The Girl Who Spun Through Time
Chapter 6
Ah. It's as I thought. Let's begin.
Hinata didn't move away from the sword at her throat; she was sure the man in front of her would shove it through her trachea if she did. He was completely on edge, ready to take action at a moment's notice.
He couldn't be Danzo Shimura. Danzo didn't have a Sharingan; Danzo didn't look like a porcelain cup that had been dropped and hastily glued back together. At least, he hadn't the last time she had seen him.
Hinata realized that had been thirteen years ago. A lot could have happened in thirteen years. Her chest constricted, as though her someone were squeezing her heart, and Hinata's face went white.
"Shimura-san?" she asked respectfully. The man didn't lower his sword. "Don't you recognize me?"
The man's eyes narrowed, his Sharingan gleaming in the dim light. "You look like Hinata Hyuuga," he said, his grip tightening around his sword. "That is, of course, impossible. So I'll ask one more time. Who are you?"
"I am Hinata Hyuuga," Hinata said warily. Her eyes ached, and she closed them momentarily, trying to blink the wariness away. Her chakra system felt tangled; every inch of it buzzed with dull pain. Something coldly familiar was coursing through it, leaving her covered with goosebumps. "We met, thirteen or so years ago. After I had traveled through time. I'm… back." Danzo blinked and cocked his head, the crack running through his shining red eye folding with the motion.
HInata looked around at the silent village and then at Danzo's marred face. The man was staring at her, his brow wrinkling. His Sharingan slowly rotated, seeing something she could not.
"No such thing happened," he said flatly, and Hinata rocked back. "All this proves is that you are not Hinata Hyuuga." He sneered, just a little. "You could have at least provided a more plausible story."
"I am!" Hinata protested. "What happened while I was gone? Why is the village so dark? And your face!" Danzo's free hand unconsciously raised to his cheek before falling away. "I don't understand what's going on. I thought-"
She blinked heavily, slamming her mouth shut.
'I thought I'd changed things for the better.'
"Prove it then," Danzo said after a brief pause. "Activate your Byakugan."
Hinata frowned, and after some hesitation she slowly brought her hand up with two fingers extended. Danzo watched the whole thing intently, ready to cut her down. Her skin prickled with more goosebumps, and her hand trembled. Her chakra refused to respond. It felt as though her internal organs were in a vice: she could not breathe.
She wanted to scream.
"As I thought," Danzo said.
"You can't!" Her hand came up, curled into a fist from the pain. It knocked away the blade as it bit into her neck, leaving a small cut on both it and her palm. "I've still got to-!"
Danzo snarled and swung once more, and the blade moved in an inexorable arc towards her chest. Hinata watched the attack that would end her life, unable to believe what was happening.
There was a burst of dull yellow, and everything disappeared.
Hinata blinked.
Konoha was gone, along with Danzo. She was on top of a building, looking out over a field of snowy field spotted with patches of black. A mountain, enormous and craggy, loomed in the distance, as though the earth had grown teeth. Before it, though still kilometers from her, was an extensive forest cloaked in white. The darkness of the dull night had vanished; now, her sight was filled with anemic light.
The Hyuuga stumbled back with a gasp and tripped. The world spun, tilting upwards into an endless expanse of grey and white. Hinata hit the roof, her breath exploding out of her along with a pained grunt. Her fingers dug into the snow, dampening her hand and magnifying the stinging from the cut on her palm, her nails scraping on the stone beneath her.
Slowly, the prickling pain in her chakra system receded. Her heart started beating more regularly; the vice loosened.
For nearly thirty seconds, she stared at the sky, unable to understand what had just happened. It seemed completely dead. The clouds hung heavy and low, unmoving, like stones ready to slam down on the world. But it wasn't dark anymore, like it had been in Konoha: just pale.
Eventually, she voiced out loud what was invariably echoing through her mind. It was a quiet sound in the ocean of emptiness around her; Hinata's own voice nearly frightened her.
"Naruto?"
That color she'd seen had been unmistakable. There wasn't another like it in the world. Yellow, bright even in the dark. That had been Naruto's hair.
He must have been there, with the cracked, fake-looking Danzo and the empty village. Naruto must have been there. And if he'd been the last thing she'd seen before coming here…
It could be a genjutsu. A very strange one, considering Danzo had been about to execute her. There'd be little point to it. But how else could she have arrived here? It had been instant. One second, the sword had been at her neck. The next, she had been on top of the building, clearly far away from Konoha. Traveling so far in an instant was just as impossible as traveling through time.
And yet, here she was.
Hinata finally started to pull herself, rubbing the back of her head. A small bruise was already forming where she'd slammed it into the stone. She pulled her foot back, and it dragged over whatever had tripped her. She looked down.
