The Unsung Story of the Inconspicuous
A/N: Ah, sorry for the delay. I was debating whether to go directly to the Third Exam, ended up writing/losing that chapter, etcetera... Thank you to Vanya Starwind- you are indeed the beta queen.
I do not own Naruto or any of its characters or affiliates.
The next time she came into contact with any the others involved in the Chuunin Exam Preliminaries, it was roughly a week later and raining. It was also despite her best efforts.
She stared up at the dark, mottled sky, and frowned. Not that anyone could tell, given the mask, but she knew and that was what counted. It wasn't enough that having decided to avoid Team Kakashi, Team Kakashi was suddenly everywhere, no. It wasn't enough that suddenly every genin and some Chuunin were making bets about her face and her father was pissed beyond all reason, no. Now the Genematrix had decided that the resident electrokinetic of Konoha should come out of the closet. It had to be that. There was no other explanation.
The first sign had been the day of her unfortunate 'Team Kakashi and Ramen' incident- Raiku was largely as unimaginative as her father- and had been when she'd ducked into an alley to avoid their attempts to find her. She'd pressed to the cool bricks to try and minimise her visibility as the three Genin had walked quickly down the street, their pink-haired member calling her name. With a sharp groan and snap, Raiku had found herself both drenched by the broken pipe above and glowing. Ordinarily inconvenient, she was now freezing and in serious danger of being discovered. With a frustrated (and moist) cry, she'd darted up the walls and away as quickly as she could, until she found herself tapping pathetically at Ryuu's highly displeased window in a desperate request for assistance. After all, she couldn't wander around glowing.
Ryuu was, understandably, less than enthused at her appearance.
The second sign was even less subtle. A sprinkler gone haywire, as she'd clung to the underside of a store overhang some perilous three feet above the unsuspecting Team Kurenai, who she was also trying to avoid. The store's flower display had gone from being mildly refreshed to drowning in a matter of seconds, and there was now a large, Raiku shaped blackened part of the overhang.
Ryuu was by then, somewhat annoyed at her continuous visits.
The third sign (and without a doubt, the most obvious) was this one.
It was raining.
She shook her fist at the sky, taking care not to extend her hand beyond the shelter of the windowsill she was momentarily contorted to fit under, some scant feet above the streets of Konoha on the external wall of a building unfortunate enough to be near her when the downpour started. She lurched threateningly and slammed her hand back to brace herself against the wood again, currently bent double with fingers straining to hold her in place. The shelter was enough to make her stay unmoving as the Plot scurried up the wall around her ankles, tugging at her lightly.
This wasn't fun. She had horrible, horrible pain building in her twisted lower back and her fingers felt at dangerous risk of snapping under the pressure of her entire body weight. This couldn't be worse.
This could not be worse.
And as thunder rumbled and the clouds lit up in brief flicker, she could only conclude that she'd asked for that one. She groaned quietly to herself, closing her eyes and trying to pretend she was somewhere- anywhere- else. At home?
Her lips twitched downwards slightly.
In Sand?
The flickering expression turned to a distinct sign of displeasure as she concluded there was actually nowhere she actually enjoyed being that she had herself gone to, except perhaps Ryuu and Daisukenojo's houses. Daisukenojo's was a close second to Ryuu's despite the constant noise: she loved the combined warmth of some eight loud, unpretentious people and the furniture worn from years of relentless affectionate battle, the smell of cooking that had pervaded the walls themselves and the faint medicinal smell of his smiling mother. If it weren't for the unending envy, she would never leave.
But Ryuu's house was something else entirely. Years of exposure to the blooming, beautiful sadist had had a curious effect on the air- left to itself, any and all air in Ryuu's proximity would change according to his preferences in a way oddly reminiscent to another elemental relationship she was stubbornly refusing to acknowledge. As a result, the air inside his home was of perfect temperature, and saturated with perfect serenity. Because wherever Ryuu went, he made damn sure he was comfortable. Whenever she so much as neared his house even her own scarcely exposed skin could detect the change, and suddenly she didn't mind. It was still.
And stillness was something that, prior to Ryuu's house, Raiku had never experienced.
She tried to summon some of that stillness to her aid now, where she was pressed against the wall, trapped against the wall, waiting out a storm she had more of an innate right to enjoy than anyone. Her fingers shook slightly under the pressure, loudly bemoaning her inability to summon chakra to her aid, and her blood wept in an uncharacteristically melodramatic way as the lightning struggled with the clouds above.
