Unsung Story of the Inconspicuous
A/N: Thanks to my beta, the ever tolerant Vanya Starwind, who deals with my colloquialisms and Australian spelling without kicking my ass. (I'd deserve it).
I don't own Naruto or any of its characters, storylines or affiliates.
It was one week and at least five hundred push-ups later that Yamada discovered Raiku simply could not access more than miniscule amounts of chakra.
"Speedy," he sighed wearily, head in his hands while he sat on a conveniently low tree branch. "Everybody has chakra. You just aren't very good with it, get me?"
Raiku sat cross-legged on the grass and stared up at him imploringly. 'Maybe I'm cursed?' she offered largely unhelpfully.
"You are not cursed!" Yamada retorted, though privately he was starting to agree. "You had to use the Clone technique to graduate after all- you've gotta have at least a little in there."
'I think it's shy.'
"Chakra is not-!" he broke off mid-sentence, hanging his head in frustration. Raiku looked up at him with endless willingness to help written in those massive blue eyes, and it only made the whole situation that much more awkward for him. It wasn't that she was being difficult and he knew that: she was simply too terrified of… everything, to be that difficult.
Raiku on the other hand, was pondering something else entirely.
I haven't seen Hinata lately, she worried to herself, tilting her head to look at the sky between branches. Has she told her family I electrocuted her and are they coming to murder me now? Does her family think I molested her and are they coming to murder me now!?
"Speedy!" Yamada said as he snapped his fingers under her nose. "Come back speedy, we're not done here!" Raiku's head snapped back to let her look at him fearfully. That fearful expression was going to have to go. The girl was too highly strung, Yamada thought wearily.
"Look speedy, you can't rush chakra," he lied, scratching the back of his head awkwardly. "It's just one of those things. I'm gonna give you some techniques to practise at home, got me? Every day."
She nodded enthusiastically. There was a short silence of mutual understanding and exasperation, before Yamada came to his senses and composed himself. "Right," he said gruffly, clearing his throat. "Until you start getting better on that front, we're going to work on taijutsu."
Raiku knew she looked like a rabbit sitting directly in the path of a fox, but it was getting to be so automatic she was afraid her face would be stuck this way forever.
"Go and find Sullen and Shorty, we'll start with some partner work," Yamada instructed.
'You like the letter "s",' Raiku offered. Yamada inhaled to respond with orders of self-inflicted physical punishment, but when she flinched he relented. "Just go," he said wearily. She visibly (and appropriately) brightened, darting off.
"Getting soft in my old age," he muttered, crossing his arms across his chest.
Raiku jogged down across the grass to the beginning of the streets, setting her feet on concrete before she stopped to make a plan of action. Daisukenojo was probably at home with all six of his siblings, but he might refuse to help her look for Ryuu. She sighed, rubbing her neck. They made this so much harder than it should have been. Ryuu was more likely to complain rather than just refuse, so she decided to find him first.
When she arrived at his pleasantly plain home his pleasantly plain mother told her he'd gone out, presumably to meet his team. Raiku thanked her and went back to the gate, side-stepping an over-enthused rookie barrelling his way down the street. What did she know about Ryuu?
Almost nothing.
Well, that was better than actually knowing nothing, she guessed. And his house was sort of near the Hyuuga compound…
Should she apologise now? Or was it too late to apologise and they'd just thank her for making the assassination easier? Maybe she was blowing this out of proportion and-
Raiku paused mid-step, tilting her head. She frowned slightly under the mask, turning to look over her shoulder. Other than some friends milling absently next to a fence, there was no one.
She shrugged and continued on. She could've sworn she heard something…
'Remind me why we're hiding from spikes?' Kiba asked Hinata, grinning devilishly. Hinata went bright red. 'N-no reason!'
Ryuu, Ryuu… Raiku pondered, deep in thought as her feet subconsciously took her to the eating and shopping district. If I were-
'What do you want?' Ryuu asked bluntly. She shrieked, recoiling from the man suddenly existent on her left. 'When did you get there!?' she demanded.
Ryuu raised an eyebrow. 'You've been standing there saying my name for about twenty minutes now. In the end someone told me so that you'd stop scaring away business.'
