Unsung Story of the Inconspicuous
A/N: I AM ALIVE. To everybody's surprise. In all fairness, you were warned, and I did come back. After a while.
ALSO I HAVE FANART. YEAH. THAT HAPPENED AGAIN. Awesooome. Head over to Mirthful-Malady on this site, she has a link up. I will also link to it, when my soul has reformed. She has made Raiku look far more attractive than she has any right to be. It's amazing.
Don't own, won't profit.
What happened next was a blur. Sakura didn't register that the shield had fallen until they were running,the world splintering into electrified madness behind them, the deafening thunder growing louder and closer, ever closer, the screaming of the air. 'Where are we going?!' she shouted, eyes squinted shut against the wind and the blinding light.
He didn't answer and she hadn't really expected Naruto to hear her, but she had felt compelled to ask something, anything, letting out one question out of the thousands crowding against her aching temples and crawling up her throat. She could see shapes flickering in and out of sight around them, their fellow shinobi running from something impossible to outrun.
Not running from, she realised just in time to tense for action. Not all of them.
Sakura yelled out in warning and yanked Naruto back just in time for the tree he had aimed for to explode into splinters, pieces of wood flying past and leaving cuts on her forearms where she had raised them to defend herself, the bulk absorbed by Naruto's protective clothing and skin.
Naruto let out a yelp of pain and shock, only for another flicker of movement to prompt Sakura into action again. He got with the program just in time to jump to the ground when the branch they had landed on was similarly obliterated, and not by any lightning. Someone with an opportunistic streak was coming after them, but Sakura couldn't pick up a chakra presence strong enough to identify.
'What's going on!?'
'I don't know!' Naruto squinted into the trees over his shoulder, but he seemed to come up as empty as she did.
Sakura drew a kunai and hastily threw it to deflect one aimed directly at Naruto's face, grabbing him. 'Run, idiot!'
He resisted for a moment before finally catching on and pulling her along again, but down to the ground. Sakura kept her head down, relying on her reflexes to keep up with Naruto's erratic swerving but feeling their pursuer's vague, unreadable chakra signature drawing closer and closer, all the more threatening for its anonymity.
'They're gaining on us!'
'I know!'
The ground ahead of them suddenly shot upwards, very nearly impaling Naruto before he rolled awkwardly to the side, narrowly avoiding knocking Sakura's feet out from under her with his flailing limbs. They rounded the new earthen spire just in time for something to strike the other side so hard that dirt showered down on them, a moment of brightness and sound so potent that they curled into balls, hands covering their ears and eyes screwed shut.
"What the hell did you think you were doing!?"
Something grabbed the back of Sakura's vest and hauled her upwards before she could do more than scream.
'Hey, let go of—Yamada!? You were doing that!?' Naruto exclaimed in horror.
"Saving your lives? Yes, idiot, that was me!" Yamada snapped from somewhere above her. "Now stop standing around before that thing decides to take a second shot at you!"
'What!? You tried to kill us!'
"You're a goddamn moron and if you don't get a move on now, I'm gonna drag your unconscious out of here in pieces, get me!?"
Sakura felt the need to interrupt, her panic from their earlier pursuit transforming into anger now that it was clear they were safe. 'I can walk on my own!'
"Didn't look that way to me, Pinky!" Yamada denied, throwing her over a shoulder. "Come on, Uzumaki! I can feel some others nearby, and like hell I'm leaving you alone!" He turned and Sakura shot Naruto a vile glare, promising all kinds of nasty retribution if he ever told anyone about how she'd been manhandled out of harm's way. She had been working hard, damnit, to get rid of her status as damsel-in-distress, and he was not about to go and ruin it for her. She was so focused on communicating that to Naruto that she almost didn't hear what Yamada muttered next.
"Trust Uzumaki to almost get stabbed to death when there's a ball of lightning on the rampage."
Apparently Yamada had been training nearby, because he quickly shepherded them to a small clearing, crude earthen spires arranged around them as a basic deterrent. A familiar group of Genin was there, and it rapidly became clear that Tsunade's team had been left out of the loop in a significant way. Not only did they seem unsurprised by what was happening, Sakura grumbled to Naruto, they were already arguing about what to do about it.
'We have to keep it away from Konoha!' Naruto exclaimed, finally catching his breath.
Daisukenojo looked like he was about to hit him. 'How the hell are we going to keep that from doing anything?!'
The only Jounin amongst them looked deep in thought, arms folded across his chest for a long moment before, "Ryuu," Yamada said after a moment, turning an intense gaze on his youngest team member.
