Unsung Story of the Inconspicuous

A/N: Yo! I return! With ... multiple injuries that I have no idea how I sustained, but that have kept me in place long enough to do this! yeeeeeah!

Don't own Naruto or anything relating to it, not for profit here.


There was an awkward silence.

Well, there was a bubble of awkward silence amongst the three people sitting at the table in the reasonably full udon restaurant, which had persevered despite being beaten at every turn by Ichiraku Ramen… protected by narrative causality and also every single one of Uzumaki's paychecks. The udon restaurant was more spacious but less populous, and a favourite of Gairanos for obvious reasons. This tiny silence in the low hum of amiable conversation at other tables was broken only by the sound of steady dripping and the sound of chopsticks hitting a bowl repeatedly.

Yamada tentatively reached for the gyoza in one of the centre dishes but recoiled violently when a pale, slightly glowing and damp hand darted out with terrifying speed to grab it before he could, his own massive hand clutching the two wooden implements to his chest with uncharacteristic trepidation.

'Sorry,' Raiku said after swallowing. 'Did you want that?'

Yamada shook his head.

She glanced quickly at Neji.

He slowly did the same.

She immediately resumed eating with what could only be described as admirable efficiency. The two empty udon bowls stacked up by her current, rapidly diminishing one were testament to her sudden, terrible hunger. Neji's eyes slowly slid over to meet Yamada's wide gaze. This brought them to the level of Yamada's shoulder, but Neji would refuse at knifepoint to look up at someone he didn't legally have to. Yamada shook his head again.

In a rare moment of perceptiveness, Raiku peered up through her bedraggled hair. '…What?' she asked defensively, hands tightening slightly on both her bowl and chopsticks.

"Really… going at it there," Yamada said after a horrified pause.

She flushed instantaneously. 'It makes me hungry!'

'You have a habit of stating the obvious,' Neji replied, but he couldn't really summon his trademark acidity. He was still taken aback at the sheer quantity and speed of the meal. He'd barely touched his, she noticed. In fact, she continued to notice with a growing sense of horror making her stomach curl up, she appeared to have stolen all his side dishes, without realising what she had done. From the look on his stupidly perfect face, however, he had.

"…What the hell!?" Yamada exploded, giving up the goat and putting down his chopsticks entirely in the face of Raiku's sheer determination to eat his food. In a ballsy move she could not have consciously made, she had been steadily steering his plate towards the centre of the table each time she nicked something else of his. Neji had put up the best fight, mostly by stabbing her repeatedly in the back of the hand with his own, strangely pointy chopsticks.

Raiku glanced at her own.

Hers were definitely not that pointy.

She squinted slightly, eating by autopilot in a daze. Were they just a different type of chopstick? Did he bring his own- no, he hadn't, because she distinctly remembered him splitting them apart without leaving one lopsided and splintery, which she had never managed to do. Had he sharpened them? Had he gone to a restaurant and sharpened his eating utensils?!

And for that matter, they were the most conspicuous people in the place and no one was even staring at them! What the hell?! Neji was sitting there, with his… his girlishly long hair and his statuesque… handsome-ness, and Yamada was… Yamada, and- seriously!? No one.

She realised someone was talking to her. "Don't eat that- you can't eat that, Speedy!"

She looked down at her hand in surprise. It was holding onto a dish with a white-knuckled grip, Yamada hanging on to the other end and trying to pry it away without breaking every bone in her ungainly, twig-like body. She gave it a half-hearted tug and a soulful look. Surely she could. What was really the line between food and not-food and how could concrete could it-

She let it go before she could finish the thought. Yamada put it down beside his own pilfered meal and rested his hands in front of him.

With a dawning horror, she realised there was going to be Exposition.

With greater horror, she realised that she'd eaten everything she could possibly eat at the table.

With a sense of gut-clenching dismay to top it all off, she noticed Neji was smirking and eating his goddamn noodles.

One day, she thought hysterically, still opening and closing her chopsticks on empty air. One day she would kill him.

And when had they dried off? Raiku frowned above the mask she'd pulled up, which had been half-frozen with rain. Much like the rest of her. She was still dripping slightly onto the floor, even-

Oh god no.

She lurched back and felt at her torso and arms desperately, checking for sparks or glowing patterns of water and how could she have been so stupid she was in public oh god she was going to be disowned and then murdered and then worst of all her father was going to frown at her and-

"Speedy, sit the hell down and shut the hell up!" Yamada barked.

She froze. There was an abrupt cessation of a high-pitched keening sound. So that had been her. How embarrassing. But she was completely used to being embarrassed, now, so she took it in stride.