She spun around, fixing a glowering storekeeper with a scandalised look. He made an impatient shooing motion.
'What do you want?' Ryuu repeated, rolling his eyes. She blinked, turning back to him. 'Yamada wants to practice taijutsu.'
'Gave up on your chakra?' he asked, lips twitching slightly.
'Y- No,' she coughed. Ryuu nodded knowingly. 'Sure.'
'We have to go find Daisukenojo anyway,' she muttered sullenly, crossing her arms across her chest. Ryuu grimaced. 'Let's get going. The sooner we get there, the sooner we can avoid his spastic family.'
'His family's not spastic!' Raiku retorted, giving him an eye roll of her own. 'You need to at least try to get along. You know, find some common ground?'
Ryuu changed the subject, making his way through the crowds with deceptive ease. 'I hear you jumped Hinata. I admire your bravery,' he smirked.
She gawked at him, weaving through the throng of people with considerably less grace and considerably more contortion. 'I didn't! It was an accident! IT WAS AN ACCIDENT.'
'Of course,' he said innocently as he pulled free of the majority and found himself almost at Daisukenojo's street with alarmingly convenient narrative styling.
'Which house is his?' he asked over his shoulder. From the crease of her eyes, Raiku was smiling. 'Follow the screams.'
As if on cue (which it most definitely was), an ear-splitting shriek assaulted them. From the third house on the left, which looked as though it had once been beautiful but now was simply sprawling. The walls had been obviously and hastily mended almost everywhere, standing in direct contrast to the curiously reverently tended garden.
A lanky red-haired child bit a lankier red-haired child on the ear. The lankier one was evidently the source of the screams. 'DAISUKE!' he- she- it shrieked.
'Shut up!' came the immediate bellow from the house. 'Excuse me,' Raiku began, immediately dismissed. 'Excuse me?' she tried again in vaguely incredulous tones.
There was what would have been a silence if it wasn't filled with the sounds of two people trying to ignore her.
'OI!' Ryuu barked, giving them a fierce glare. 'Get Daisukenojo!'
The shorter one screamed while the other ran inside. Ryuu sent her a smug look from the corner of a yellow eye. There was a suspicious series of crashes and yelps shortly before their short teammate came bursting out the door mid-yell. 'What the hell do you want R-,'
'Hey!' Raiku greeted cheerfully, eyes creasing to indicate a large smile. 'Yamada wants us up on the training field to practise taijutsu!'
He went red, caught in the middle of the beginning sentence of a tirade and now left with nowhere to go. She was just so damn… pathetic. It was like kicking a puppy. Granted it was a puppy that had made itself the most inconvenient hindrance alive by eating only every left shoe you owned, but it was a puppy nonetheless.
'Let's go,' he grumbled, slouching with what was dangerously close to petulance. She smiled at him again and he wished she'd stop. 'He gave up on your chakra then?' he asked. Raiku's smile vanished.
It wasn't her fault and she did know that. But whenever she tried to access any more than a tiny amount of chakra this damn pressure built up in her chest and in her arms, only ever getting worse. She narrowed her eyes and stuck her hands in her pockets, glowering at the ground. She would access her chakra.
She would.
"You took your damn time, speedy!"
A lovely greeting, courtesy of Yamada-sensei.
'I walked!' she protested. 'You never said I had to run!'
"It was implied, get me? Now," he said, rubbing his hands together in a business-like fashion. "You all know what taijutsu is, and you've all done some of the basics at school. You've got a fairly good idea, don't you?"
Raiku brightened. Daisukenojo and Ryuu just looked suspicious.
"Wrong!" Yamada roared, almost physically blowing Raiku away in the process. "You do NOT have a good idea of what taijutsu is! Today you are going to work, and then you're going to work, and then you're going to work some more, until I tell you that you're doing it right, get me!?"
Awestruck silence.
He inhaled sharply. "GET ME!?"
'Yes sensei!' the three responded in barely (and in one instance, not even slightly) concealed terror. "Good!" he said brightly. "Now, I'm going to give you some exercises for all three of you to work on your chakra with, and then I'm going to show you some moves. You're going to take it in turns to fight each other, all nice and friendly."