Ryuu looked back at him with the face of a boy on the edge, lit up sporadically by painfully bright flashes in an otherwise overcast darkness. '…You can't be serious,' he said with an uncharacteristic lack of composure. 'You-,'
"You've done it before," Yamada pointed out to the bafflement of everyone in the group, but Ryuu cut him off.
'I've steered Raiku before, this isn't—this isn't the same!' His voice was raised, like everybody's, the crashing and thundering background noise growing and falling in volume but never dropping low enough to speak normally. But Ryuu's yell was higher pitched than normal and his careful composure was cracking around the edges.
"I'm not asking you to do it alone, but we don't have a choice here!"
'This isn't some teenager freaking out! This is something else, this is something dangerous!' Ryuu's eyes were wild with fear and adrenaline. He suddenly looked his age for the first time, his growing panic stripping years of cynicism and bitterness from his features.
'It's going to get back to the village unless we do something!' Daisukenojo pointed out as Naruto tried to shake the niggling feeling at the back of his head that cut a little deeper each time they said "it", tried to get his thoughts together enough to let through the epiphany pressing against his mind if he could only focus hard enough. 'Who knows how many people it's going to kill if we don't stop it!'
'And how do you propose we stop it with her corpse!?' Ryuu shouted, shoving Daisukenojo away from him. 'That's all that's in that cage! Raiku's dead!'
Sakura jolted and looked up at them with sudden inspiration. She pushed herself through the arguing males to stand between them. 'Wait! The technique relies on ambient electromagnetic radiation!' she cried over the growing din. Naruto looked worriedly over his shoulder, but the blinding moments that left the world in silhouetted black and white made it impossible to pinpoint the force's real location. Not that it would have helped, with the speed it was moving at. Not that it was even the biggest of his worries.
He couldn't feel his pursuer; maybe they had died, maybe they had fled, maybe they were waiting for him and Yamada to part ways, but he didn't think that it was over.
Konoha was in danger, Naruto, he reminded himself, taking a deep breath. He couldn't waste time being worried about himself when the village was at risk.
Yamada looked at her like she'd grown a second head. "Thanks for the update, Pinky!" he snapped, but she powered through.
'If we can get the cage open, it'll be drawn to the conductors and to… to the body, and then we can close it again! Those conductors are half-buried and should be able to earth the force once it can't feed on the storm!'
Naruto knew absolutely nothing about electricity, with the exception of "oh no, don't touch that", but it sounded legit. Mostly. He felt a surge of pride for Sakura, who was staring down Yamada and only shaking a little.
Yamada stared back at her with a lopsided squint as he parsed through what she'd said.
'…That doesn't sound like a real thing!' Daisukenojo accused.
'Oh good! I can die for a plan that won't work!' Ryuu threw up his hands, seeming to finally cross the edge into hysteria.
Sakura flushed with anger and embarrassment. 'Do you have a better idea!?'
And no, they didn't. They had no better idea, and they couldn't waste any more time. The scent of smoke and ozone was steadily growing stronger and the paltry distance between them and Konoha could be bridged at any time. A slim chance was better than no chance.
'I'll go back and open it!' Naruto volunteered, sticking his chest out slightly to marshal some courage. 'No problem!'
Sakura looked stricken and Yamada glared at him, obviously displeased with the situation. "Oh no, not you! Not while Gairano is out there trying to murder you! Which, if you care to-"
Naruto boggled. 'Gairano!?' What? That didn't make any sense, was Yamada concussed or something? Wasn't Raiku- oh, right. Wait, no, that made no sense as well!
'We don't have time for this!' Neji snapped. 'I'll go with him to help! Can you get it back to the field, or not!?' he demanded of Ryuu, who for the first time ever, looked slightly uncertain. After a moment he nodded anyway, but jerkily.
Yamada's jaw clenched. "Hatori, you come with me. Haruno, you find the Hokage and see what she's doing. Odds are we're going to need her after all this. Get me?" he asked with grim finality.
Sakura swallowed and nodded. Naruto grabbed her arm when she turned to go, drawing her in for a brief hug. Her hands tightened in the back of his jacket for a moment before she let go, meeting his eyes and giving him a tight smile and a nod.
He did the same, letting his hands linger on her shoulders just slightly before he let go.
He looked to Neji, who looked slightly pale. Or maybe that was the light, the violent disturbances shattering the air around them, but it couldn't have helped.
They could do it, Naruto knew. They had to do it, so they could do it.
He smiled to himself and to Neji, nodding again.
Right.
Oh, just send it back to the field, Ryuu parroted in his mind, feet moving on autopilot to follow Yamada to a small clearing. Steer it back in the opposite direction and hope that it didn't stop by to say hello, obliterating him once and for all.
Simple.
He tried to concentrate and realised his hands were shaking. He tucked them into his pockets and attempted to clear his thoughts, reaching his senses out into the air.