Raiku slid back onto her seat, fingers twitching.

"You're fine. You're just freaking everyone out, get me?"

She nodded slowly.

Yamada fixed her with an intense stare, which kept her body effectively paralysed in place while her mind considered her options. Okay. No Gairano stuff, that was off-limits. She was allowed a certain amount of Exposition per year, as long as that amount didn't exceed her cumulative months of Brooding added to her quota Deliberately Being Emotionally Unavailable that she hadn't quite filled up yet because she really liked playing cards, which left her with… oh god she was so bad at math.

Oblivious to her internal struggles (or, more likely, assuming that they were happening constantly and so he could ignore them), Yamada took a dainty sip of his tea. "Right then."

She jerked. 'Yes!'

His gaze didn't waver "Haven't asked you anything yet."

She sagged.

"Anyway." He put the cup down. "What the hell is with the food."

She hesitated.

He raised an eyebrow.

'That… that didn't sound… like a question,' she faltered, visibly swaying back and forth. 'Should… I… I'm going to just assume that was a question that you enunciated wrong-differently. Not wrong!'

Yamada bore this patiently for a few seconds. Neji seemed faintly entertained. In his usual way. At someone else's expense, she muttered in her mind, too scared of his potential telepathy to really nonverbally put it out there. After checking to make sure that it really had been internal, she made to answer Yamada's question. 'I get really hungry. Because I've used lots of energy. So I… eat.'

Two unimpressed stares.

"Simple enough," Yamada conceded after a grudging silence. "Stop vibrating."

Raiku shrugged helplessly. The only way she knew how to shrug, but also because she couldn't, with all the spare energy running haywire through her system. 'Sorry.'

"What did you get, Cranky?" Yamada addressed Neji. He had finally broken with the s-nicknames, mostly because it limited his derogatory options, and that was just unacceptable to him. Neji considered this question, or possibly just sat there and stewed in futile rage, or, or, brooded handsomely or-

Raiku rubbed her own (presumably less attractive) face in despair and the friction made little sparking sounds that she did her best to ignore. Neji was the worst.

'It was impossible to see anything,' he said eventually.

Yamada's fist thudded onto the woefully underprepared table. Raiku felt the vibrations through her bare feet and also all of her bones. "What kind of answer is that!?"

Neji's eyes narrowed. 'An accurate one. It was impossible to make out chakra lines, or even veins.'

Raiku paled and fizzled subconsciously. 'What!? You can see my veins!?'

She covered herself protectively with her arms when Neji's eyes slowly slid over to look at her, head still facing Yamada.

He looked back at her teacher. 'Ordinarily, chakra would be visible through any substance. But,' he said with a distinct air of dislike. 'Your student's… condition… is extremely intense. It was impossible to make out even the most obvious chakra nodes.'

Yamada briefly mulled over this thought for a split second before Neji interrupted it. 'Because she was electrocuting everything.'

'This is getting slightly antagonistic,' Raiku commented. They ignored her.

'With the lightning that she carries around in a clear defiance of public safety.'

She frowned. 'That's a little uncharitable.'

'That she keeps a secret for absolutely no discernible reason other than her compulsively secretive nature.'

'Okay, okay, that was a bit personal!' Raiku interrupted.

"Oh. Yeah," Yamada supported her, albeit a little too late and also just too little in general. He cleared his throat and regained his stern expression.

Suddenly, Neji found himself also at the receiving end of Yamada's heavy gaze."How the hell did you even know about this, anyway?" the much, much larger man asked in a low voice.

Raiku watched, wishing she had popcorn. Or at least some form of food, she was still really hungry.

'Your student assaulted me on my own property,' Neji replied at last. Raiku spat out her tea.

'No!' she protested, yanking her mask back up and pointing at Neji's disgusted face. 'That isn't what happened! I just…! He was…!'

She winced.

'Okay, so that would be one way of phrasing the truth, but it… it is not keeping with the… the spirit of what happened!'

Yamada glowered. Magnificently.

It all came out in a terrible rush. 'He saw me and it was raining and he shoved me outside! So I assaulted him.'

'In my home,' Neji added, dropping her napkin on some of the tea she'd gotten everywhere.

'In his … home,' she finished lamely. 'Okay. So, yes, I… did assault him on his own property, legally and…'

'Literally,' Neji finished for her. When she glowered at him, he met her gaze with an expression of serenity that made her electrified skin itch.

"Good job there," Yamada growled at her. She gaped in outrage, but he didn't let her speak, one gesture from his hand shutting her up immediately. "I don't even care. Hyuuga hasn't said anything, because if he did, I would break his spine and floss with it! So good job there, Cranky," he said with frightening cheer, patting Neji on the back.