Raiku took a deep breath that failed to calm her but did manage to make her focus, opening her eyes. She had to move. If the lightning started and it would start, given that lightning as a possibility became an inevitability wherever she was concerned, the wall wouldn't help her. She'd seen lightning bend around corners and try to open windows in its attempts to get to her, so pressed to a wall in the open was a problem. But…
But it's raining, a voice in her head whined in a way dangerously close to petulant. And it's cold.
She shook her head, reminding herself that she was a Konoha kunoichi, and she could do this. And not only that, she frowned to herself, but she didn't feel the cold very well, because she had somewhat of a heater installed inside her skin. Wondering what on earth she was playing at and resolving to have a long, stern conversation with herself once this was all over, Raiku gingerly slid a cramped foot out of her small area and flattened the sole of it against the wall, trying laboriously to fix chakra to the bottom of her shoe. When her foot stuck in a precarious way that made Daisukenojo's wondrous chakra seem even more enviable, she promptly moved her hands up to the window sill and grasped tightly, sliding her foot off the small ledge that was now supporting her and letting her weight hang suspended between her arms and affixed foot.
Now that she was in an even more awkward position than before, Raiku slowly drew chakra to her shoe and pressed her foot flat to the wall. That accomplished, she turned her body slowly so that her nose was facing the wall and her Achilles tendons were showing off at the angle they were bent at.
This was it. Moment of truth. She gingerly lifted a finger of each hand off the windowsill, slowly preparing to let her own chakra take her weight. After she started to shift backwards, she reluctantly lifted two more fingers.
'This is ridiculous.'
And she knew that, thank you very much, she didn't need to demoralise herself any more than she already had.
'Shut up,' she grumbled to herself.
'This looks ridiculous.'
'I refuse to perpetuate the stereotype that dictates all Gairanos talk to themselves,' she said sternly, easing another finger loose. 'As well as that, I'm pretty poor conversation so you, me, can just shut up right now, before the lightning finds me.'
'…You have easily the poorest senses of any shinobi. Pathetic. I am, however, surprised that you appear to know words longer than monosyllabic.'
Raiku's eyebrows shot up and she almost collapsed against the wall in surprise and indignation. What the hell was that?! Rarely did she undermine her intelligence over her abilities as a kunoichi.
When there was no answer forthcoming, she found her cramped limbs tensing in something other than mere physical discomfort.
Something tapped the top of the remaining finger of her left hand briefly.
'I'm not looking,' she said stubbornly, glaring at the bricks like they were somehow responsible for her slip in character and the rain, growing ever heavier and beginning to drip down the walls, lining the air with moisture. 'I'm not looking, because I just know I'm not going to like what I see.'
The tap turned to a firm grasp on either side of her finger, and to her supreme horror, her finger was slowly and threateningly lifted a few millimetres from the windowsill.
She unwillingly raised her gaze to a few inches above eye level, high enough to take in the stunned and horrified spider clinging, much like she was, to the underside of the windowsill.
Her finger began to hurt as it was lifted higher, at what was now an incredibly awkward angle.
She dragged her eyes further up, briefly resting on a creamy shirt, a masculine neck and then a wonderfully defined jaw line, before they finally rested on a pair of utterly blank ones.
She stared. 'I suppose it's out of the question for you to let me go and pretend that this never happened.'
'Yes, it is,' Neji confirmed.
She nodded to herself. 'I suppose you want an explanation for why I'm under your windowsill.'
'Yes, I do,' Neji said evenly.
Raiku bit her lip. 'Can it wait until after the rain's stopped?'
'No it can't,' Neji said, twisting her finger slightly. She twitched at the pain, whimpering.
'I didn't think so.' She looked down at her feet and slid one up, pushing her to eye level with the somewhat bemused and significantly annoyed Hyuuga. 'So,' she began awkwardly with a completely characteristic lack of discretion. 'Can I… have my finger back?'
Without changing his expression at all or looking away from her face, Neji twisted her finger further around. She gasped at the sudden surge of pain, eyes watering slightly. 'Okay! Okay, explanations!' she winced, arm twisting awkwardly to try and alleviate the pain. 'It's raining! It's raining and this was the nearest wall! Sorry, I'm sorry!'
'Why did you need to find a wall?' Neji asked. As a Plot convenient reminder, the sound of the rain began to filter in to Raiku's panic hazed mind, the steady drumming of water hitting roofs and cement bringing up something rather significant. The smell of wet earth and that unique scent that followed rain everywhere served to make her calming breath useless, sending another surge of urgency to her brain.
'I… didn't want to mess up my hair?' she offered. She cringed at the words even as they left her mouth. Her hair was like some sort of aggravated porcupine at the best of times. Coming from Neji himself it may have been different, but from her it was only even more ridiculous than the position she was in.