He shuddered, drawing slightly closer to the reassuring mass of Yamada by his side and hoping the other man wouldn't say anything if he noticed. It felt so wrong, it all felt so violently wrong. Its raging through the air was a knife scraping raggedly against his nerves and his mind tried to gloss over it each time he even thought about it.
It ached but Ryuu drew his focus in towards the storm, the path it would need to take to get to the procedure site. It was on the opposite side of it to Konoha, so if the Uzumaki idiot couldn't get the cage open… It didn't bear thinking about.
It was simple with Raiku. It involved minimal displacement; just a suggestion and she usually took the desired path on her own, hurtling headfirst into any (every) trap he'd set for her, the idiot-
Not the time.
Not the time.
Not the time, he repeated to himself over and over until it stuck, taking a deep breath and starting to draw energy in towards himself.
With both hands, Ryuu took hold of the air and twisted.
The lightning tore through the forest with grasping, greedy hands that left a trail of destruction in its wake, shrieking through the air and sending trees into the air from the roots in the blink of an eye. Consuming everything in its path faster than the eye could follow, each blink left it somewhere else, taking something else and leaving a trail of fire and ash. A few small figures made their way through the forest but were forced to stop when a wall of electricity barred their way for a moment, before with a flash, it jerked and, impossibly, changed direction once, towards the forest and then again when it ripped itself upwards, returning to the clouds through a winding path of explosive energy.
It took to the sky with a flash that lit up the world like the sun, for a moment, casting a bleached pallor over the ravaged environment before it hurtled away over the horizon. It left a burnt and ugly scar on the forest that crawled up the mountain, its impact triggering a slow, heavy collapse on its upper reaches; a landslide that made the earth shake as it gained momentum on the way down the slope.
Daisukenojo flailed to try and catch Ryuu as he fell, but his adrenaline-shaky limbs couldn't coordinate in time for him to do much more than pat his back awkwardly and barely keep his balance on the quaking ground.
'It's moving too fast,' Ryuu panted from his knees, white and trembling from the exertion. Yamada mercilessly hauled him up by the back of his shirt and set him on his feet again, the Genin swaying in place, hands shaking. 'I can't keep up. I can't do it fast enough to stay ahead.'
"Try harder!"
'I can't!' The words emerged like they were being ripped out of him, self-loathing flashing across Ryuu's face, disgust at his failure. 'I… I can't do it!'
Yamada bent closer, forcing him to meet his gaze. "This isn't a choice. Get me?"
Ryuu stared up at him helplessly before transferring his gaze back to his hands. Daisukenojo swallowed, his own, useless hands clenching by his side.
Yamada glanced back at him and straightened. "I'll do what I can from the other end and give it some resistance. You just make the path home as smooth as possible. Hatori, you make sure he doesn't get fried."
What? How in holy hell was he supposed to do that!? Daisukenojo wasn't some enormous mass of lightning; it wasn't like they were on equal footing, here! He wasn't even as fast as Ryuu on a good day!
He got the feeling that wasn't going to fly, though, and just nodded, deliberately not meeting Ryuu's gaze. He'd do his best, but odds are he wouldn't be able to save Ryuu if it came down to it. Not either one of them. But Yamada had to know that.
Yamada vanished and left them alone, the two teammates trying to avoid looking at each other and unsure they could be strong enough when their lives depended on it.
Eventually, Ryuu straightened, setting his feet apart and bracing himself.
'Hey, Hatori.'
Daisukenojo looked over reluctantly, in time for Ryuu to nod at him. 'You've got my back, right?'
'No problem.' Daisukenojo tried to smile, but could feel it coming out more like a grimace. 'Looks like I've gotta carry your weight again, asshole.'
Ryuu looked tired already, but determined. 'If you can manage it, dickhead.'
Naruto threw his weight into pulling the metal slab across the top of the Faraday cage, but he couldn't get good enough footing on the side to put any real force into it. 'What's even in here!?' he huffed, pain building in his straining arms.
Next to him, Neji was nowhere near as red-faced, but still visibly struggling with the enormous weight. 'Gai…rano.'
The body. Raiku's body. Naruto shuddered as he remembered Ryuu saying it, as he remembered the look on the Gairano Head's face and in his eyes.
You.
'What … is even … going on,' he gritted out before he sagged against the side, unable to keep up the pressure. How had they even gotten the damn thing on?! No wonder they thought it'd be lightning proof, this thing was gonna be there until the end of time!
Neji released it with an explosive exhale, pressed against the metal in a moment of rest. 'She's … electrical,' he panted. 'Somehow. They… were trying to get rid of it.'