Raiku winced sympathetically, both at the mental image and the memory of Yamada's back-patting. He'd be bruised for days.

"So this was mostly useless, but pretty funny."

Neji took this assessment with deadly calm that made Raiku feel an intense sense of fear, like most things that Raiku encountered on a daily basis.

Yamada finished his tea and leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest. His eyes seemed to be looking through Raiku, who still twitched and sparked occasionally, though the sensation had long stopped being transcendent and now just felt like a little too much adrenaline and tasted like copper.

"So the question now is where you want to go with this, get me?" he asked, watching her carefully for her reaction.

Their bubble of silence rose up again.

Raiku looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. She watched the flashes of light through her veins and under her fingernails for a moment and thought about being able to control it, thought about knowing her own face and knowing what it meant to touch someone without watching herself rip them apart from the inside; she thought about so many things before she spoke. 'I want…'

She failed when the Plot on her left hip let out a snatch of sound. Mostly it was thunder when it tried to make noises now, dispersed with snatches of voices she couldn't quite understand, but it was enough to remind her of its presence. She swallowed and steeled herself. This wasn't really about her. She could do a lot of things. She could learn to use this power, she could steal and hijack a Plot of her own, become a Main Character, have her own, shining life. But she knew what the cost of that would be- she knew that being the centre of attention was never good, because it cost too much. So many deaths and personal Drama catalysts that people just became vessels for messages and morals. They became Characters instead of people, and that was…

That was…

'I don't…'

"Yeah?" Yamada prompted.

'I … don't want to talk about this in front of Hyuuga,' she finished, avoiding Neji's gaze.

'You're damn right you don't!'

Raiku screamed and recoiled from Daisukenojo's hand, slammed into the table inches from her abdomen and slammed right through the bubble of silence and her own introspection.

'Well, well, well! You three have been running around and doing things all … secretively, and we caught you!' Daisukenojo gloated.

'You are such an idiot,' Ryuu hissed from his own bubble, made out of the nightmares of other people. 'We were going to watch them until they actually said something!'

'Shut up, asshat, I'm being a winner!'

"What the hell is wrong with you!? This was private training, get me!?" Yamada boomed, standing up from the table. This left everyone above Raiku's immediately eye level except Neji, who was giving her some weird sort of glare she'd never seen before, which was rare, since he was glaring at her constantly when he deigned to notice she existed.

'What?' she mouthed, when the argument above them started getting really into full swing.

'Her knee was broken! She can't be doing things!'

"She can do what I say she can, short-stack!"

He looked away. With the byakugan, however, he could glare at her from literally any angle and also from across town.

She paled at the thought.

'And another thing! You've totally been playing favourites with this "secret training"!'

"Oh yeah!? And what are you gonna do about it!?"

'It's time to take you down, old man!'

Raiku covered her head with her arms, only for one of them to be grabbed and pulled up. 'Hey!'

Ryuu shot her a bored look and leaned out of the war of Daisukenojo charging Yamada with a battle cry. 'You should leave. He's just going to tire himself out and then want to go home.'

She stared at him. 'Are… are you helping me?'

His glare returned with a force that actually stung slightly. 'No. I'm helping myself. He'll just get his second wind if he gets a chance to yell at you.'

Yamada threw Daisukenojo through a table with an enormous crunch of splintering wood.

Ryuu rolled his yellow eyes and then fixed them back on her, like the world's most sociopathic cat. 'Hopefully he'll be dead before then, but he already ruined my original plan to follow you, so he'll ruin this dream of mine too.'

Staring at him, she mused on how this day had started out so seriously, and then gone insane. Unfortunately, the world then spun when Ryuu took advantage of her disorientation and shoved her towards the door. She narrowly avoided colliding with it in time to sort of awkwardly crawl around it when it opened to admit another person as she tried to open it, spilling out onto the street.

The abrupt drop in noise made her aware of how much background sound she'd been tuning out in there. The abrupt rise in ambient dampness made her remember how it was still raining and she had no way of getting home without Yamada there to give her a chakra net.

'Why don't you buy an umbrella?'

'Because they're made of metal,' she whined, dropping her head. 'And metal makes me really, really happy so I explode sort of continuously.'

'Suit yourself.'

Neji moved past her and out into the rain, walking down the street like some sort of … love interest in a terrible drama, the rain pouring down on him and his long, dark hair and his… stiff back.

'Hey!' she called after him. 'Are you mad at me?'

