Family Matters #1
The owls were not shutting up. That was the third thing Hinata noticed upon entering the hideout. The first was Neji, obviously, and that took up about 99% of her attention, and the only other facts that made it to being noticed were that a) there was a brick in one wall that was definitely another ninja in disguise, and b) the owls would not shut up. There must have been over a hundred of them sat in the rafters, sage creatures all, some of which she even recognised or had summoned herself.
They chatted constantly, some in hushed whispers, some in loud, unapologetically heated debates, as Hinata made her way into the central chamber. There, perfectly relaxed but exuding menace, was Neji Hyuuga.
"Cousin." He addressed her.
"Cuntface." She replied.
"Rude."
"I am very much beyond rude at this point. You've had me stewing in my own rage for a week straight while you hold my friend captive." Hinata's glare could have etched glass. "You'd better give him back right now, or I swear to Kami-"
"Relax." Neji emphasised. He snapped his fingers. A door behind her on her left opened. Making sure to keep her Byakugan trained on him, Hinata turned and gasped. "Kudos!"
"M-Mistress?" Sat there in a small room, scribbled with seals presumably to stop him desummoning, Kudos looked like absolute shit. His posture was hunched, his feathers were ruffled, and one eye was swollen, held forcefully shut. "Mistress, is that you?"
"It's me, Kudos. I'm here." Hinata dropped to her knees next to him and enveloped him in a hug, heedless of the obvious target she presented to Neji. "By the Sage, Kudos, what did he do to you?"
"Did something funny with my eyes." Kudos shivered in her arms. "But other than that, he didn't hurt me. He just...kept me in there..."
Kudos was big, but Hinata was strong, and it didn't take much effort to pick him up and carry him out of the room. "Can you get back home now?"
Kudos squinted with his one good eye. "Mmhmm, I think so. Are you staying here?"
"I am."
"Kick his butt, mistress."
"Don't worry. I will." Hinata gave him a reassuring smile.
Hesitantly, Kudos put his claws together, and vanished in a puff of smoke.
Hinata turned, and looked back at Neji. "You...you're evil."
"Aren't I though?" Neji smiled, and stood up.
At that, all the owls in the rafters suddenly went silent.
"So, what's your reason?" Hinata asked, performing some last minute stretches. "Why...all this?"
"Tell me, Hinata, have you figured it out?" He replied with another question. "How the Gokei is acquired?"
Hinata nodded. "Eventually, yes. While the Sharingan requires you to kill an ally, the Byakugan requires you to be spared by an enemy."
"Quite. And I trust you remember how I developed mine?"
"It was me." Hinata whispered. "When father attempted to kill you and ordered me not to intervene, and yet I saved your life."
"Precisely." Neji beamed. "I suppose I should thank you for making all this possible. Not that I'm blaming you for the massacre, of course, I'm keeping full credit for that."
"Is that why I was spared?" Hinata asked him, some desperation leaking out into her voice. After so long...she needed to know. "Was some misplaced sense of gratitude why you let me live?"
"I'm afraid not." Neji replied, calmly. "You see, Hinata, I told you earlier that the Gokei's powers cannot last forever. That they have consequences for the person who wields them. By the end of this battle, it's entirely possible that Gokei overuse will have killed me. However..." He pointed. Straight at her. "There is a way to negate this. With the eyes of another Gokei user, those of a close family member, one can gain the power to use the Gokei indefinitely, with greater power and a reduced cost. Why do you think I spared you? Bid you get stronger? Now, here you are. And whoever leaves here will have eternal access to one of the strongest eyes on the planet."
Hinata shook her head in disgust. "That's all it is? That's all it ever was? You wanted more power?"
He tilted his head. "Would you believe me if I told you I was trying to save the world?"
It wasn't a direct statement, so she couldn't tell if he was lying.
"No." she settled into a gentle fist stance.
"I didn't think so."
He fell back into one himself. "Are you prepared?"
"I've been prepared for the last ten years."