Naruto opened an eye, the rest of his face pressed against the mercifully cool metal. 'That makes no sense,' he said, muffled by the box. 'No … wonder she…'
No wonder she'd died. Naruto knew from painful experience that you couldn't just pick and choose what parts of a person to keep, and was struck by a sudden empathy for Raiku and the kind of situation that he intimately knew would make a person reject something inside them.
'It was supposed to just be that part,' Neji said on an exhale that sounded like a sigh.
This lightning was that part; it was a part of Raiku? It made sense, didn't it, because Raiku had always been just a little too precariously balanced on the edge of strangeness and secrecy, had always been too twitchy for explanation. But that wasn't it, that wasn't the stray edge that was catching at Naruto's mind. It was a missing piece that fit the space, but not perfectly enough for an "ah, that's it" of clarity, it wasn't enough.
But there wasn't any time for that.
There was an explosion that made the ground shake and a spike of Yamada's chakra, making Naruto huddle closer to the metal reflexively. They didn't have forever, but whatever Tsunade had set up, it was clearly designed to keep the damn box closed and maybe if they'd had someone else to help, but…
You.
Or maybe not. Naruto pushed himself away from the box to look at it, Neji pausing for a moment before he did the same.
'There's no seal on it, it should just move!' Neji's usual composure was breaking and his hair was even slightly dishevelled around his frustrated features. Neither were good signs.
There was another ominous boom.
Naruto turned.
They had had a reprieve when the lightning had hurtled through the forest towards the distant mountain, but a sudden, enormous ridge of earth had shot up from the far-off greenery, huge even from this distance and a deliberate blockade against the cataclysmic path of black and burning destruction. It was Yamada's, probably, and holy shit, it hadn't liked that very much.
He turned back. 'We need to get it open!' he yelped, making for the box again. 'Right now now now!'
There was a silence in which Neji obviously turned to look at the forest behind them as well, but Naruto was too busy scrabbling at the edge to pay any attention until the Hyuuga was suddenly beside him, working on the edge with similar desperation with chakra-laden hands.
It was coming, it was coming towards them and its path wasn't direct but he could spare no time to see how far away it was, so each brush of the wind against his neck made his heart race even faster, convinced that that would be the last thing he ever felt, limbs tensing and blood surging with the giddy rush of desperate adrenaline.
Finally, the slab budged. Less than a millimetre, nowhere near close enough, but it moved. Naruto bared his teeth in a strained grin of triumph, jaw clenched and face red with the effort. It was working! It was going to work!
He dared to try and look in Neji's direction to see if the other boy had noticed too, but the metal plate suddenly yanked itself back into place. 'No!' Naruto wheezed, adjusting his grip on the top like it would undo the damage. 'Neji, come on!'
Neji's reply was not what he expected, and didn't come from where he had thought he was. 'Uzumaki, look out!'
Something grabbed the back of Naruto's shirt and tore him from the side of the cage, hurling him into the air and away. There was a moment of weightlessness before he really registered what was going on, and then he hit the ground with a jolt that rattled his bones and ripped what felt like half the skin of his body off.
A pair of sandalled feet was what he saw when he dragged his head up from the dirt, tracing up the legs of the owner until he finally saw in flickering light and shadow, the pitiless eyes of Raiku's father.
You.
Gairano's hand closed around his throat, hoisting him into the air with a choked-off cry. Naruto gasped in air through a constricted windpipe and scrabbled at Gairano's vice-like grip before he came to his senses and kicked the older man solidly in the chest with both feet instead.
Right.
Shinobi.
Released, he practically hyperventilated in his eagerness to get oxygen into his lungs, coughing. 'What… the hell!?' he rasped, massaging his throat and feeling the heat of blossoming bruises under his hand.
He heard Neji's shout, but couldn't tear his gaze away from the face in front of him. 'We have to get the cage open! What are you doing!?'
'It stays closed.'
'What? Why?!'
Gairano tilted his head slightly. Naruto had never felt this way before, like a bug under a magnifying glass, like something squirming under a microscope, but he'd never been the focus of a stare like that. It wasn't in his nature to balk, and he had faced much more dangerous men so he wouldn't anyway, but it wasn't because Gairano was someone particularly intimidating, it was because… because he…
He couldn't put his finger on it, but he didn't have a chance to try and figure it out. Neji made for the cage and Gairano swiftly sent him staggering back. He wasn't strong like Kakashi, or even Gai, but he was still a Jounin, and with him working against them combined their limited time frame…
To hell with it; they could do it! They had to.
Naruto pushed himself up into a crouch and caught Neji's eye. They would have to work together if they were going to do this. Neither one of them could open it alone.
Taking initiative, Naruto tried to buy Neji some time to catch Gairano off-guard.
'Getting that thing open is our only way to protect Konoha!'