Neji's lip curled slightly. She paled, recognising a sign of trouble. His grip tightened and she was forced to contort as he twisted again, spine and arm bent at an unnatural angle to minimise pain. 'Why are you here, Gairano? Don't lie this time.'
She craned her neck to eyeball the darkening, faintly rumbling clouds. 'I'm serious about the rain thing! I swear I am! I can't get wet!' she exclaimed, pressing herself closer to the windowsill- also Neji, but she was fixedly pretending he wasn't there- to try and escape the rain, by now more sleet than mere water.
'Why?' he asked flatly.
'Family rule!' She broke off into a yelp as she found her finger twisted and her body unable to contort to compensate any further, already impossibly placed. 'Family rule, I swear! I wish I could tell you, finger breaker, but I can't!'
And that was the point at which she literally, could not say more. He could snap that finger off her hand, and she simply wouldn't speak. It wasn't enough to threaten a Gairano when it came to the rules- their cowardice immediately replaced with penultimate pigheadedness in the face of Equalisers and worse-
Notice.
Notice worthy of mid-sentence capitalisation, even.
The thought was enough to make her shudder and the angle of her hand unnatural enough for him to interpret it as pain, watching her with narrowed eyes.
'Given the level of humidity,' she whimpered, shifting her head back to add a few centimetres to the scant distance between them, afraid of electrocuting as well as inadvertently insulting the shinobi prodigy, 'you might want to pull back a bit.'
His eyebrow moved slightly, narrowed eyes narrowed further.
'Please?' she attempted desperately.
Neji, as always, felt the need to be contrary in the face of challenge. He leaned forward slightly in a distinctly defiant way, enough for her to feel the heat coming off his skin and enough for him to be inwardly shocked at the warmth of the air around her. A low keening sound was pulled unwillingly from her throat at the realisation that struck her- he thought she was alarmed because he was close, but not for the reasons she actually was. This wasn't an issue she'd anticipated facing, ever, given her precarious physical situation.
She tried to think of some sort of an excuse, leaning back as far as she could without breaching the wall of water. Well, this was as bad as things reasonably could be. It would only be worse if Uzumaki found some sort of way of interfering.
As a matter of fact, what were the odds of Neji finding her? Out of all the windows in Konoha, what were the odds, especially given that she avoided all Hyuuga and clan members at all costs?
Her eyes gave no indication of the frown deepening under her mask as she considered this point. Was she in fact free of the Plot? Or was she steadily succumbing to its influence? Her eyes widened as something tugged on her ankle. That sneaky little bastard! That little- oh, it knew. It knew where she was the moment it had shown up. It had probably done something completely unnecessary to bring him here. The idea of intentionally luring a Hyuuga anywhere, especially this one, was repugnant to her Gairano senses of evasion. She grimaced.
'As hard as it is for a Gairano, try to stay focused,' Neji said with chilly irritation, unable to not notice that he was losing her fleeting attention.
She opened her mouth to defend her family's honour and promptly realised that as it had none doing so would be superfluous. She closed her mouth again and settled for nodding with strained good will. A muscle in her eye twitched. 'Any other questions, Hyuuga-san?' In light of the circumstances, a higher level of formality was called for. No doubt it looked like she was stalking him, which was something so incredibly suicidal just thinking of it made her want to weep with fear, so the re-establishing of levels of acquaintance was necessary.
For a moment Neji glared at her, perfectly still in Raiku's current moving world comprised of a windowsill and endless rain, still holding her beleaguered digit between his own, infinitely more elegant fingers. He monitored her impossible heart rate, took in the strangely irregular flow of her breath before he spoke again.
'You're afraid of me.' There was a shadow of a possibility of a theoretical upwards movement at the corner of his lips, one that she recognised from Ryuu. She couldn't place the phantom expression, but recognising it was something Ryuu did meant absolutely nothing good.
'I'm afraid of everything,' she said evasively. 'Especially rain!'
Thunder boomed.
'And lightning,' she added hastily, expression changing into one Neji couldn't easily place, at least with that damn mask on.
His eyes shifted back into glare mode, and Raiku cringed, wondering what she'd done wrong. 'Lightning!' she repeated in an attempt to remind him. 'Lightning is bad!'
'You're hardly at risk.' His words were measured and clipped in his annoyance, annoyance she couldn't easily trace.
'I think you'd be surprised!' she said in tones bordering on hysteria, eyes shining with fear in the dim grey light the cloud allowed to reach them. 'Please let me go!'