"Then the question I asked you ten years ago still stands. Hinata Hyuuga, do you believe you can change your fate?"
The following battle would take place entirely within the ensuing sixty seconds.
Itachi was sat alone in the forest when Sasuke found him. The elder Uchiha brother had a wide cloak around his shoulders, and a blade of grass on his lips, and was trying (unsuccessfully) to blow a tune into it.
"Pfthffffft." He said, in greeting.
"That is definitely not how you're supposed to do that." Sasuke remarked, dryly.
Itachi looked at him. Frowned. Put down the leaf. "Something's up. What."
"Oh come on, you did not figure that out from my just sassing you! I always sass you!" Sasuke protested.
"You'd be surprised what you pick up about someone when you look at them with the Sharingan most days for four years." Itachi replied, staring hard. "You, little brother, are absolutely furious. What's happened?"
Sasuke considered letting the farce play out longer, but gave up. There had never been any hope of him lying to Itachi.
"Traitor." He said, simply.
"Ah." Itachi replied. He sighed, and stood up.
"Did you hurt Izumi?"
"No. She's in prison."
"Thank you. She's not guilty of anything."
"Except keeping secrets?"
"Except that, yes. Will I be allowed to explain myself?"
"Sure," Sasuke replied, "from prison."
"We both know this village doesn't have a prison that can hold me." Itachi looked up and fixed his gaze on the middle distance. "But I imagine that's your plan, isn't it? Any opportunity to kill me would be good for you."
After a moment, Fugaku faded into appearance where Itachi was looking. "We don't want to kill you. But we will, if you won't come peacefully."
"Well, that's a crock of shit and you know it." Itachi turned back to Sasuke. "I'm not supposed to tell you this, but Fugaku and the Uchiha were planning a coup d'etat back when I was twelve. They had every intention of killing the Hokage and taking over the village."
Sasuke weighed up the information. "Thanks. I'll deal with that later. Did you help kill the Hyuuga?"
Itachi's eyes narrowed. "Yes."
"Have you been consorting with Neji this whole time?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I'm not going to tell you that while Neji is still alive."
"Great." Sasuke drew Raito. "You ruined one of my teammates' lives. Surrender or I will kill you."
"Would you believe me if I told you it was to help save the world?" Itachi asked.
Sasuke thoguht about it. "No."
"I didn't think so." Itachi turned to face Fugaku. "If I die here, make sure this asshole doesn't get my eyes."
Then his Sharingan flashed.
Kagutsuchi. Sasuke thought, and the Amaterasu flames that blossomed on Fugaku's body didn't harm him, they all flew harmlessly away and coalesced in Sasuke's palm.
He raised an eyebrow at his older brother, pointedly.
"Worth a shot." Itachi shrugged.
Then Sasuke flung the black fire from his palm in the form of dozens of shuriken, and Itachi conjured a clone that transformed into a large wooden barricade, and the moment the spray touched it it exploded in a bright flash, and in the brief moment of blindness Fugaku had to use sound alone to block Itachi's taijutsu attack, and then the fight was on.
The good thing about a battle between two Byakugan users was that neither bothered to waste time with genjutsu. They just charged.
Hand signs flashed and three Hinata slammed into three Neji, hands blurring between them like wind dancing around mountains. There was one pop, and another, and then the poof of a substitution jutsu and another pop, and then Hinata was stood back in the position of her safety-clone looking out at three perfectly intact Neji.
Fuck, that was quick. He's better than me at the gentle fist.
"Five years of experience, remember." Neji tutted.
He sprinted towards her again-
And was met with an explosion.
Hinata pulled her right hand back to the satchel she'd summoned at her hip, and threw a kunai with her left. Then threw another with her right, and another with her left, and-
Explosions rocked the hideout. Owls took off, screeching, as the walls shook and dirt was thrown up and Neji jumped, span, and twisted like a madman to avoid the detonating projectiles Hinata threw at him at a rate roughly equivalent to a high caliber chaingun.