Gairano flicked his fingers in a careless "what can you do" gesture that left Naruto gobsmacked, offended down to the core of his being.
'We have to protect the village!'
Gairano was saved from having to respond by Neji coming at him from the side, Naruto immediately launching himself to attack the opening he left when he turned. A burst of force threw them both back, less than a metre but enough for Gairano to get an arm inand throw an open palmed attack swiftly through Naruto's guard, landing hard enough to drive the air out of his lungs. Gairano blocked Neji's incoming strike in the few seconds this bought him, hard enough for the impact to make a resounding noise. Neji managed to keep him gripped for a moment, chakra leaking out around his fingers and forcing Gairano to keep his arm straight.
But only for a moment, and not long enough to make a difference. Gairano suddenly dropped tension from his outstretched arm, sending his bent elbow directly into Neji's collarbone and following it up with a headbutt that landed with a crunch. Neji made a sound of muffled agony and lurched back, blood streaming from where he was clutching his nose with his free hand.
Naruto caught Neji before he could trip, still wheezing slightly. For something that hadn't felt chakra-heavy, Gairano's palm had hit him with enough force to make his ribs ache worryingly on each inhale.
Once again, Gairano stood between them and the cage.
'Why are you doing this!?' Naruto demanded, effect somewhat ruined by his breathlessness and the rasp his voice was starting to come out as. He was lucky the strangulation hadn't made his throat swell up beyond talking, but it still hurt like hell. 'People will die!'
'People always do,' Gairano replied.
Neji's shoulder tensed suddenly under Naruto's hand. '…Did you plan this?' His voice was distorted and muffled by both his hand and his injury, but the question was clear enough. He yanked himself free of Naruto's grip while the shock was still setting in for the blond. 'Did you plan for this to happen!?'
Plan for it? Neji thought that Gairano had planned to, what, use the electricity to attack Konoha? To sacrifice his own kid for it?
With a crawling sensation of horror, Naruto saw how easily it all fell into place if that was the truth.
But no, it couldn't be, could it? Raiku was his daughter; he couldn't just… throw her away! Gairano had looked so horrified, so angry when it was all happening…
But what if it was an act, put on to convince Tsunade?
Mind spinning, Naruto struggled to find an answer that made sense, but didn't have the chance before it was all starting again.
'Ah,' Gairano said eventually, focus shifting until his usual, distant expression returned, staring at something behind Neji's face, at nothing at all. 'Having trouble seeing past your personal traumas, aren't you.' More a statement than a question, but it baffled Naruto.
Regardless, it seemed to hit its mark. Neji inhaled sharply. 'You …' He seemed overcome, the words forced out through an overwhelming anger. 'You murdered your daughter!' he spat.
Gairano's hands twitched by his sides. The corners of his lips twitched, features shifting through myriad expressions that Naruto couldn't quite decipher until they finally settled. Settled into one he could put a name on and he suddenly understood why he had been so put on edge by the man, because there it was something more dangerous than anger or scheming in Gairano.
Desperation.
The rumbling Naruto had barely registered was growing stronger beneath his feet and he looked over his shoulder just in time to see what was coming, the end of their time and their options.
'Neji!' he screamed. 'Get down!'
Gairano finally turned his head and looked away from them towards the coming storm, a small frown appearing on his face, like this was some small inconvenience and not the failure of the plan, the only plan that they had. Naruto threw himself to the ground and shielded himself with his arms, eyes screwed shut and braced for impact.
When it came, it consumed him from the inside out. The sound and light tore down his spine like his back had split open, filled his chest with pressure that made his ribs ache and constrict, hot against his insides. It ripped him open and scoured the inside of his skull with fingers made of pain and brightness that pressed out against his eyes and ears and—
Passed him by, vanishing somewhere behind where he was curled.
Naruto took a breath that hurt all the way down, huddled against the ground and …still alive, still alive? He clutched at what parts of him he could reach with his arms still against the earth and felt through tingling fingertips that he was … he was…
He slowly and carefully lifted his head. His field of vision was one enormous dark spot that wavered and swirled, but where it was clearing around the edges he could see an enormous mass of crackling light, that had… just missed him.
When he could finally see what was really going on, squinting against the agonising brightness, he didn't understand for a moment what it was he saw. It hadn't moved on, it hadn't blown through and obliterated them before taking its ravenous greed to Konoha. The clouds above were lit up from within and roiling with energy, blown by the chaotic wind. Lightning was bombarding the metal cage in the middle of the scorched earth, hurtling into it again, again, again, each colossal impact sending force and heat out in endless waves, each impact like a punch into Naruto's chest, a blow that he felt down to the marrow.
