UNINVITED
IV: A Short Morning Walk
in which Neji doesn't get his answer.
- story occurs outside of canon; it would be best if one read up until the timejump happens though, as I may be referring to incidents pertaining to those chapters. Naruto belongs to Kishimoto Masashi, that crazy genius, and this is only a poor fanfic by a starstruck fan.
- this contains implied yaoi, which means two guys paired up with each other. While there isn't any overt action (...yet!), the implications are clear, and are intended, to make the story work. Please do us both a favor and NOT read if you're squeamish with this. And I do know how rare the occurrence of the NejiSasu fanperson in the fandom today, but here's to hoping it'll reach some anyway. ;
He had not moved an inch.
Morning came with faint sunlight, which filtered in through the window over his guest's bed. Outside, the village slowly awoke: the second daylight watch would rotate, and messenger birds would wing over the sky to carry reports from border patrol.
He could hear the compound come alive as well. To give themselves privacy, the Hyuuga placed seals over every room in their houses, disallowing the intrusive ability of the Byakugan. When one attempted to use the Byakugan to see through a room, a painful jolt would shoot through the user's eyes enough to break the hold.
The East House children were awake and ready for school, judging by the sound of small voices breaking the clear morning air. Because they were members of the Branch Family, these children would attend Academy lessons for half the day, to return home and be tutored by older Hyuuga members.
He could hear, from where he sat, the distant flurry of feathers: the aviary must have been opened now, the messenger birds all roused from their perches, the caretaker throwing in their meals for the day: meat for the kites and the smaller owls, bird pellets for the smaller birds.
He had sat in his place since the night before, intently watching the alien body on the bed. Although the sliding door that separated the inner room stood slightly open, and even as the chakra patterns traveling underneath the skin became familiar to him, Neji (who was sitting in the outer room of his chambers) did not once take his eyes off his ward.
To be fair, Uchiha Sasuke had not done anything. The stillness of the morning seemed to weigh upon his prone form, so that each breath was muted, and not a hair rustled in his head. Through Neji's vision, however, the sealing tubes continued to pump chakra in and out of Sasuke's subtlest pressure points.
In and out the faint chakra stream went, filtering oddly-colored energy in (Sasuke's chakra was blue chakra, faint and teal-hued), pumping faintly dark-colored energy out. The inner organs were masterfully restored by the physical surgeons, and Neji had no doubt that the Hokage had, literally, a hand in it as well; Uchiha Sasuke looked normal inside and out.
It was like watching out for the dead.
In the old days, especially in the days of the war, it had happened. Teams took great risk in retrieving the bodies of their comrades who had fallen, to keep the secret of a bloodline or a deliberately altered body part. Teams took each other's life in a dire situation, choosing to commit suicide instead of allowing their bodies to reveal the secrets of the village.
He had heard stories, from his father. He heard stories, about his father.
There was a very slight tap on the main door, and he turned sharply, roused from his reverie. He took one last glance at the body, and, deciding that the chances of Sasuke suddenly getting up and going mad were slim, went to attend to his visitor.
"Good morning, Neji-kun."
A heavily blindfolded man, a little over Neji's height, stood outside. Thick white bandages wrapped around the upper part of his face, obscuring his eyes, and part of his forehead, where the Mark of the Caged Bird was etched faintly. The very subtle lines on his face suggested that the man was a little past his prime, and a faint, long scar peeked down a few inches from the edge of the bandages.
He nodded in greeting as Neji slid the door open quietly.
Neji frowned. It was most unexpected, and he had thought that the transfer of the Uchiha was a secret. Hinata certainly made it clear to him that it was.
It was embarrassing enough as is; he doubted anyone else besides his uncle would look at things in the more "honorable" light, and he certainly did not want the entire clan to know of it.
"Kaminari-aniki?" he muttered in a low voice, stepping out of the room.
The man cocked his head, as if he could see the tension in Neji's face despite the heavy bandages wound over his eyes. "Why Neji-kun. You have not slept." He craned is neck slightly, as if to see into the room, a small, barely perceptible smile twitching his lips. The irony fairly wafted from his tone.
Neji's low jaw clenched. "Did uncle—"
"Hiashi-sama did nothing of the sort," the man replied almost cheerfully, waving the suggestion away with a flippant gesture. "And neither did Hinata-sama. She chose very good assistants, might I add."
Neji made as if to speak again, but was silenced by a twitch of the other man's jaw.
"Come, Neji," the man said levelly, and had the other's eyes been exposed, they would have stared down at him in the knowing look he knew too well. As if I need to explain, the tone seemed to say in subtext.
Neji looked away, disgruntled; it was (as it would ever be, he thought) futile to win an argument against his cousin. The older man stepped back, and leaned against the railings that overlooked the inner courtyard.
"A lot of air chakra," he mused, head held high, as if he had the extraordinary ability to sniff the very stuff. "A good choice," he said wryly.
Neji glared at his cousin deeply. He did not need the reminder. He did not need, as it were, the softly chiding tone that Kaminari was casually using, to his expense.
"He can't be within the presence of other people such as Sakura and Naruto," he muttered through grit teeth. "And he cannot stay for long in the hospital. As such, it seems this is the only place he will not—"
"—find traces of unstable memory, yes," Kaminari finished thoughtfully, as if he had read Neji's mind. "I understand completely."
Then, as if a brilliant idea struck him, he broke into a smile.
"Come, Neji-kun. Let us take a walk down the courtyards for a while. I think, it is only fitting you gave Sasuke-kun his privacy, after keeping watch all night." And with a slight smile, the older man turned to walk down the long hallway, towards the staircase.
