A/N: I have a ton of time on my hands, so I figured I'd update again. Consider it an early Christmas present.
Time for chapter 14
Enjoy!
Hinata gritted her teeth as she suppressed the searing pain in her ankle. She and her teammates had been sent on an endurance run by Kakashi, and the weather was abysmal. It had been raining on and off for the past forty-five minutes, and the sky was a depressing grey color. Unfortunately for the Hyuga heiress, several puddles had formed due to the rain. One of these puddles also happened to be a small pothole, which she had tripped over. Hinata's ankle had twisted as she had fallen, likely spraining it in the process.
Despite the obvious injury, she had decided to continue running. For every step she took, her ankle became more and more unbearable to put weight on.
'Two more laps. Just two more. Ignore the pain' Hinata thought to herself. After several more steps, her mental coaching could not motivate her enough to continue running. She crashed to the ground and grimaced in pain as she clutched her injured ankle.
"Good god, why does this have to be so painful?" she hissed. She rolled onto her back and sighed as it began to rain again. For roughly ten minutes, she laid there silently. Eventually, she was found by the first and last person that she would have wanted to find her injured on the street.
"Hinata? Are you trying to nap in the middle of the street?" Naruto, who had made his way around the village, said. Hinata glanced at the blond and attempted to sit up. Before she could fully straighten, her ankle shifted, causing her to yelp.
"I...think I might have sprained my ankle" she admitted. Naruto jogged over to Hinata and knelt down beside her.
"Oh, that's not good. How many laps do you have left?" he asked. The Hyuga girl thought for a moment.
"Three. I think I sprained it during my fourth lap" she replied through a grimace. The Jinchuuriki raised an eyebrow.
"You ran an entire lap around the village with a sprained ankle? I've gotta say, that's really impressive" he complimented. The Hyuga heiress sighed.
"Be that as it may, I can't walk on it anymore" she said frustratedly. Naruto remained silent for a moment before plucking her from the ground and walking back towards the bench where Kakashi was always situated during their endurance runs.
"What on earth are you doing?" Hinata squeaked, her face practically glowing red. The Jinchuuriki shrugged and adjusted his grip on her to better support her weight.
"Carrying you back to Kakashi-sensei. He probably knows how to fix a sprained ankle. It'll probably take fifteen minutes to get back, so be patient" he replied. The Hyuga girl shifted a bit in his arms.
"You could have at least asked before picking me up" she grumbled. Naruto gave her a bored look and shook his head.
"If I had asked, you would have scurried away or punched me. Maybe both" he said bluntly. Hinata opened her mouth to refute the statement, but shut it again when she found that he was likely correct.
"I would have been perfectly justified if I had punched you, Naruto…san" she said quietly, managing to catch herself before attaching 'kun' to the end of Naruto's name. The blonde chuckled at her retort.
"Then why haven't you? I'm in range, and I probably can't dodge you" he asked. Hinata responded by wrapping her arms around the back of his neck and curling up.
"I don't want you to drop me. It would hurt" she admitted, clearly embarrassed by the fact that she was being carried bridal-style through the streets of Konoha. Naruto reddened a bit at the heightened physical contact, but continued to carry her.
"I won't drop you. If I did, you'd tear me in half once you could walk again if I did. I don't want to die as a teenager" he said. The Hyuga heiress remained silent as she was briskly transported through the village, her face a shade of red that had yet to be discovered by the scientific community. After several minutes, she spoke again.
"Thank you for this. Really" she said gratefully. The Jinchuuriki smiled and adjusted his grip on her again.
"You don't have to thank me. What was I supposed to do? Just leave you in the rain with a sprained ankle?" he replied. His teammate looked up at him and tilted her head to one side.
"Well, you could have just ran to Kakashi-sensei and brought him here yourself. Instead, you chose to slow yourself down and carry me" she pointed out.
"Would you have preferred me to have done that instead of carrying you?" he asked. Hinata, to his surprise, shook her head and tightened her grip around his neck and shoulder.
"No. I would have caught a cold. You're...quite pleasantly warm" she said quietly. Naruto raised an eyebrow.
"Thank...you?" he said, earning a rare giggle from the Hyuga heiress. The blonde sighed and looked down at his injured teammate once more.
"What's so funny?" he asked. Hinata shook her head and calmed herself down in order to speak.