The punches were basic but apparently all three of them were doing them wrong. Their kicks left a lot to be desired but were apparently less feeble than their punches. Only Daisukenojo could do a perfect hold, but the other two got by. Satisfied that their 'feeble, womanly ways' would allow for a half decent fight, Yamada paired Ryuu and Daisukenojo and sat Raiku down with a chakra exercise, then promptly vanished to consult someone about something.
Probably her, Raiku supposed glumly, sitting cross-legged yet again and holding her hands in front of her. Her left hand was parallel to the ground, held loosely at the level of her chest with the palm facing upwards. The right hovered a small way above it, palm down. Both hands were, to her supreme discomfort, bare. Any closer and strings of electricity would connect the two, surging more powerfully the more she pressed.
She closed her eyes, and tried to bring the chakra to the surface. Daisukenojo and Ryuu had both managed a healthy glow and proceeded to compete for who could glow the brightest. She couldn't even manage a glimmer.
Establishing the connection wasn't the problem. She could feel her chakra flow, could even direct it where she wanted it to go. The problem was the pressure. The second she tried to manipulate it externally, or even to a certain degree internally, it felt like something was taking everything under the skin and forcing it together. The harder she tried, the heavier it got until it felt like there was something coiling under the skin of her chest preparing to strike.
She screwed her eyes even further shut to concentrate when Daisukenojo gave a distinctly unmanly yelp of pain. She was much faster than those two when it came to taijutsu, but the second they landed a hit it was all over for her. The chakra surged under her skin, her hands started to shake with the effort.
Yamada reached the edge of the field yet again, a lazy eyed man with strangely coloured hair accompanying him. The bickering of Hatake's team could be heard in the distance. Yamada didn't dislike the copy-nin, but he hated asking him for help. "The chakra's getting blocked somewhere," he said, folding his arms and staring at the concentrating genin critically. "It's unstable. I thought maybe…" he let it trail off, eyes indiscreetly flicking to the forehead protector covering Kakashi's eye. The shorter man gave him a mild look.
"There!" Yamada said, pointing at the flash of blue between Raiku's trembling fingers. "See?"
Kakashi tilted his head, but gave no other indication of interest.
"Can you help or not?" Yamada asked with carefully restrained impatience.
'She might be like Gai's student,' Kakashi pointed out, hands casually stuck in his pockets.
Yamada grimaced. "Don't say that."
'Give her more time. She might not be cut out to be a genin at all,' Kakashi suggested, turning back around and slouching away. Yamada's eye twitched. "I haven't failed a genin yet," he muttered darkly to the man's retreating back. He sighed. "Speedy, get up and trade with shorty.'
Daisukenojo reluctantly tugged free of Ryuu's headlock, stumbling back a few steps. 'Raiku, c'mon,' he said when there was no response.
Raiku felt the familiar vibrations of Yamada's footsteps growing closer, the impacts jolting her hands slightly. "Speedy, get up," he prompted, standing over her with his hands on his hips. "Rest time is over."
She felt sweat break out on her forehead as the pressure refused to alleviate. Yamada reached down for her, giving the distinct impression he was about to roll his eyes.
There was the sudden snap of something important and brief weightlessness. There was a ringing in her ears drowning out everything else and pain as something slammed into her back. Every part of her hurt. Dimly she heard yells, felt hands on her shoulders. Through wavering vision she raised a hand and was surprised to see it stained red, the shreds of her sleeves covering skin that fizzled and sparked. She tried to open her mouth to speak and something warm spilled out to spread over the mask, blocking her air supply and sticking to her face in a way that made her sick. The fingers of her other hand twitched uselessly at her side.
'Raiku! Raiku stay awake!'
'Yamada's hurt! There's blood everywhere, what the hell do I do?!'
'Get to the hospital and get a medic you damn moron!'
A vague suggestion of a face in front of her pierced the dark. 'Raiku? Raiku, don't black out you idiot!'
Raiku was many things, but tough wasn't one of them. Her head fell to the side, and her eyes closed.
Ryuu shook her again, cursing as something burnt his hands. 'Hurry up Hatori!' he shouted after Daisukenojo.
A/N: Read, review and don't forget to send me money! Oh, and constructive criticism and suggestions. In that order.