That wasn't right; he didn't know much about this, but he knew that that wasn't how it was supposed to behave. It wasn't going anywhere, it wasn't even heading back into the forest; it was just hammering at the metal over and over, luminous bolts of electricity slamming and crackling against the edges, almost like…
Like pale fingers scrabbling at steel.
You.
Naruto's mouth dropped open as realisation hit, the facts at last cascading into place at the same time he saw Gairano standing silhouetted against the light, unharmed.
You.
Raiku's father had stood by until he couldn't stand it any longer. This was a step too far, over a line he hadn't realised was there until it had been crossed. He had found himself ripping Naruto away from the cage in between jolts of lightning, felt it burn and crackle along his skin where it had just missed him and the answering sizzle along his nerves. Felt a cold and savage satisfaction run through him as the boy, the Plot-black Catalyst flew through the air to land awkwardly, ripping skin from his hands and holes in his clothes to stop his skidding. Gairano took a step towards him, and then another. And another. Each step brought him closer to that human catastrophe trying to regain his balance, powering through the tangled net of his obligations and the Genematrix's resistance.
Gone. Gone. It was aching through him with each beat of his heart and he couldn't bear to stop and think, had to keep moving or he would falter. He would fall from where he stood on the precipice of a grief deep and paralysing, and he couldn't afford to, not now. He would be damned if he was going to let his daughter be just another stepping-stone for Naruto's character development. Not when she'd been everything, the only thing, and now she was nothing.
A white blur moved to intercept him and Gairano leaned back slightly, just enough for the Hyuuga's open palm to cut through the air in front of his nose. He followed its path with his eyes and could see all at once the way the day would follow from there, and how this would all end. For him. For them. The rage that had stirred at the back of his mind, the leviathan inside his subconscious rose again to consume him and froze his blood in his veins.
No.
He had no Plot and so he was going to lose; he could see it in the blackness scrawled between them, but no. No. No Hyuuga side character was going to make him step down and let Naruto destroy the only part of herself that (Raiku. Raiku. Raiku)- that she had left behind, just to satisfy some Genematrix loose end that Naruto had torn free in the first place.
Gairano reached into the Plot-thick air and Hyuuga's eyes widened, body twisting to avoid the attack to the midsection that he had anticipated, that never came. Gairano's hand curled into a fist to grasp at the narrative black and ripped.
Neji stopped.
After an age, he fell and didn't rise, his body limp against the blackened earth. Gairano registered Naruto's inarticulate yell of dismay, his hand curled around rapidly vanishing Plot, the section of story in which Hyuuga held him off and Naruto saved the fucking day trapped in his fingers. Hyuuga couldn't continue until that now content-empty time had passed and he resumed as though it had never happened, but the answering hole in the Hyuuga's personal narrative ached in his mind's eye like an open wound. It would have to be fixed, it wouldn't be stable and god knew how much damage he had done to the path of his storyline, how far the ramifications of this single violent and impossible act would spread in this kid's life. Maybe nothing, maybe everything would change without this cautionary footnote.
He found that he didn't really care.
He was facing a crime he'd committed against the most fundamental moral code of his family and all he could think was that she'd trusted him. She'd trusted him to look after her. He'd done everything he could but it still wasn't enough, because he was a Gairano and he could never change anything that mattered. But he had been so sure that he could do it, just this once, because Raiku hadn't mattered at all except to him.
'If it weren't for you, she'd still be alive,' Gairano said, and he could feel his grief suffocating under the weight of his rage. 'Raiku.' Raiku, Raiku, Raiku, gone forever because they were Gairano and Naruto wasn't and she hadn't done anything to deserve this. The Genematrix only cared about important people, and it didn't care how important she'd been to him.
'Wait!' Naruto exclaimed, raising a hand as though to hold him back. 'You don't understand!'
'I don't understand?' Gairano smacked that outstretched hand aside, grabbed the fist Naruto tried to throw his way and shoved the arm back into the boy's chest before he could straighten it enough to punch properly. 'I don't understand,' he repeated conversationally, almost lightheaded with the combination of rage and incredulity. Some part of him, a more rational and measured part, tried to figure out why Naruto's narrative intuition had brought him to this at all, since he knew better than anyone that it never did anything for no reason. But the rest of him couldn't care less, when the results were laid out before them.
Naruto's intense, beseeching gaze was infuriating. 'You can't just throw parts of people away! It doesn't-,'
Gairano's lip curled. He wasn't some introductory-arc training-wheels villain for Naruto to practice on. Naruto couldn't fix this with some rousing monologue on his capitals-worthy "Way of the Ninja".Naruto couldn't bring back the little girl who'd never mastered fingerpainting without setting fires or holding a normal conversation, couldn't reanimate the hands that had left their fingerprints all over his life by seeing into Gairano's heart and understanding his pain.