"Oh, nothing. I just find the fact that you were perfectly willing to pick up me, your female teammate, but are unsure of how to react the half of a compliment to be quite endearing" she said humorously. Naruto studied her for several seconds.
"You should laugh more. It suits you" he said. Hinata immediately averted eye contact and curled up again.
"And you should carry me more often. It suits us both" she said quietly. The moment the sentence left her lips, she realized her critical mistake and slapped a hand over her mouth. Naruto raised an eyebrow,
"What was that?" he asked. The Hyuga heiress shook her head rapidly and covered her pink-tinted face.
"Nothing. Nothing at all" she said meekly. The blonde shrugged and picked up the pace at which he was walking. After another minute or two of walking, they reached the bench where their sensei awaited them.
"What do we have here? Bridal-style, huh? Not bad, Naruto" Kakashi, who was still reading his orange-colored book, asked. Naruto set Hinata down on the bench next to the jonin.
"She sprained her ankle. She tripped or something" he explained. Kakashi knelt down and studied the Hyuga girl's foot for a moment before nodding in confirmation.
"Not a sprain, but a dislocation. Definitely painful-looking. I can fix this pretty easily" he said. Hinata sighed in relief and allowed the silver haired ninja to prop her foot up on the bench. Then, without warning, Kakashi snapped her ankle back into its socket, eliciting a high-pitched cry of pain from Hinata.
"Couldn't you have warned me first?!" she demanded as she tentatively rotated her foot around. The jonin shrugged and returned his attention to his book.
"If I had, you would have tensed up and made it even more painful. Now get running, you two. Try not to hurt yourself again, Hinata" he ordered. The genin both sighed, but nodded and took off running to complete their final laps. Three for Hinata, and two for Naruto. Kakashi watched them as they scurried away and smiled.
'They're a weird pair, but I'd be lying if I said they weren't adorable'
Naruto wiped sweat from his brow as he reset into his stance and stared down Kakashi. They had been sparring in the rain for the past thirty minutes, a true test of the Jinchuuriki's endurance in combat. Despite the difference in strength between the two, Kakashi had not refrained from hitting the genin hard and cleanly, as evidenced by the blood trickling down the side of Naruto's face.
"Don't just stare at me, kid. Do something" the jonin ordered. Naruto responded by charging forward and throwing a punch at the left side of Kakashi's head, a strike that the silver haired ninja easily evaded. The blonde followed up the missed punch with a kick to Kakashi's chest which, to his surprise, landed and launched the jonin backwards.
"Good! Now build on that success" the older ninja said. Naruto nodded and pressed forward again. Before he could mount any sort of offense, his head was snapped back by a sharp, left-handed punch from Kakashi. The Jinchuuriki stumbled back a step and growled. He then returned fire with two punches that both missed, earning him a hard knee to the stomach from his sensei. Naruto coughed painfully and dropped to his knees, a small stream of blood trickling from his mouth.
"What the hell is this? Why are you beating the hell out of me? This isn't even training at this point" he demanded from his knees. Kakashi gave him a hard stare.
"Because you need to get stronger quickly. The exams are two weeks out, and you're our best bet for the one-on-one combat section of the testing. I can't afford to take it easy on you" he explained. The blonde frowned and climbed to his feet.
"That doesn't make sense to me. Hinata is still the strongest member of our team" he said. The jonin shook his head.
"No, she isn't. You know as well as I do that you could kill her if you fought. The clones, stamina, and demonic chakra would be far too much for Hinata to handle" he said.
"I've already told you, Kakashi-sensei. I can't control the fox's power" he said. The jonin raised an eyebrow.
"I have some doubts about that. Hinata told me that you were awfully calm for somebody who claimed to have no control over the power he was using" he said. Naruto sighed.
"Look, I'm not lying when I say I can't just call on it whenever I want. I just know what state of mind I need to be in for the power to have a chance of manifesting. When I'm pissed, there's always a chance that the power comes out" he explained. Kakashi nodded and stepped back.
"We're done sparring for today. I have something I've been meaning to teach your for a few days now" he said. Before Naruto could ask the obvious question of what he would be learning, the jonin held out a hand and focused a mass of chakra into it. After several moments, a swirling sphere of blue energy formed in the palm of his hand.
"What's that? I can hear it" the Jinchuuriki asked curiously. Kakashi smiled and forced a bit more chakra into the sphere, increasing its size slightly.
