Unsung Story of the Inconspicuous
A/N: Not reeeeally happy with this and will probably be taking it down, I'm just trying to introduce the Plot's EXTREMELY OBVIOUS interference with her life. Forgive the state it's in!
Don't own.
ALSO I HAVE FANART. DahliaFay has generously drawn Raiku on dA, go ahead and check her out! Thank you! I... I feel so awesome.
The intervening weeks passed with varying levels of success, from the Gairano drama avoidance perspective. The Gairanos' sudden withdrawal from public life was eclipsed by Sasuke's convenient defection and the Sound invasion recovery efforts. As a village, Konoha did not particularly care for them as it was- their family was strange and had a heavy burden of civilians, and they seemed to shuffle along without a clear definition of what being a Gairano even meant. Their sudden recalcitrance was passed off as being a result of family losses during the invasion, which was only partially true.
The reality was that from the inside, family life was rapidly changing. They had lost more people than they had expected during the invasion and they were struggling to mobilise as much of their remaining forces as possible towards the stabilising of Konoha without arousing suspicion. This was in addition to the attention they were already getting for their losses. The handling of the overarching Plot was growing more difficult as it expanded. Her father rarely made it home until the next day, now, and usually was so exhausted that he could do nothing else. They may have been Gairano, but they were also human, and much of their family had died. The fact that they were still a very large family and that they had known about their losses in advance was hardly a comfort when houses stood empty in the squat compound. Grieving wasn't something they could recklessly indulge in, either, as it generated Drama if left unchecked. Unfortunately, so did repressing the matter, which left much of their already strained manpower dedicated to intense grief counselling and gift basket making.
For her part, Raiku was struggling to keep up with what was happening while trying to grapple with the sudden feeling that she wasn't really meant to; everyone had their jobs, and she had hers. Hers was rather simple at the heart of it, though, and where her support would have previously been tolerated, it was now actively suppressed.
She knew, intellectually, that much of what she was feeling was being artificially produced to make her easier to sympathise with, later. For someone as used to being optimistic to the point of causing discomfort in others, though, the weight of such complex emotions was exhausting.
She didn't really blame them, she reflected, staring sullenly out her window during her allotted Brooding time. Brooding was serious business for a shinobi. The average jounin went through dozens of hours a month just to stay intriguing enough to survive a Level Two Plot Twist, though of course, this was largely unintentional. Until her Plot had been seen through to the end, however, Raiku's four hours a week had been upped drastically. She had already been punished for trying to sneak sudoku puzzles into her room, which had been stripped of her tiny broken radios as a result.
She missed them. They made her feel like her room had things in it.
The Plot oozed at her in a disturbingly sympathetic fashion. She eyed it balefully while trying to keep her other eye fixed on the increasingly depressing weather outside and only succeeded into giving herself a headache.
Raiku and the blackened curse had reached a compromise in conjunction with her father. She would do her best to look appropriately distant and brooding, and it wouldn't introduce any further friction until it had to do its wretched thing.
If she squinted very hard and frowned so tightly that her whole jaw ached, she could pull off a slightly constipated Level Two Brood. It was so close to being above mediocre that she'd been generously allowed, after her grafted Plot had been deemed to be attaching nicely, the freedom to go outside during the next autumn storm.
Yay, she had muttered, receiving a look of weary exasperation from her father in response.
She hated it.
Things were becoming serious and she was barely a teenager, for god's sake. How could she be expected to do this, to-
She savagely cut the thought off and rubbed her face roughly. She wasn't going to think about it. She was going to sit here and wait for the rain, and then...
Raiku's attention was grabbed by the Plot's oily, amorphous mass lurching around in what she felt was a distinctly ominous sign of excitement. Or anger, but the little bastards tended to bite when they got tetchy, so that probably wasn't it. It started emitting short, choppy bursts of sound that made her skin crawl; snippets of voices, of her own voice and ones she knew, raised to different pitches by whatever stress they would one day undergo at the little monster's behest. Cut into jagged vowels, clipped syllables and rendered meaningless but utterly, utterly wrong.