He kept walking through the water covering the ground, ignoring her.

'Oh god, he's mad at me.'

Raiku hovered in agonising indecision between the overhang and the door, before making a rapid leap to the shelter of the next overhang to follow him. 'Hey! Don't be mad at me! I didn't invite yoooh god I made that worse just now,' she broke off to mumble to herself when she saw his eyes narrow even further. 'Why are you mad!?' she tried. 'I didn't mean to make you mad!'

She was forced to make another leap but wasn't quite fast enough, some water getting through her hair and down the back of her shirt with an ominously crackling sound and sensation. Luckily, the restaurant overhangs were only populated sparsely due to the weather, only really keeping dry the people who'd come outside to smoke. 'I didn't even call you a girl!' she called after him, stranded at the last overhang. She made another keening sound of discomfort before her last ditch attempt. 'I'm… I'm sorry!'

Neji stopped.

She felt a flash of relief, then sudden trepidation at the set of his shoulders.

He turned.

She edged backwards and gave a nervous laugh.

'I took time from my training to do a favour for your teacher,' Neji said evenly, beginning to advance. 'Training that's important to me.'

Apparently whatever character development arc he'd gone through in the Chuunin exams hadn't quite taken yet.

The Plot tried to tug her backwards, for once, which made her stubbornly hold her ground. She cursed her years of anti-Plot conditioning when that meant she hadn't run away.

He didn't seethe, not like Ryuu did, where the person became just a cauldron of boiling rage. He got icy with anger. Like some sort of homicidal glacier that was on a severe incline, dragging him inexorably closer.

'But not for you.'

He stopped when he'd gotten precisely close enough to not get shocked, even when she was so hyper-charged. 'Don't be self-centred enough to think this is about you.'

She stared at him, not quite understanding what was happening. 'I didn't-'

'Not everything is about you, and whatever you are. Gairano,' he told her curtly, before he turned on his heel.

'I… didn't,' she said again, even though he wasn't there anymore, and just stared after her. 'I didn't mean to upset you,' she managed, brow creasing with uncertainty and a strange feeling in her gut.

She didn't really register how long she'd been standing there until someone caught up to her, clearly out of breath. 'Raiku!' one of her less squinty cousins panted, holding out a transparent plastic umbrella. 'I saw you out here and brought you this!'

She glanced down at it. 'Oh… thanks,' she forced out, creasing her eyes in an approximation of her usual expression. 'I really need that.'

Her cousin (second cousin? maybe?) grinned. 'No problem. See you at home?'

She nodded, feeling much more genuinely cheerful. 'See you there!'

Her cousin nodded and jogged back down the aisle of restaurants, back towards the udon place. Raiku unfolded the umbrella and stepped out onto the wet street, mind much more settled. So Neji thought she was a what and not a who.

She spun the umbrella absently, sending water spinning off it in a way she found amusing, rather than the more standard 'horrible' she found most liquids, and smiled to herself.

She could still go home.


A/N: Aha! There it is! It was short, I know that. But this was a hump chapter for me, so I'm pretty happy to have it out there, but also may put a chapter between 33 and 34. Will think on it, but that's not important. I went less than a year! I think- yes! Less than a year! In a graph, that's... an improvement of gradient!

Reviews

Memory25: I'm so glad you liked it! I worry about the funny, especially since it's gotten more serious in the last five or so. But that is an intriguing idea, the Disaster Magnet- I think my own is more Raiku's Device is 'Being the Worst'. Thoughts? Thanks for the review!

sin kx: thanks for reviewing! I hope you like where it goes.

Katio: uh, wish granted! Thank you.

shanagi95: Ah, yes. Her complete inability to use jutsu is a problem and also hilarious, but the Plot that's attached to her is dragging her towards physical normalcy. Unfortunately, the lightning won't just go away, but it takes a long process. Thank you for reviewing!

Abandoned account44: I did mention you. And here it is again. Thank you for your comments on the pace and feel of it- this chapter was also slow, content-wise, but I really wanted to get the build going. Thanks for reviewing!

Skwiziks: WE MEET AGAIN, YOU CRAZY DIAMOND. Sorry about the time! I'm messing around with both the beginning of 34 and maybe a chapter in between 33 and 34, making it... 35, I guess, but the time was an issue in pacing. Still, I'm working on it. Thanks for reviewing, and thank you for your feedback!

Aotrs Commander: That's right, I'm like Santa, only thinner and less veiled in German mythology. Sometimes. Anyway, thank you!

Kai-Chan94: I know, right? Thanks!

sroone: And I have provided! Within a year, no less, aha! Thanks for reviewing.