"It's called Rasengan. A technique invented by the Fourth Hokage, who also happened to be my sensei when I was your age" he explained. Naruto's eyes widened.
"You were trained by the Fourth? That's awesome" he said. The silver haired ninja nodded and allowed the sphere to fizzle out.
"You're going to be learning this technique, and you aren't likely to learn a stronger one for quite some time. But, even more so than many powerful jutsu, the Rasengan is incredibly difficult to use. It's the height of shape transformation, and you're going to hate it by the time you're practiced enough to use it in combat" he said. The genin nodded.
"Alright, what do I have to do to learn it?" he asked. Kakashi reached into his kunai pouch and produced three un-filled water balloons.
"Fill these up with rain water and we can get started"
Shikamaru yawned as he walked through the streets of Konoha. He was out late, later than he likely should have been, but sleep had eluded him consistently throughout the night. Clan drilling had been simplistic and boring that day, with the lazy genin being forced to spar his father numerous times. He had lost each and every time, obviously, but the sessions had not even been stressful.
'Being a ninja is boring as hell. Even the Land of Waves mission didn't get interesting until Naruto died' he thought to himself. He then rounded a corner and turned onto a new street. As he walked along, his mind wandered back to something his father, Shikaku, had said during one of their sparring sessions.
"If you can't defend yourself when faced with an opponent that you can't just out think, you'll die before you've had your first legal sip of alcohol"
Shikamaru sighed as he contemplated the frustrating accuracy that the Nara clan head's words held. The lazy genin had never been a good student of taijutsu, and it was beginning to show in training. Naruto, who had essentially never been trained formally, tended to beat him more often than not, and Hinata obviously trounced him.
'I should get Kakashi-sensei to help me some time. I'll get my ass handed to me in the exam if I can't at least punch with people' he thought to himself. While he had been thinking, Shikamaru had stopped paying attention to where he was walking, and promptly bumped into somebody as a result.
"Sorry about that. I spaced out a little" he apologized as he offered a hand to the person he had accidentally knocked to the ground. The person in question was a boy around his same age. He had long brown hair and pale, blank eyes. The boy took the hand and stood to his feet.
"Don't worry about it. We both failed to pay attention, and as such, we collided" he said as he dusted himself off. The shadow user looked him up and down and raised an eyebrow.
'A Hyuga, huh? I guess they all talk like seventeenth century poets' he thought to himself. The Hyuga boy studied him for a moment before speaking again.
"Would you happen to be Shikamaru Nara?" he asked, surprising the lazy genin. Shikamaru nodded and raised an eyebrow.
"I am, yes. How do you know who I am, exactly?" he asked skeptically. His fellow genin chuckled and gestured to the village around them.
"Kakashi Hatake's Team Seven has gained quite a name in this village, Nara-san. You completed an A-Ranked mission with only D-Ranked missions under your belt. A feat like that is completely unheard of. Aside from your fifteen minutes of fame, my cousin also happens to be a member of your team" he explained. The Nara chuckled.
"Hinata, right? She's an interesting one, that's for sure. Not necessarily in a good way either" he replied, well aware that he was walking a fine line by backhandedly insulting the Hyuga girl. The boy laughed out loud.
"I would have to agree with you on that front. Cold as an icicle. Just as sharp too. I must say, most people don't have the gusto to insult a member of the Hyuga clan to the face of another member. You impress me, Nara-san" he complimented. Shikamaru grinned.
"I'm a no-nonsense kind of guy. I don't like to sugar-coat things" he said. The Hyuga boy chuckled and nodded.
"Neither do I. Now, as fascinating as this conversation has been, I must be going now. I have places to be" he said, turning to walk away as he spoke. The shadow user watched him walk for several moments before calling out to him.
"What's your name?" he asked. The boy glanced back over his shoulder and stopped walking for a moment.
"My name is Neji" he replied before continuing his trek towards his destination, whatever it was. Shikamaru then turned and began to walk back towards his home.
'So, that's the guy Kakashi-sensei is worried about, huh? Can't say I don't understand his concern. He seemed...competent. More than most genin are' he thought to himself. The shadow user reached the front door of his home at roughly one in the morning. He sighed and pushed the door open.
'I should stop going for late-night walks. I always run into someone scary'
A/N: The debut of Neji is now in the books. Pretty short, but he'll have plenty of screentime during the exam.
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