So he didn't really feel bad about how satisfying it was to press that captive arm harder across Naruto's chest, forcing him on his back against the ground and rendering him unable to draw a full breath. Even though he knew it wasn't Naruto's fault. Not really. He was just some kid who was unfortunate enough to be the center of the universe. He hadn't meant to do any of this, and realistically, Gairano should have … set his house on fire, or something, anything to keep him away from this whole mess. But he hadn't, and he should have remembered that being able to see fate hadn't once let him protect someone from it yet.
'Raiku… means…' Naruto wheezed, and Gairano was forced to admire his tenacity, if nothing else. '…lightning…'
Gairano raised an eyebrow. That was it? That was the kind of grand revelation that Naruto used to win the hearts and minds of others? He felt a little bit cheated. Lightning struck the cage behind them with a clap of thunder, over and over, a white noise Gairano had long grown accustomed to overlooking.
Of course her name meant lightning. He'd named Raiku for her Device, when it had been unclear what it really was, so long ago now. It had managed to get past his wife's field, and hers, but she had survived it, so it had made sense to recognise its significance.
It had been a useless statement. Strange. Naruto would not ordinarily make a useless statement now, at the crux of things.
But Naruto was not, apparently, finished. He gave a weak, wavering smile, blood in his teeth, a terrible kindness in his eyes. 'Raiku,' he rasped, 'is. lightning.'
No.
His instinctive rejection surprised him with its intensity. What was the big deal? Raiku had always been electric, had always been attached to the Device that made her so. That was just the way it was.
But that hadn't been what Naruto said, he realized. It wasn't that Raiku had lightning, that she had a Device. It was that she was lightning.
That she was the Device.
No.
Gairano lurched to his feet, to feel the world spinning and hear fate laughing at him.
No.
It couldn't be possible. No. Raiku was his daughter and a Gairano, and no… no Device could ever get more than a foothold in their fields, let alone forge that kind of complexity. Raiku was…
No, Raiku was a Gairano. His wife had been a Gairano. It was not possible. It could never have gotten through the field.
Raiku was…
No, Raiku was a Gairano. His daughter, and she was not what Naruto was trying to tell him she was, because that was impossible for one of them.
But his wife had been one of them, his wife the Gairano, and she had died. And Raiku, the Gairano, had not, and he had thought it was a mercy. He had thought she had been the only good thing to come out of the whole mess, and living with the Device was a small price to pay for that.
Raiku was...
Raiku was not complex, though. Not in the way that people were complex.
He was breathing harshly through his teeth and clenching his hands so tightly that they ached. He was stepping back, he was staggering and he was being flooded with thoughts so tightly organized into one epiphany that they had to have been Plot-formulated. Forced together into one solid wave of truth that made him sick.
Her incomprehension in the face of human motives. Her strange, desperate hunger. The way that she loved, as one thoughtless, raw nerve, and how easily he could have taken inhumanity for naiveté. How easily he could have mistaken simplicity for honesty and how a more basic, elemental nature would struggle to evolve, trailing behind its more complex peers. And oh, how she'd tried, struggling endlessly and inexplicably to understand how other people changed so drastically in normal, human ways. He'd watched and remembered his own adolescent awkwardness, blindly accepting that answer because Raiku and her electrokinesis, Raiku and her Device, was tolerable. It was acceptable in a way that Raiku the Device was not, more acceptable than the idea that the human, the Gairano owner of that life had never lived it.
'You can still save her,' Naruto panted, painted in blood and dirt, 'if she dies, it'll be because you let her.'
Impossible. Unthinkable. Life didn't work like that for them. The universe didn't give back what it took away. Not to them, and he had long seen his family function as collateral, their lives payment for other people's miracles. Even if it was true, it was his duty to destroy it, because the idea of a Device gaining sentience, being raised like a child (his child his Raiku) was a new and terrible development. He was a Gairano, and they didn't tolerate Genematrix machinations. He was a Gairano, and it was his job to stop things like this from happening. It was wrong and it was impossible and it couldn't be this way. He shouldn't have to choose between his family and his daughter.
And the more he thought about it, the more it became apparent that he wasn't going to, because there was no choice. Suddenly he found that he hated Naruto, and himself, because with a feeling like the slow collapse of years of belief, he knew that he would always take Raiku the Device over Raiku the corpse. Every time.
Naruto stood up behind him and took a wary step forward, and Gairano thought wildly for a moment that he could do it, if he really tried. Right then. He could kill him. Maybe the Genematrix would never recover, maybe the fabric of the world would unravel at Naruto's passing like it did so often at his behest, but maybe it wouldn't. And then this would all be over, and it could be so easy.