It was a man, clad in hefty grey plate armor. He was spattered with ash and blood, and an arrow covered in dry blood transfixed his throat. One of his hands was clutching a thick sword. The other was missing. A horned helmet lay nearby, split nearly in half at the crown. Hinata imagined it had been his.
She recognized the armor. It was worn by samurai in the Land of Iron: thick and heavy, effective at diminishing the dangers of hand-to-hand combat and the possibility of mass casualties via large-scale ninjutsu. It was not, as she recalled from her father's lessons, very effective against the Gentle Fist.
Samurai rarely left the Land of Iron. That probably meant she was somewhere there, hundreds of miles away from Konoha. The thought swept across her mind, detached and cold as her surroundings. Hinata felt herself shut down parts of brain as she regarded her situation: the parts screaming about broken old men and flashes of blond hair. She needed the quiet.
Back on her feet, she could look around with clearer eyes. The dark patches in the field weren't shrubbery or exposed grass, as she'd initially supposed. They were more bodies, all lying about like littered trash. Most were samurai, but there were shinobi as well, seemingly from Iwagakure. There were even several civilians in heavy jackets, men and women both. They had all been killed with blades and arrows, or torn apart by ninjutsu.
Hinata shivered. All of these people hadn't died long ago. The bodies hadn't decayed; this massacre had happened within the last several days. She looked back at the dead samurai. He had a beard full of frost, and a terrified twist to his lips.
She stepped away from the body, feeling at the cut on her neck. It was shallow, but painful. Steam rose from the snow where blood had dripped from her neck, across her shoulders, down her sleeve, and onto the roof of the building. Just one more ache in the days to come.
Hinata leapt off the building, landing in the snow without a sound, and regarded the scattered bodies once more. How had samurai, civilians, and shinobi from Iwagakure all come to die here? There didn't seem to be anything around. Judging by the positions of the bodies, they'd been attacked by multiple enemies, with the civilians dying first.
She brought her hand up, attempting to activate her Byakugan once more. Her chakra system wasn't as debilitated as it had been just a minute ago; she'd recovered faster from the journey through time on her second trip. While it sent unpleasant twinges racing through her entire body to focus on the energy inside her, like someone was yanking on a thread extending from the back of her neck that ran through her whole body, she wasn't close to edge of paralysis as she had been last time.
Hinata couldn't suppress a flinch as she forced chakra through her choked system. It brought with it a harsh cold rather than its ordinary warmth. It wasn't healthy to use it like that. Her eyes twitched, but gradually, the Byakugan's veins pulsed out.
The battlefield was revealed entirely to her. Thirty bodies in total: the building she'd jumped down from was a simple, bunker like construction, its entrance melted to slag. There were wolf-heads emblazoned above the disfigured rock. The field of snow was mostly flat, with several soft hills. It extended all the way to the forest at the base of the mountain she'd seen when she'd first arrived, dotted with patches of withered brown plant-life.
Hinata hardly noticed any of that thanks to the woman standing stock still about one-hundred and twenty meters to her left.
She was rather short, barely more than five feet tall, and her brown hair fell to just above her shoulders. The woman was dressed like an ANBU, though she lacked a mask and hitai-ate. She stared up at the sky, as still as a statue. The effect was enhanced by the cracks and fissures crawling across her body, and the paleness of her skin.
'The same as Danzo.'
Hinata shivered, and took a step towards the distant women.
'Is it some kind of disease?'
Her concentration punctured for a moment, the snow crunched under Hinata's feet. She opened her mouth to say something, but before she could, the woman spun towards her. Her eyes were wide; they were entirely black, with the exception of a yellow-red slit of a pupil.
"Umm." The Hyuuga stopped dead in her tracks. The eyes bored into her, freezing her voice in her throat. She felt as though Danzo's sword were once more pressed to her neck; the sensation made her take a step back.
The cracked woman broke in a dead sprint right at Hinata, screeching at the top of her lungs. A trail of snow exploded out behind her in a cascading wave, thrown up by the speed of her passing. She covered the space between herself and Hinata in less than a second.
The woman thrust her hand out like a spear, aimed right for the Hyuuga's heart. Hinata, acting entirely on instinct, bent backwards. She found herself looking at the sky again, with the woman's hand suddenly blocking her view. Her back ached, and the clarity of the sudden pain embedded itself in her mind.
'What?'
Enemy. No time to think. Muscle memory that had been trained into her since before she could walk took over, and Hinata brought her hands down to complete an ad-hoc backflip. Her feet came up, striking the screeching woman in the chin and kicking her away.