If the bastard was going to give her seven days, she was damn well going to make the most of them. And if ever there was a time for 'spend all your money and use all your consumable items', this was it.
Naruto had said it best. You can never have too many explosive tags.
Eventually Neji twisted into a Heavenly Spin (which he did on his hands, by the way) and Hinata planned on attacking with something that had more punch, but he beat her to it, shooting a bolt of lightning from the inside of his dome aimed straight at her heart, all while somehow keeping his clones in the dome with him.
How are they-Oh, putting out chakra in sync with him so the flow goes around them, didn't know that was possible, noting it down-
Hinata used the same technique she'd used against Sasuke, catching and splitting the bolt with a flicker of lionfist goodness and channeling it around her, but this time she didn't fire it straight back. She shot it in almost a cone in front of her, in what must have looked like a poorly controlled burst, but that didn't matter because she wasn't aiming to penetrate the dome with it.
Hundreds of shards of metal, remnants of her thrown kunai buried in floors and walls, were suddenly lit up with electricity. Lightning sparked across the ground, through the air, darting past the dome to strike Neji in the-
A blink, and then his two clones transformed into large metal rods, catching and grounding all the lightning before it could hit Neji. They both popped, and Neji idly brushed some debris off his cloak.
"Are you afraid yet?" He asked.
"No." She replied.
"You're telling the truth." He mused. "Good for you. Problem is-" he looked her in the eye, "You really ought to be."
And then everything went white.
The forest outside Konoha was pretty fucking on fire right now my dudes. Itachi was following a well tested Uchiha strategy of 'well, being outnumbered doesn't matter as much if the terrain doesn't let them double team me, and the terrain doesn't let them double team me if the terrain is fire.'
Sasuke jumped between burning trees, throwing a brace of shuriken at Itachi's form as it blitzed past him, then glared and used his Kagutsuchi to grapple a large plume of Amaterasu, yanking it away from where his father was also executing some calculated arson.
Oh yeah, Amaterasu was everywhere too, thanks for that Itachi. Everything was either red as the blood of angry men or black as the dark of ages past, and all of it was hot as hell.
Weird, Itachi doesn't usually-oh, whatever, not important.
Sasuke unrolled a spool of razor wire and-
No!
That was important. He chased the thread of thought back to its root, and growled. Oh, very clever.
Of course, Itachi couldn't use Amaterasu to such an outrageous extent without going blind. Ergo, this wasn't happening. And the tricky shit had put a little bonus genjutsu in to make Sasuke avoid thinking about the plot holes.
He snapped out of the illusion just in time to see Itachi swinging for his head with a sword, and barely got his own up to block it.
A vague note of amusement bubbled to the surface of the rage when he realised that they were both using one half of Raito. Note to self, claim that off his corpse.
He twisted his brother's blade away, parried another five quick strikes, then reposted, his blade sliding harmlessly over Itachi's shoulder while his elbow came around to punt him in the face and Explosive Shadow Clone-
A rapid substitution got Sasuke out of the range of the bang (immolating a poor tree branch) and then he used his razor wire like a grapple to yank himself leftwards, to where Itachi and Fugaku were duelling.
Another quick fireball split them apart, and then Sasuke was above Itachi, opening his arms and unleashing a blitz of shuriken.
Itachi responded in kind, and the air was turned sharp as flashes of steel collided, intersected, fell harmlessly or thunked into trees. One grazed Sasuke's cheek, another made a gash in Itachi's leg.
Then Sasuke finished falling, and crashed down on Itachi just as Fugaku charged in from the side, and they blurred together in a crush of steel, and then Itachi caught Sasuke with a heel to the back of his neck and knocked him flat unconscious on the floor, turning to focus on Fugaku and reminding the elder that, hey, maybe taking on your young, fit, genius prodigy son is much easier alongside your other young, fit, genius prodigy son and not alone as a man who is at best 'really good' at being a ninja (pathetic, right?).