No, it couldn't.
He found himself calming in the face of his task, his resolve returning now that he had decided on a course of action. He took a step forward, squinting against the light, bracing himself as even that small movement towards it made the intensity of it hard to bear. The Hyuuga had been wrong, naturally, but he was only a Genin. The cage was sealed shut, but not with a traditional seal. He could feel the traces of the Hokage's chakra through every inch of it, supplemented by her apprentice's, keeping it anchored in place. But it was only an anchor, and the metal was starting to glow hot at the seams. It hadn't been designed to withstand this kind of assault for so long. But the storm was losing force, still violent, but less rapidfire. It couldn't sustain itself, trapped in place.
He began to walk forward slowly, holding a hand up to shield his eyes from the brightness, the world turning white around him as he approached. The air was suffocatingly hot, and after a few steps, the sound became less a thing that he heard than he felt, deep inside his ribcage, down his spine. It could destroy him at any second, or Naruto, who was trying to keep up but who couldn't have been used to it.
After an age, he placed his hands on the metal of the cage, coated in chakra. It was vibrating so hard that it rattled his teeth and made his eyes water. When the lightning failed to destroy them, something seemed to settle into place in his mind. Idly, he wondered if this was how Raiku felt all the time—surrounded, consumed by energy and light—and then he braced himself against the side and pulled, pouring chakra out through his skin to bombard the seal in place. It didn't budge, until a moment later, a far more singed Naruto almost slammed into the side in his haste to help.
By milimetres, the slab began to move.
Naruto shouted something, but he couldn't make it out.
The seals began to snap, until the tiny pulses of chakra ceased and the cage slid open. With a blinding flash of light and clap of thunder that sounded like triumph, the storm broke, and the world went dark.
Yamada wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, leaning heavily on the ridge of earth he had thrown up to try and help Ryuu. Fucking Raiku. Fucking Gairano. Forcing him to get involved, god, it had been years since he'd needed to put this much effort into anything. His chakra hadn't had to work this hard since... hell, he could barely remember, and now he still needed to round up his unruly mob and get out of there before—
'Yamada?'
He froze.
Sakura leaned into his field of vision, slowly. 'I found Shishou.'
Unwillingly, he turned his head.
Tsunade smiled at him, one hand resting on Sakura's shoulder in a proprietary fashion.
'Hello, Yamada.'
Oh god fucking damn.
'Fancy seeing you here.'
Ryuu collapsed with a sound of relief and Daisukenojo barely managed to catch him before he hit the ground. 'Ryuu!? Ryuu!'
He clutched him awkwardly, staggering under his weight. He looked around for help and of course, saw no one. A quick check revealed that Ryuu was unconscious.
'Well, shit.'
The smell of ozone and the rain came down, in seconds a steady downpour that quickly soaked them both to the bone, cooling the air in a wave of relief. It brought cold reality back to Gairano, made the aches in his body and his quiet doubts suddenly important again.
No. He'd given in to Naruto, like everybody else. He was supposed to be smarter than that. Naruto's narrative imperative could have made him believe anything while he was vulnerable and now, whatever it was that woke up inside Raiku's body was out of his hands. What if Raiku wasn't what he had been so quickly convinced she was? Would he be trapped with it, now, a stranger with Raiku's face? He waited for the confirmation of his fears, the sudden emergence of a fraud in his daughter's skin.
His doubts lasted until a tiny vibration made him realise that the inside of the Faraday cage had been knocked on, tentatively. Gairano Chitose raised a hand to cover his eyes, shoulders starting to shake from relief and bubbling hysteria.
'Hello?' a weedy female voice called from behind the metal. '…Hello?'
Some metres away, Neji finally stirred, rejoining the wider narrative with a loud and jarring inhale, suddenly aware of himself again as his story resumed. The voice from inside the cage tried again.
'Is it over? …Anybody?'
Raiku's plaintive, uncertain voice was the sweetest thing he had ever heard.
'…I can't get out.'
A/N: And excuse me, while I let my face carefully crash into the keyboard from exhaustion. Finally. Finally we reach the timeskip, which I promise you will actually be addressed. Don't worry. You won't be missing anything.
So, reviews! Many of them asked questions that I feel were answered in this chapter, so I'm going to thank the people who reviewed by chapter, then answer the ones from the last one. If this makes you want to kill me, just let me know that you don't feel it was addressed. Naturally, I can't say anything if it's going to be a plot point later, but... actually, yes, that's basically the extent of it.
One thing that came up quite a bit: my update schedule. And I am sorry, my darlings, but I don't have one. Usually I update much faster than this, but depending on the length and difficulty of a chapter, it make take longer. Generally, if real life doesn't kick me in the face, it's pretty quick.
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