Neji scowled, hating the enigmatic way he was always led astray, hated how his deepest concerns were articulated in the most casual way possible.
He cast a doubtful look back into the room in deep disquiet before he decided to follow suit.
They were both quiet, when they reached the courtyard, allowing the gravel softly crunching beneath their sandals to ease the air between them. It would always seem strange to Neji, how he could walk beside his cousin like so, as if the latter were a normal, able shinobi, with a good pair of eyes that were, in fact, wounded and quite useless as they were hidden behind the bandages.
It had always been strange to him, how Kaminari, a victim of such terrible irony, could walk beside him now without assistance, as if the man could see as well as he, or any of his other Hyuuga kin.
As if Kaminari weren't blind.
"Chakra burns," Kaminari began softly, and from the corner of his eye Neji saw him scratch absentmindedly at his arm, a phantom pain. "To use chakra so intensely as to hurt yourself. To be hurt, so intensely, by someone else's chakra, so that your system is disrupted, and your inner organs start to fail."
They were quiet again, and in steadily growing light, Neji could see, through his cousin's robes, the long, muted whip-like gashes that ran from the man's shoulder right down to his back. Chakra burns.
Neji never really understood his kinsman, for all the years they had lived, literally, under the same roof. After his father's death, Kaminari had immediately taken the boy under his wing, teaching Neji most of what he knew, the jutsu of the First Family.
The man's blindness and the cause of it was a legend among the Hyuuga children, and even distant relatives never knew the whole story. Many dismissed him, liked to pretend he did not exist; to a clan well-known for its eyes, a blind member was an embarrassment—nevermind that he initially belonged to the Main Branch.
But Neji, after living with and training under his cousin for most of his life, knew that Kaminari's blindness wasn't ordinary, that an unexplained clairvoyance preceded his disability.
Beside him, Kaminari continued. "Did you know that chakra have textures? It is quite interesting. The Yondaime for example, his was a warm, slightly prickly, crackling sort. You'd know it was him a mile away."
"Aniki," Neji said quietly. He did not need to say what he wanted to know.
"—your father, he was an air element like you. Oh, being around him felt like pressing your face against the wind that passes through Minamino Pass." The older Branch member continued as if he had heard nothing.
"Kaminari-aniki," Neji repeated, stopping in his tracks.
There was an audible sigh, before Kaminari turned in Neji's general direction. "Your obstinacy has not left with your rather fatalistic zeal, I see," he started in a slightly sharper tone that made Neji wince inwardly. "And I will not repeat what Hiashi-sama told you yesterday. You want to know the outcome of this 'mission' hmm? Neji-kun."
Neji pursed his lips, feeling like an eight-year old all over again. Since he had noticed his cousin's uncanny ability to hint at, and correctly predict situations, he had always asked about particular events. Sometimes Kaminari jovially let hints slip; he had predicted who Neji would fight in the Chuunin Exam Third stage.
For the briefest moment, a sadness Neji could not quite name crossed Kaminari's face, in the slight downward turn of his mouth; and then it was gone.
"You should be old enough to know it will not matter what I will say, what all this 'Fate' has to do with everything," was the reply. Extending a hand to steer Neji back the path they came, Kaminari continued, "but I do believe our little chat must conclude itself."
He inclined his head a little, as if listening for something, smiled enigmatically for a moment, and continued walking.
"I was talking about chakra, wasn't I? In any case, the Sandaime had a natural air of superiority about him—"
Neji frowned, but followed along, frustrated at his aniki's apparent disinterest in his affairs. There was no use cajoling; he had learned earlier on that when his cousin refused to say anything, nothing else was to be said.
The two slowly made their way back to the North House, even as the sun rose high in Konoha. Outside the family compound, business resumed, and further on outside the village, powerful heads of state converged.
Upstairs in the quiet second floor corridor of the East Wing, the lone occupant of Neji's room twitched a pale wrist feebly.
The altar lamps flickered slightly, and a breeze found its way through the lightly-shuttered window. Feebly, and very slowly, half-open parched lips sucked in air, as if their owner had just surfaced from a deep, dark immersion.
In the clear Konoha morning, Uchiha Sasuke began to slowly awaken.
Author's Notes:
(1) Introducing Hyuuga Kaminari. ; He's originally a Main House member, who was cast into Branch House because of his blindness. Why he is blind, I will elaborate on later, but all in due time. I figured the very strict familial management of the Hyuuga would cast down any unimportant member to Branch House. Kaminari would be helpless as he is blind, and a shameful thing for the family to recognize. He'd be like those black horses in the family, the cripple in a family of swordsmen, the dyslexic in a family of poets and writers and orators--only he isn't as incapacitated as many deem him to be. The family thus would rather hide him than recognize him as a representative of the Hyuuga in the Main Family. An OC whose character trait I sketched from Urahara Kisuke's from BLEACH. I wanted to give Neji a father figure after the death of his own.
(2) I don't suppose Neji, for all his genius, can learn the Heavenly Spin and the 64 Hands of Hakke (originally Main House specialties) on his own, raised as he is in the Branch House. I needed to give him a mentor of sorts, a "big brother" (that is what 'aniki' means) who would have been exposed to Main Family jutsu. Neji's genius therefore lies in the fact that, at a very young age, he is able to master such advanced techniques as taught to him by Kaminari. Which is, as one training under Kaminari understands, basically just 87 of figuring it out for yourself.
(3) Sasuke's awake!
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