Of course, that wasn't what was actually happening. Fugaku must have noticed when a genjutsu'd Itachi started completely ignoring his completely okay little brother, but professionally didn't react, letting Sasuke set up a web of traps, and then charge in from behind with a chidori aimed right at Itachi's back.
Itachi turned around and caught Sasuke's arm.
"You do realise I wasn't caught by any of that, right?" He remarked, calmly.
Sasuke bared his teeth and kept fighting.
The fight went on to last about three minutes, but when you're a ninja who surpassed the speed of sound during the Chunin exams and your APM varies between a hundred and a thousand, three minutes can feel like a lifetime.
The initiative waxed and waned, techniques were traded, Itachi's reserves gradually ran low until he was forced to pull out the Susanno. After that, it was only a matter of time.
The orange armour cracked, then fell away, allowing Sasuke in to bury a chidori in his elder brother's stomach.
Itachi gave one last witty remark, smiled, did that thing with the forehead poke he'd liked to do throughout Sasuke's childhood, and died.
And Sasuke cried for him.
He was too exhausted to deal with Fugaku's explanations or complaints; putting his brother's body in a storage scroll and leaving at an unhurried walk.
It was only hours later, sat in his room, that he realised something was wrong.
As an exercise, he threw up a genjutsu on himself; wiping his own memory and replaying through the events from an unbiased point of view.
Lo and behold; the fight had gone exactly how he'd expected it to go.
Because that's all it had been. An expectation.
Itachi hadn't done anything Sasuke hadn't known he could. From the initial genjutsu war, to the kenjutsu fight, to the fire, to the mangekyo...to the fact that Sasuke hadn't been able to surpass his brother, just wear him down. Everything had been exactly as he'd expected it to be. That was what the genjutsu had been made out of, after all.
Sasuke paused, sighed. And then screamed aloud, and shattered his reality like glass.
He was back at the beginning of the fight, but this wasn't real either, was it? He broke through the genjutsu, then broke the next one, then the next, then the next, then the overarching genjutsu that was putting all the other ones in front of him, then the one above that and the one above that but it didn't matter, there would always be more, illusion after illusion wrapping around him like a nice warm blanket that he was too afraid to shrug off, like suffocating in his bedsheets during a dream, because it didn't matter how much he thought he was fighting, at the end of the day he would never be able to get over the idea that Itachi would always be there, like some omnipotent onii-san deity that he couldn't possibly defy, because how could Itachi ever be wrong-
But he was. And Sasuke was sick and tired of trusting him.
Something very important deep inside Sasuke broke.
And with it, a red moon shattered into stardust.
Sasuke came to in the clearing, and judged that about two seconds had passed since the fight had really started. Fugaku was already bleeding from multiple cuts, and was currently restrained in a web of razor wire.
Evidently half a millisecond from stabbing his father in the gut, Itachi was staring at Sasuke in honest, gaping, mangekyo-eyed surprise.
"Stop. Lying. To Me." Sasuke told him.
"Well." Itachi, for the first time Sasuke had ever seen, gulped. "You just broke out of the Tsukiyomi, so I'm not even sure lying's possible anymore."
"Cute." Remarked Fugaku, offhandedly. And then his eyes shifted pattern, and black flames blasted forth.
Oh, son of a bitch, I forgot about Kokosora.
Hinata spun around in the emptiness, trying to remain calm.
Alright, what do we know. One; time isn't dilated in here, so we have about a second before he pulls my eyes out. Great. Two; total sensory deprivation for an unknown timescale. At least several weeks, not that I'll survive the next two seconds anyway. So, breaking it.
She stretched her eyes. Frowned, and stretched them further.
Nothing.
There was just nothing. Mind-bendingly, maddeningly, nothing, for as far as she could see in any direction. More worryingly, there wasn't even a her. Her base eyes told her she floating in space, but she wasn't, her Byakugan couldn't even see her own body, they didn't even have a reference point as to where they were, and her nausea grew as she was provided no sensory data to even suggest that she existed-
Calm down, girl. Think. What can we do that Itachi Uchiha can't? Hinata exhaled, grimaced, and thought 'Hiragekoma'.