She waved the arm it was attached to and resorted to smacking it against the window when that failed to provoke a response. The little bastard made a wounded sound in her own voice and slithered around her elbow towards her torso to protect itself. 'Oh no you don't,' Raiku growled, scraping her upper arm against the windowsill to dissuade it. 'We had a deal. You stay where I can see you-'
There was a knock on her door. 'Raiku. Your teacher's here,' her father said through the wood, a strained note of cheer in his voice. This was new too. They'd danced around each other for so long as unwitting Plot Device and Gairano family head that they hadn't felt like family until the Sound invasion was over and they realised the distance they had allowed to grow between them.
Raiku frowned. 'He shouldn't be,' she replied, trying to minimise the backlash this deviance from her Genematrix entry schedule would inevitably cause. She held her breath and listened, hoping that would earn her some leeway.
Her father opened the door and gave a helpless shrug, along with a wry smile. This made her drop her guard instantly, having expected more anger. She managed a small, but genuine smile in return, the two simply looking at each other for a moment, before she remembered Yamada's presence and sagged. So much for a peaceful day of brooding. Shoulders still slumped, she dragged herself over to the door and down the hallway, keeping her eyes lowered as she passed her father's raised eyebrows and affectionate grin.
Things were getting better, slowly. She knew her father truly loved her and wanted what was best for her and he knew, he knew that it was part of the Plot, but a lifetime of habits and secrecy didn't make it any easier for anyone to adjust to suddenly having one attached to a family member. It made it no easier to cater to one, to having to actually actively participate in the behaviours they had so long been conditioned to avoid.
Just inside the door, not even far enough into the house to need to take his shoes off, Yamada beamed at her in a malevolent way, enormous hands set on his hips. Raiku's posture subconsciously straightened under the weight of his dark gaze.
It wasn't fair. He was standing on ground over two feet lower than the rest of the house and she still had to tilt her head back to even look him in the jaw.
"Speedy, get your shoes! We're going to go training," he declared with relish.
Raiku squinted at him. The muscles involved in this were so sore from Brooding that it ached. '…I've been on medical leave.' And so she had. In the chaos that had followed the Sound invasion and the Hokage's assassination, Raiku had been recovering in Daisukenojo's house under the terrifying, hawk-like gaze of the Hatori matriarch. It had gone slowly, probably not helped by the deeply not-restful atmosphere of a house full of insane, walking freckles. Why, oh, why hadn't she gone to Ryuu's house? Oh, right, she remembered. Because he was convinced she was working to kill herself and was treating her with the kind of bullying watchfulness that was fast becoming his trademark expression of concern. It had taken so long for her knee in particular to heal, in fact, that by the time she had emerged, Sasuke's glorious betrayal and the failed retrieval of his broody, ungrateful self had come and gone.
Yamada's dark eyes gleamed.
"And now you aren't, get me?!" Raiku instinctively tensed when he took a breath, his enormous chest expanding to well over double her width. "Move, move, move!"
The bellowed orders reached her brain before her ears had stopped ringing, without the interference of her higher thought processes, and she found herself scrambling to put her shoes on before she'd really even registered what he'd said. She was relieved, when he'd shouted her outside into the surprisingly chilly air, that the terror she felt whenever he so much as looked at her had abated slightly, somewhere since she'd seen him running from nurses a quarter of his size in a panic.
It was only when Raiku had narrowly avoided being bodily thrown down the steep hill that bracketed the Gairano compound that she came to her senses, digging her heels into the ground so abruptly that she skidded for a few metres before stopping. 'Wait!'
Yamada half-turned towards her, already gearing up to shout her into submission. She threw out her spidery hands in desperate supplication. 'I have a reason! I have a reason!'
When he paused and gave her a suspicious look, she gingerly curled all but the pointer finger of one of her hands towards her palm, leaving the finger pointed directly at the overbearing thunderclouds shifting slowly in the lower atmosphere. His gaze flicked up, then back at her, growing even more suspicious. She immediately cowered and dropped her head. 'I meant that it's going to rain! I didn't do that!'
How could she even do that, an inner voice grumbled. The damn stuff is water.
Water… her natural enemy. This combined with Yamada, a fine example of her natural predator (from a wide selection of sentient Anythings), was not leaving her feeling optimistic. But by god, she was going to give it her best shot. She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders and nodded decisively.
"I can see the damn sky, Speedy!"
Raiku's eye twitched slightly, but her face remained in the largely covered expression of determined cheer she'd pasted on.
"What, you thought I'd forgotten about our little training sessions!?"
Raiku's previously characteristic cheerful face froze in a moment of panic, honestly trying to recall when that had happened. What sessions!? There was nothing about storms in there! Certainly not about- he wouldn't.
