculously lovely eyelashes. At least his eyes, once mostly brown but now, probably through Drama, a vivid yellow, were still creepy. Tearing her eyes away from his face, she noticed he was wearing black. Of course he was. Of course, unlike Raiku, who looked even skinnier in black, he just looked edgy. Even with the green flak vest, which should have clashed horribly with the entire colour scheme. Which it definitely did on Raiku.
Raiku looked down at herself, pulling her flak vest away to peer down. Her chest was hardly impressive, and she was scrawny as ever. Wait, maybe a little less so? But definitely right on that sight of the spectrum.
She frowned. She'd gotten a little more tall and a lot more traumatized. What a bargain.
"If Speedy's done with her little episode, I think some congratulations are in order, get me?" Yamada said pointedly.
'What, why?' she asked blankly, after taking a second to realise he was talking to her.
'You've got to be kidding me,' Daisukenojo said, pulling at his own flak vest and giving her a meaningful look.
Embarrassingly, she didn't immediately cotton on to his point, staring at the vest like it held the answers.
Which it eventually did, but still. 'Oh. Oh!' She remembered. 'You're Chuunin!'
'Thank you!' Daisukenojo said, throwing up his hands. 'Finally.'
'Con…gratulations!' she added, feeling she wasn't giving it the proper level of enthusiasm. 'Yaaaay!' she drew out, but she realised when she heard herself that it was rather lacking. Still, Daisukenojo looked rather proud at her praise, so—
'Thanks. Your enthusiasm is heartwarming.'
Goddamn Ryuu.
'Oh, and what was that, earlier?' he asked, tucking his hands into his vest pockets and slouching artfully. 'I can accept the flimsy head trauma excuse for your crazy,' and why had they let him be the medic, why had they ever thought that would be a good idea, 'but why'd you faint?'
'I,' Raiku began slowly, 'have. Been. Waiting! For you guys to get home! And… not sleeping much! So,' she glanced at Yamada and Daisukenojo to see if they were buying this frankly insulting attempt at a cover, 'when you guys arrived, I… I guess it caught up with me!'
Luckily, her forehead protector and mask covered up the nervous sweat she'd broken into.
Ryuu's catlike eyes flattenedwith disbelief. But he tilted his head back slightly in what was obviously a capitulation, because, she realised with relief, like hell were they going to take her on in her dad's kitchen.
'So!' her dad piped up, finally intervening. 'You guys should go out and celebrate!'
Raiku seized the out with both hands. 'Yeah! We should! Definitely, you guys have done really well, so we should go and celebrate with lunch or something or you know we could-,'
'Yeah, yeah,' Daisukenojo said, waving it off. He was still reassuringly practical and had clearly given up on this losing battle, obviously still proud of himself and unwilling to let her idiosyncrasies ruin the day. 'Dumplings?'
'I like dumplings,' Raiku agreed hastily, standing up from the table. 'Let's go! I'll pay for one other person!'
"And that'll be me," Yamada added, getting to his feet. She looked away, because man that was unsettling to look at with new eyes. Like meeting him all over again, his every movement seemed threatening; he was just too large to be real, so physically powerful that each action had a curious grace, so carefully he had to hold himself back. Just seeing him getting up was like watching a mountain go for a stroll, and it had taken her years to get over flinching every time he looked at her! Back at square one!
While Raiku lamented the loss of years of accumulated desensitization, she missed the rather more practical side of things, which was that Yamada ate the most, right up there with her, and the other two were already looking more cheerful.
Vengeance wasn't usually this straightforward, so every now and again it was refreshing.
'Alright,' Ryuu said, letting his chair fall back onto four legs. Raiku hadn't even noticed how he'd tipped it back, so busy taking in the overall picture of insouciance that she'd missed the minor details. Wow, she marvelled. That was quite a strong Drama-induced effect he had going on there. Her father caught her eye and they shared a moment of narrative wariness; Ryuu was, as always, going to be trouble.
But for now, he was going to lunch with the rest of them. Well, not technically lunch anymore. Afternoon snack? Late lunch, early dinner? It was sort of an awkward time; her fainting had eaten up longer than she'd anticipated. An afternoonish meal, she decided, because she couldn't spend too long on that.
'I'll be back for dinner,' she said to her dad, who immediately smiled. He had her back.
'Oh, don't worry about it! You guys have a lot of catching up to do. Maybe get some training in, gotta stay sharp!'
He had a knife in her back, that rat bastard. Raiku only just managed not to lunge across the table at him when Yamada brightened with sadistic glee. "Good idea, Gairano!"
Daisukenojo groaned. 'Perfect, just perfect.'
'Yeah, dad. Perfect,' Raiku gritted out, glare shooting daggers at him as Yamada put a hand on her shoulder and steered her out into the hallway. Her father followed them, probably in equal parts due to wanting to gloat and wanting to make sure Ryuu actually left.
'You have fun!' he said with a cheerful smile and a wave, so normal-looking, so completely innocent, so not showing the depths of his sadistic madness.
Raiku shook her head and pulled her shoes on, avoiding with ease the scuffling match that Ryuu and Daisukenojo broke into when one leaned too far into the other's space while pulling on their own footwear. By the time she straightened, something had occurred to her.
Vengeance wasn't usually this straightforward, so every now and again it was refreshing.
'Thanks for talking some sense into me, dad,' Raiku said, tone mild and pleasant. And then, because they were Gairano and they were notoriously bad at subtlety even when discussing their own Exposition quotas, she thought she'd better be safe and add, 'I know it took a lot of explaining!'
The door closed on his expression of dismayed realization, and Raiku laughed all the way down the hill.
A/N: Hello again! Sorry it's a short one, but Shippuden needed framing. I agonised. Agonised. In related news, real life has kicked me in the teeth pretty savagely, so there are two results of that: updates will be a bit slow. Not this slow! This was really the worst of it and so they'll be coming quite a bit faster than this one. The second is that I haven't been able to organise a place for review replies, having been knocked flat, and probably won't have time to get it together for a while. I'm sorry, guys. But I am still alive, and still here!