It certainly felt like the clarity was there, but there was no change in what she saw. While any other technique would have bloomed out into endless complexities of chakra threads, the Kokosora was still just plain nothing. No weak points, no strong points, nothing but an endless emptiness stretching out into eternity.
Of course. This genjutsu was meant specifically to target those with an over reliance on dojutsu. My eyes won't help me here.
Hinata was certain a second had passed; maybe Neji was taking his time, confident she wouldn't escape?
What had he said...be afraid. Be afraid of what? Him? The technique? Was he cryptically giving her a hint or did she try and do the opposite of what he said?
What was she afraid of? Only the nebulous. She was afraid of hurting her teammates, afraid of dying because of what that would mean for the world, but that didn't seem relevant here.
What were normal people scared of?
The dark.
It was a small, innocent, almost hysterical thought, but it stuck and Hinata turned back to it. Plenty of people were scared of the dark, but not the Hyuuga. It didn't matter to them how dark it was, they saw chakra. And yet...there was the cursed seal to stop the removal of their eyes. There was the hiding of the Byakugan's secrets, to stop people developing counters. The Hyuuga clan was terrified of its own special brand of darkness; the darkness that came when the eyes you were so proud of were somehow rendered useless.
It's a riddle, if you like. Who is more afraid of the dark? Someone with the sharpest eyes in the world...or a blind man?
Hinata turned off her Byakugan. Still white. She closed her eyes. Black now, but still useless.
Do you really think I should be afraid of you stealing my eyes, Neji?
I'll kill you blind if I have to.
She opened her eyes, grinned, and then reached up and tore both Byakugan out.
Hinata came back to her senses 1.465 seconds after going under, not having even had time to fall over. Neji was barely a foot in front of her, hand outstretched towards her, yet when he saw her reopen her eyes his own widened in what looked like genuine shock.
"Glad that worked." She muttered to herself. "I'd have felt an utter imbecile if it hadn't."
There was a crack, and a blur of blue, and her palm slammed forwards and took Neji in the chest, sending him flying backwards to crash into his throne.
"And you're wrong." Hinata looked up at him, curse mark activated, flexing her wings. "I'm not the one who should be afraid."
So?" Konan asked, impassively. "What's the plan of attack?"
"There isn't one." The Deva path of Pain admitted, walking up to the gates of Konoha. "I'm going to enter, and use the human path of pain to eat people's memories until I find where the Kyuubi is."
"Sounds well thought out."
"A plan is just a list of things that can go wrong."
"This from the man who made the most complicated world takeover plan in the history of the planet."
Konan waited for a reaction, didn't get one, and frowned. "Oh, damn, you are pissed."
"I am." The Deva Path wasn't showing much in the way of expressions.
"You know you're going to hurt a lot of people."
"I do."
"Are you going to give the civilians a warning?"
Pain paused. Nodded. "Yes. They'll get a warning."
He cleared his throat, walked towards the gates, and held his hands out. Breathed in.
"SOME-"
"Lady Tsunade!" Shizune burst into the Hokage office- "You won the lottery!"
Tsunade froze. "The-You mean the Konoha-"
"No! The international lottery!" Shizune was beaming. "That was one in a billion chance, my lady! You're so lucky!"
Tsunade shook, and slowly turned to look through her window.
As she watched, the gates to the city exploded, nearby houses collapsing with bodies and shards of wood being scattered across the streets along with the echoing call of "-BODY ONCE TOLD ME THE WORLD WAS GONNA ROLL ME, I-"
Oh, yeah. It's all coming together.
You may notice that these fights are mirroring each other to some degree, and that's deliberate. I'm really going for the whole 'Hyuuga and Uchiha are two sides of the same coin' thing. You may also notice that everyone is swearing a lot, and that's basically because they're all completely furious.
So, ladies, gentlemen and weebs. Place your bets. Who am I going to let survive this?