Yamada saw the horror dawning in her electric eyes and started chuckling malevolently. The sheer enormity of his ribcage lent the act a complex depth of sound. An appropriately dramatic soundtrack for her impending doom. "That's right, Speedy! We're going to be doing special training today, get me?"
Above them, power crackled in the dark, low-hanging clouds. The wind had picked up slightly and the temperature dropped a few degrees to signal the impending rain that they could smell clearly in the otherwise oppressively charged air.
Raiku finally took this in, staring at Yamada from her crouching position on the slope. The imminent thunderstorm she'd been given permission to (discreetly) enjoy was suddenly something far more terrifying. 'No,' she tried, voice coming out more as a jagged exhale than a sound. She swallowed dryly and tried again. 'No!'
Yamada gave her a stern look and folded his arms, immune to Raiku's enormous blue gaze of utter pleading. "Get going, Speedy."
After a solid few moments of silent pleading and equally silent refusal, Raiku straightened as slowly as the stereotypical crone she was inevitably going to enrage some day.
Yamada cut her off before she could even take a step. "And in case you're thinking about running…" He nodded meaningfully to someone down the road, towards the training ground.
Yes, Raiku thought with resignation, not even bothering to look. Ryuu would volunteer for this. With a heavy sigh, she slouched down the hill and drew level with Yamada, who was suddenly all smiles, talking excitedly about the plans he had.
"Throw lightning at it" seemed the main component. But as they grew closer and closer to the long grass of the training grounds and their companion grew more visible, the more the heavy feeling of resigned dread grew in her stomach.
'That's not Ryuu, there,' she muttered to Yamada, gaze baleful.
"Nope."
'…Neither is it Daisukenojo.'
Yamada's beatific smile beamed out at the world through the net of scar tissue that surrounded his mouth. "Nope."
They grew ever closer, the sky above settling into the final moments of stillness, just before a storm.
Raiku's gaze flattened.
'…It is either a girl, or Hyuuga Neji.'
The Plot wiggled joyously on her stomach. Of course. It needed a way to Naruto and the main plot, and why not Neji, who was already involved and knew her? Why not Neji, because it was a sociopath.
Yamada sighed happily, waving at Ryuu and what a merciful god would have made a girl, but now was a coldly staring Hyuuga.
'Why is it Hyuuga Neji, oh god?' Raiku asked the sky sadly.
Yamada answered instead. "Call it payback. Imagine my surprise when he sees you lit up like a Christmas tree and doesn't bat an eyelid!"
Well, one secret out of the bag.
Raiku slumped down to possibly half her actual size, as though it would save her. Neji nodded respectfully to Yamada when they reached him, falling into pace beside her teacher on the opposite side. 'Yamada-san.'
"Hyuuga," Yamada greeted, rubbing his hands together and casting a critical eye to the sky. "We don't have much time to go over things, so this is what we're gonna do. Speedy, you're going to take off…" he waved a hand vaguely up and down, as though her clothes were too offensive for him to openly identify. "… some of that. Hyuuga's going to use the Byakugan on you and see what's going on while you practice, get me?"
Neji nodded.
Raiku was less clear, remembering to ask a question after she'd spent a few seconds frowning at her clothes in confusion. 'Wait, won't he get blinded?' she asked dubiously, already obediently tugging at the tight leather glove she was wearing.
Yamada seemed pleased. "Good thinking!"
Yes!
"But it's taken care of!"
Damnit!
"The Byakugan doesn't work quite like normal vision when activated, so it shouldn't do him any harm."
She could just feel the look Neji was giving her for daring to doubt his abilities.
She was going to have to bite the bullet. They had already reached the fringe of the training grounds. 'Surely Hinata would be better!?' she tried desperately, aiming for an expression of her genuine unease and only hitting awkward rudeness. It was force of habit, really. There was nothing she excelled so surely at.
There was an affronted silence from Neji, like there was whenever Hinata was mentioned.
"Shut up and get on with it, get me!?"
Raiku sighed heavily and started unwrapping the arm bindings, dragging it out in her reluctance. The cool air made goosebumps stand out on her skin, but nothing as spectacular as last time she'd been exposed near a Hyuuga. Neji's careful scrutiny and the flare of chakra that no doubt signalled the Byakugan activation made her feel oddly naked, but … it was just her arms.
