"Hyuuga-san, what's your blood type?" asked fanpoodle fifty. Or maybe it was seventy. Hinata had lost count by now.
Her wish to stop being sent out of the village had not been answered. In fact, Tsunade-sama had noted with bemusement that Team 8 was being requested with increasing frequency for escort missions, commanding a greater and greater price tag each time. There was a waiting list for Team 8 nowadays, because they were just that in demand.
She briefly considered the wisdom of revealing her blood type to this perfect stranger in this perfectly nondescript village on the border between Fire and Wind. On one hand, did it even matter anymore? Everyone somehow already knew about that time Kumo tried to kidnap her on her birthday, and the way Neji nii-san used to hate her, and her imaginary boyfriend Menma.
On the other hand, she was the former heiress of an important clan. Again, a clan against whom multiple kidnap attempts had been made in the past. Who knew how the information of her blood type would be used?
"It's a secret," she said, giving her fan a polite, closed-off smile honed through years of training.
That was exactly the wrong thing to say. She would regret it later, much like Tsunade-sama would for not paying attention to the problem in its early stages.
When he woke up that day, Naruto didn't think he would accidentally start a miniature war in a random village, but you know, that was why he was called the number one most unpredictable ninja.
It was just another day in the course of his training with Jiraiya. They'd stopped at this place because it was both at the edge of the forest, where they could work on controlling the Kyuubi's chakra without harming any passersby, and yet relatively populated and not too isolated, just in case something went wrong like last time and they needed to get medical supplies.
So there he was, at the center of the marketplace, scrounging through his wallet for any spare change for those multiple-wash-one-hundred-percent cotton bandages that Jiraiya had asked him to buy.
Then he heard someone yelling about "Hinata," and he almost dropped Gama-chan in shock.
"Hinata! Is Hinata here? Hi, Hinata!" He whirled around like a maniac and beamed. A lot of villagers gave him funny looks, which made him stop and look a bit closely.
No pair of white eyes in sight. His heart deflated.
Maybe it was someone else named Hinata? he thought.
It clearly wasn't his Hinata.
He was dead wrong.
"You've heard of Hinata, son? Hyuuga Hinata?" asked a small, bearded man next to a kite stand. Naruto squinted at the man's hands, making out a pencil and a bright green magazine titled Awesome Assassins from Across the Five Great Nations.
"Yeah! She's my friend!" he announced, still beaming.
Hinata was apparently a big deal in this village, because the man dropped his pencil and just stared at Naruto with big, blown-out eyes.
"Your friend? Hyuuga Hinata's your friend?" the kite stand owner shouted. "That's impossible. Hyuuga-san wouldn't be friends with a stupid-looking blonde like you."
"Hey!" Naruto snapped. "I'll have you know that she told me that she's always admired me. I've known her since the Ninja Academy, ya know!"
"Oh, yeah?" kite-stand-guy challenged. "Then...what is her blood type? Her friend should be able to answer that part of the crossword puzzle." He jerked his head towards the bearded man's Awesome Assassins magazine. Sure enough, the cover proclaimed that whoever "could fill out all 50 extra-difficult words" would get a cash prize.
Naruto puffed out his chest in pride. He didn't know why Hinata had a whole crossword puzzle in a magazine dedicated to her, but he did know the answer.
"It's a secret!" He grinned. "She let me know once when we were kids, but she wouldn't tell morons like you!"
That was probably true, he reasoned. She was too shy and wouldn't go around sharing things like her blood type with random weirdos like these.
Unfortunately, this didn't go down well with the kite-stand-guy.
"You're just saying that 'cause you don't know anything about her!" he yelled.
"I do too!"
"No, you don't!"
"Yes, I do!"
"No, you don't!"
"Yes, I do! I know her favorite food, her favorite color, her hobbies, and her special powers!"
"Oh yeah? Then what are they?"
"Cinnamon rolls, purple, flower pressing, and one time her cousin tried to give her a heart attack, but that didn't stop her. She kept fighting! She's a complete badass, ya know?"
There was a split second of stark silence at these pronouncements.
Unfortunately, Naruto had never heard of using indoor voices, and the entire marketplace was listening.
And then complete pandemonium broke loose. Naruto barely avoided getting torn from limb as he dodged pots and pans and kites and sandals.
It was carnage. Villager against villager. Hinata fan against Hinata fan. All arguing over the new random facts about her that Naruto had decided to shout out that day, and no one able to come to an agreement on them.
Someone said that it was out of character for a girl who commanded samurai armies to do flower pressing. Another said it was perfectly in character because it showed that she was elegant and refined.
Everyone agreed that there was a slight chance that she liked cinnamon rolls. They also agreed that there was a hundred percent chance that she wore purple to strike terror into her enemies.
Naruto was oblivious. After escaping near death, he shrugged his shoulders and went back to shopping in a quieter corner of the village.
Ah, well, he reasoned. Sometimes you ran into nutcases on your journeys. It was all part of the job.
Naruto would later smile in pleasure at having remembered so many facts about his friend. Despite whatever people thought about him, he wasn't oblivious to everything.
He knew quite a lot about shy, dark weirdos who looked away when he looked at them. Actually, the fact that they looked away when he looked at them meant that they didn't even know that he noticed them.
Naruto could be smart that way.
And sadly for Hinata, the villagers interpreted his comment about her not dying from heart attacks in...interesting ways.
A/N: A lot of you have sent me ideas about the hilarious situations that Hinata could find herself in. Don't worry, I'll do my best to incorporate them into the story. That includes the one about Hinata encountering paparazzi, Naruto getting jealous of "Menma," Neji finding out about it all, and so on. So please don't get anxious if you don't see your idea right away. Please keep in mind that I have to create a flow in the storyline so that they can be incorporated naturally. Thanks for understanding! :)