Hinata came back to her feet, settling into a low Juken stance. The madwoman spun, regaining her balance, and immediately went on the attack once more. Her bone-rattling screams continued unabated as she leapt into the air for a set of kicks. Hinata ducked the first, feeling the force of the blow send her hair whipping to the left, and plucked the second out of the air with three precise strikes to the woman's shin and kneecap. The screaming woman's leg went limp, and Hinata wrapped her free arm around it.
She intended to slam the woman to the ground and use the opportunity to seal more of her tenketsu. Unfortunately, that opportunity vanished when the woman finished drawing the tanto from the sheath in the small of her back, and unable to reach Hinata herself thanks to the length of the blade, cut off her own leg instead.
Off-balance, Hinata staggered back with the woman's leg clutched in the crook of her arm. Another kick, sent as the screaming woman fell to the ground, grazed the Hyuuga's chin and left a small scrape. Then, the woman slammed to the snow, and Hinata dropped the severed leg in shock.
The limb didn't bleed; neither did the woman it had come from. She scrambled up, falling onto her three remaining limbs like an animal. Writhing black marks scrambled up her neck and over her face, wrapping around her face. They swirled like whirlpools around her slit eyes, and her features grew steadily more monstrous under the black.
"What?!" Hinata couldn't contain the exclamation. The woman came at her again, leaping off the ground, leading with her tanto. Hinata met her with both fists.
The tanto went skittering away through the snow, knocked away by a burst of chakra, but the woman finally got a blow in. Her fist smashed into Hinata's throat, knocking the Hyuuga's breath away. Hinata rocked back, and then the woman's hand drove at her chest.
Hinata skipped back and kicked in desperation, barely evading the thrust. The woman deflected the kicks with her free hand and came on once more, drawing her hand back with her fingers forming a wedge. Hinata narrowed her eyes and refused to fall back. Instead, she rushed in and slipped past the blow, stabbing at the arm with the tips of her fingers. Tenketsu slammed shut, and the woman's arm fell limp. Hinata completed the pass, knocking away a backhand directed at her face, and dropped low to sweep the woman's feet out from under her.
The sweep was stopped by a kick to the ankle; Hinata flinched. The woman had her leg back. That was-
No: stupid to think like that. She had to stop thinking like that or she'd be-
Her opponent kicked upward, catching Hinata in the jaw and sending her tumbling backwards. She rolled back to her feet, ready to meet the inevitable follow-up. The woman looked like a beast now: her skin was pitch black, and horns had sprouted from her shoulders, her hair turning a light green and extending to nearly the length of her body. Combined with the cracks that covered her, she seemed little more than a horrific pastel monster.
The woman-turned-beast screamed again, leaping forward. Hinata threw a hand out, hoping to destroy her brain with a blast of chakra directed through the woman's eye-socket.
There was a yellow flash.
The woman staggered back. She had a pronged kunai through her head. Hinata's blow fell short, and she blinked.
By the time her eyes opened again, the woman had vanished. The kunai fell to the snow, landing point down.
Hinata froze. There was a man standing behind her, taller than her, with a long coat and bright blonde hair. Just like the woman who had abruptly vanished, he was covered in surreal fissures, like crinkled paper. He was staring at the back of her head with cold blue eyes.
He had Naruto's hair, she realized. Naruto's hair and Naruto's eyes. The effect was bizarre, seeing them in a grown man's face. He looked familiar, in a manner beyond the familiar features. Hinata couldn't help but think she'd met him before.
They stared at each other for a moment, and Hinata knew the man was making eye contact with her through the back of her head. Slowly, she dropped her arms to her sides.
"I sent her away." He spoke in a calm baritone. "Though I must apologize for putting you in such a position in the first place. I was sloppy."
Hinata started. This man was the reason she'd appeared here; he must have been the one to save her from Danzo. Perhaps with the same technique he'd used to make the beastial woman disappear.
"Who are you?" Hinata slowly turned around, keeping her Byakugan active. The man seemed totally relaxed, but she hadn't even seen him stab the woman earlier. If he decided to attack her, she wouldn't be able to react in time. "Do I know you?"
The man smiled, through the cracks in his face murdered any chance it had at being comforting. "If you really are Hinata Hyuuga, you've probably seen my face almost every day of your life."
Hinata narrowed her eyes, analyzing his features.
"I'm sorry," she said, and she couldn't help but be a little genuinely apologetic. "It's been a very long day."
The blond man snorted.
"I'm the Fourth Hokage," Minato Namikaze said as Hinata nearly swallowed her own tongue. "And if what you told Danzo was true, I think the both of us have a very interesting story to share."
AN: I'm back.