She paused slightly, then finished one arm and moved to the next as she simultaneously toed off her shoes. But… when was she going to get this chance again? Neither Yamada nor Neji really cared, though Neji thought she was a 'thing' rather than a person and loathed her. A low sound and sporadic drops of rain marked the beginning of the downpour. She felt, rather than heard, the rumbling in the clouds above, and the tell-tale rush of excitement that always accompanied it.
In the only surge of recklessness she'd yet allowed herself to experience, Raiku reached up and yanked her mask down to pool around her neck, a sharp breath forced from her from both the unfortunate knowledge that she'd regret it and the first drop of rain hitting her skin and shining.
Fortunately, Yamada had no sense of ceremony.
"Spark up, Speedy!"
Like it worked that way. But seconds later it may as well have, the deluge starting and sending walls of rain thudding downwards into them at the signal of a thunderous crack.
Raiku flashed into life like a lightning bolt.
Yamada shaded his eyes and squinted until the flare died down, leaving her sparking.
It wasn't serene. More Plot-important people, when they shone, shone with gentle, shining light, or waves of consistent darkness. Raiku wasn't like that. It wasn't nearly so inspiring.
In fact, he noted with exasperation, it was kind of weird.
Raiku didn't notice through the rush of adrenaline and fierce joy, but the electricity on her skin was flaring up at each new point of contact as well as shimmering in the water running down in rivulets, making her alternately spotted and striped in disturbing patterns.
Yamada cast a glance to Neji, whose veins around the eyes were distended in the trademark tell of Byakugan use, his gaze intense and unblinking.
He said nothing.
Yamada internally lamented at Raiku not sharing her secret with a more experienced user.
The charge on Raiku was building slowly. She could feel the electricity bouncing under her skin and seeping out of her pores to gleefully meet freedom. The hair plastered to her face and neck crackled with energy. It felt like being too big for her skin, too much for her body. It felt like being separate from her spidery limbs and constant foot-in-mouth, the Plot she carried so reluctantly to her fate.
She closed her glowing eyes and let the charge build and build to a growing crescendo and felt at peace for a moment that could only have been a fraction of a second, but that stilled her constantly racing heart and the energy she felt always bouncing off her insides.
"Go!" Yamada barked.
Raiku opened her eyes and her restraint and the world split in half for a moment with a crack of thunder that shook the earth and drove Neji a step back, leaving both his and Yamada's ears ringing violent. Underlying it was the euphoric shout Raiku couldn't restrain that rushed out of her with everything else, half-laughter. She couldn't stop herself from leaping into the air and darting from place to place, bolts of lightning chasing her and scorching, cracking the earth whenever it missed her.
Yamada took this terrifying, uncoordinated frolicking in with stoic deafness. Neji looked deeply ... something negative, it was hard to tell. Disgusted? Disturbed? A more dignified version of freaked out?
"Getting anything?" Yamada asked loudly.
Neji didn't answer, either because of deafness, concentration or hypnotism.
"Guess not."
A/N: I swear things will improve as I get into the swing of it again! Yes. He hates her. FEEDBACK WELCOME.
Reviewer Responses:
Buziwuzi: Yay! That's really good to see and really encouraging! Thanks for reviewing!
Guest: I... I'm sorry? Here it is?
blackcherrynuke: Thank you! Happy to be back, hope not to disappoint.
1412 karasu: It really is. It's even in her name, it really IS who she is. Another Neji or Naruto? Reviewers are meeeeean and hilarious. Thanks for reviewing.
Skiwiziks: Yes it is, and yes you are! Thank you so much for your kind words and sticking with me. It's tricky, but I'm trying to get the hang of it again. Thank you for saying that about its internal logical framework, it keeps me up at night. Thank you!
Parrot Post: Not mobs! I'm allergic! Neji in a dress would be infinitely more attractive than Raiku in the same. I should be sleeping. We can procrastinate together. Thanks for reviewing!
SSHiei: Raiku colliding usually has that effect. Thank you! Obscurity laughs at me, but the reference is much appreciated.
Aotrs Commander: Thank you, that means a huge deal. I'm glad it had that effect, and hope it continues to! Thank you for your well wishes, things seem better. Thanks as well for reviewing.
srooone: yes... quality... that's why it's being updated... *cough*... Thanks!
You guys. You guys. I love you guys. Please let me know if I mess up, I'm out of practice.