She hated begging. Hated it even more when all she wanted to do was rip through the sky in power that shrieked, absorbing what she didn't overpower and receiving endlessness that sang in her veins and soothed the familiar ache of repression and what wasn't quite isolation. She hated begging for the purpose of avoiding what she so rarely had the opportunity to experience, because she always did so.
And then she made her biggest mistake (today, or at least within the past second or two).
She sighed. In longing and resignation, but the mistake was in the act of sighing itself.
Neji's grip tightened. 'Am I boring you, Gairano?' he asked tersely.
'No! No, you're quite entert- interesting,' she corrected, flinching at the instantaneous spark of ire. 'You're very interesting.'
'Perhaps you'd prefer to be elsewhere?' he continued with all the good cheer of a venomous snake. With a powerful shove and the immediate failure of the chakra on her feet, Raiku's relative safety disintegrated. She slammed into the wall of water and through, instantly saturated and freezing cold. The water drenched her clothes and skin, something viciously appreciative howling out through every pore to make itself known before she could even register she was flying backwards, long before she shifted to land heavily on her feet in the water puddling on the street. The rain pounded into her slim shoulders and the exposed skin of her scalp and neck, water shimmering over her glowing skin and clothes in a way no refraction of light could excuse.
She paused to regain her bearings as the freezing water poured in rivulets down her face and by extension mask, hair plastered to her head and forehead. She looked up as through the euphoria, recollection struck. And it was because she was near the Hyuuga Compound, and it was because she couldn't think and because everything was harder now that she couldn't move as, framed by the window frame like some statue, Hyuuga Neji stared at her and as she stared back. Dread settled like lead in her stomach while she crouched in the street in the rain and while he stood in the warmth and dry of his home, confirming what he'd suspected.
'Lightning techniques,' he echoed with that curious, permanent bitterness. It was enough to make her remember who she was and who he was and enough to make her throw herself through the window so quickly the lightning missed her and split the street behind her with a thunderous crack, hands outstretched as he shifted to counter- too slow- and grasped him by his thankfully clad shoulders, sending mild jolts through his system as he slammed back onto the tatami mats that covered the floor, pinned with desperation he was beginning to associate with the thin girl.
'Please,' she pleaded with him urgently, hands fisting in his shirt even as he moved to throw her from him, voice cracking as she fought the urge to just give in to the inevitability of discovery. 'Please don't tell anyone!'
He looked up at her with pale, angry eyes and said nothing. This expression of aggravation was enough to taint her hysteria with the beginnings of hopelessness, a feeling she tried to suppress as best she could.
'Please,' she repeated, water dripping from her clothes onto him and bead of moisture falling from her hair to his with biting jerks of pain as it landed on his skin. Her hands shook slightly, she compensated by tightening her grip. 'Please don't,' she whispered, hanging her head and closing her eyes. It would have been a gesture of appropriate request had she not been almost-sitting on him and he hadn't been seriously considering just murdering her, secrets and answers aside.
'Get off me!' he growled, managing to twitch instead of jerk each time something electrified hit his skin. He couldn't risk touching her any more than her hands on his shirt, lest he find out first-hand the power of the "lightning techniques", and her proximity was only serving to worsen the situation. On Raiku's part, the contact and the almost-contact was making every muscle tense in preparation for flight and her grip on his shirt tenuous at best from nervousness. She wasn't used to being close to people. She wasn't even this close to someone when she fought them, generally preferring to force them as far away as possible for this very reason.
'I really want to,' she said, hands releasing his shirt slightly. 'But please just promise me that you won't!' she pleaded, moisture that Neji suspected wasn't from the sky wavering in her opened eyes. 'You don't know what'll happen to me if you tell anyone! I'm not supposed to be like this!'
'Like what- like the demon Uzumaki?' he demanded as the face above his flinched. 'What are you?'
'I'm human … I am!' she insisted. 'I'm human…' she muttered, trailing off. She was. No Plot would make her anything more or less. She was simply human and … extra parts. Or maybe even missing something that stopped humans from being what she was.
She closed her eyes in silent prayer. 'Please don't tell anyone what's wrong with me,' she said quietly, as thunder made the glass in the windows shake. 'No one's allowed to know.'
'Are you honestly threatening me, Gairano?' Neji asked in a low, deadly voice.
She sighed heavily, gloved hands at some point simply resting heavily on his shoulders. 'No. My family doesn't want me to be this way. I'm not meant to be like this and they'll be angry with me if they find out you've found out. I'm not … I'm not meant to be like this,' she said again, exhaling heavily. It was hard to get her point across- the significant silences, the meaningful looks and the knowledge, constant knowledge that you are what you are and that is okay as long as you keep it to yourself.
For someone as verbally inelegant as Raiku, this was understandably difficult. 'I don't want people to think of me like this.' Like a glowing freak who couldn't stop, like someone even further from them than her complete incapacity for human touch made her. 'I'm not supposed to be this,' she said, more forcefully, throwing the words far from her as though it would make the thought itself leave. She knew her father loved her when he was her father, but when he was the head of Gairano he couldn't like what she was. He loved that she was different, when he was her father, but no one else did. In fact, they were the only ones that didn't mind her being what she was.
But neither of them didn't mind it all the time. The constant, now broken creed of the Gairano family declared they couldn't stand out and they couldn't be noticed, but everything about her demanded attention that she herself didn't desire.
'If you tell anyone, I could die. And if,' she pressed on as Neji visibly tensed at the ultimatum, 'I don't, then I'll always be even more of a loner… freak than I am now. I can't go against my family, no one else would want me.'
By god it was true and it stung. Ryuu and Daisukenojo accepted what she was, but to her it seemed as though they accepted it on the grounds that she wasn't that all the time. And she was.
'They'd kill you.'
It was more to himself than her. She wondered if he'd take this opportunity to get rid of her for good.
'Will I forget we had this conversation, Gairano? Is that what your family does?' he asked icily. His superiority was impressive, given that a girl who weighed, at an absolute maximum, fifty kilos was currently incapacitating him.
'My family doesn't do that. My family just enjoys that.'
She hesitated to call it what she just knew would make things infinitely worse, failed to find another word and settled. 'It's fate. Destiny. Lack of destiny, maybe. You,' she conceded awkwardly as lightning flashed. 'Will probably forget me. Everybody … will probably forget me.'
'Even if they knew what sort of thing you were?'
The word "thing" made her flinch. If he cared, he didn't show it. 'Even then,' she confirmed wearily. 'It's what you get when you don't have a destiny. Doomed to be of little consequence. It's not bad, really.'
Slip 2. 3? It didn't matter.
'You accept meaning nothing.' And he was angry with her, enraged maybe. Something she'd said had set him off, yet again.
'Well… I don't mean anything,' she muttered. 'Except to my family. And if you tell, I won't even mean that much.'
'Stop that. Turn it off,' he snapped when he found himself yet again being distracted by being mildly shocked by her dripping clothing. The tatami mats were drenched beyond repair. She was turning out to be an expensive revelation.
'I can't.'
This caused the most minute of pauses.
'You can't,' he repeated flatly.
'I can't,' she nodded.
'… At all.'
'At all.'
He was definitely sick of it, and this new bit of information didn't help. She was shoved unceremoniously off him and onto the mats, drawing her legs up to herself protectively as he rose into a semi-graceful sitting position.
'Relax, idiot,' he muttered, when it became clear she was about to panic and/or start an electrical fire from nerves. 'There's no benefit to spreading this information.'
'That's not true,' she said blandly. Dishonesty would earn her no favours here. He seemed mildly approving of that acknowledgement.
'No,' he confirmed. 'But I'm not going to tell anyone. On,' he added as she brightened with hope that almost wounded him. 'Several conditions.'
'Yes?' she asked, tilting her head quizzically.
Neji exhaled lightly, shaking his head.
Despite being in a bad situation – the worst situation, let's not beat around the bush here- Raiku found herself feeling… Oddly optimistic.
Reviews:
XxXTwilight-SinXxX: I believe she had good intentions when she asked to see her, but Naruto tempted her. Much like he did Sasuke with Kakashi's mask. Thanks for reviewing.
Impatiens Psittacina: Yeah, I thought her chickening out was far more believable. And as for drawing out her loss- her utter terror of the sickly examiner would make her avoid any and all pain. Even when she lost, it was self-inflicted. Ryuu and Daisukenojo won't be seen much until the Third Exam, but that's iminent anyway and they deserve a break. Except Ryuu. He gets stuck helping Raiku out whenever the world conspires against her. Again- it always ends up inconveniencing him the most. Laughing's good, let's stick with that? Thanks for the review!
fan of this story (love the name): I'm glad you see her that way, but because you're the first person to call it a clan, I'm now free to do something dramatic to them! Ah, unwritten rules, beautiful. Thanks for reviewing.
Stray-Dog: I'm terribly sorry. I'm barely bilingual, but thanks for the review? I find it difficult to comprehend that someone reading a story in english would review in another language, but to each their own, right? Thanks for reviewing.
