Chapter 64

Training

Naruto headed over to Hinata's for breakfast in the morning as usual and spent some time with her family. He was making casual conversation with Lord Hiashi before he planned to set out for the day. Hanabi took turns listening to their conversation, talking on and off with Hinata whenever she was bored.

"I hope I don't get put on a squad with people I don't like," Hanabi complained to Hinata. Since she had passed school, she was ready to be paired and assigned a squad leader.

"You'll have to make due for the time being, but in time, your squad will become your friends," Hinata reassured her.

Naruto overheard and remembered all too well the day that he was assigned to his squad. "Yeah, I hated Sasuke at first and couldn't believe we had to be on a team together, but now he's one of my closest friends," he added.

Hanabi shared the quality of superiority that her cousin Neji often did, it would take hard training and falling short to teach her the humility that he gained as he matured. Her father had praised her in the past for this behavior and had the same attitude himself, until he confronted Neji after the chunin exams.

"Hanabi, your squad will become like your second family. It is not whether you like them or not, you are a shinobi of the leaf and will vow your life to protect them, just as they are doing for you. The more you work with your squad, the more you will understand this." He lectured as he took a sip of tea.

Hinata nodded her head, understanding that life wasn't as black and white as it looked to her sister at times.

"You better get going if you don't want to be late, Iruka Sensi will put you on a bad squad for sure!" Naruto joked while Hanabi made a horrified look and got up to leave without saying goodbye, her father and sister clearly weren't impressed. Naruto coughed and repositioned himself in his chair.

"I had a visitor yesterday," Lord Hiashi began. "Lady Tsunade came here to see you Hinata."

"Me? Did she need more balm for the hospital?"

"No, she wanted to check in on Naruto's progress since she released him to your care."

"You're supposed to be checking in with her..." Hinata mentioned to Naruto.

"After you left I kinda forgot," Naruto said sheepishly.

"I updated her on Naruto's health. I've checked his chakra network with my buyokogon periodically and he seems to be making progress." He commented.

It felt weird for Naruto to hear Lord Hiashi discussing him like he wasn't there.

"I've been thinking so too father, I was hoping we could try out the training grounds today." She replied as she looked at Naruto and smiled.

"Alright! Finally!" Naruto said as he stood up and got ready to leave.

She held up one hand to stop him, "Naruto, you will need to pace yourself, if it hurts at all, we have to stop." He looked like he was going to try to argue. "I'm serious Naruto, if you can't promise then you can work on this with Lady Tsunade." She warned.

"Grandma Tsunade, no way!" he replied. "I promise Hinata, now let's go train."

They both said bye to Lord Hiashi and headed towards the training grounds holding hands.

"To start with I'm going to use my buyokogon to monitor you while you try to run chakra into your arm." She instructed. "Go ahead and start when you're ready."

Naruto concentrated and began regulating some chakra in his arm, he didn't feel any pain but there was an odd tingling sensation.

Hinata activated her buyokogon and focused in on Naruto's arm and then his body, watching the flow of energy through his body. She could see that his flow was barely moving in his arm, it was a gradual process of building up the chakra and at the rate he was experiencing it was taking quite a while.

"How does it look Hinata?" he asked her.

"Just keep trying," she encouraged him. "It hasn't wielded juitsu in a while so it's difficult for it to build," she added.

Naruto tried to push himself harder and harder until something would change. It took several hours before he was finally able to build up enough chakra to add a hand sign to.

"This is great Naruto, you're getting stronger!" She pointed out.

He only nodded his head and continued building his chakra. He was only able to last as long as he did because he had enormous reserves of chakra.

She asked him to begin some hand signs to make juitsus so that she could see how he did. The first few didn't produce any results which irritated Naruto.

"It's not working," he said angrily.

"Just give it time Naruto, try again," Hinata encouraged.

"Right," he said as he continued. After a few more tries his juitsu would begin to activate and then fizzle out.

"It's at least started working," she could see that his chakra network was having difficulty holding chakra. She was also running out of chakra after using her byukogon.

Naruto started to notice that she looked tired. "Hey, how are you holding up Hinata?"

"I'm fine, but nearly out of chakra," she replied. "You should keep practicing and I'll rest for a while," she said as she moved to a shady spot.

"I wish I could make a shadow clone to help this go quicker…" he muttered. His lack of results reminded him of when he was trying to learn the Rasengan from Jariah.

After a few hours Naruto was still at it and Hinata would check in on his progress with her byuokogon. He had started to make some progress and Hinata was ready to move him to the next steps.

"Now, I think you're ready," she said as she moved close to him. "We're both close range fighters, and I'm going to come at you with an attack and I want you to block it," she directed.

Naruto took a stance like he was preparing for a fight as Hinata grabbed a kuni knife and came at him. He blocked the first and several other blows with relative ease.

"Okay, this is going to get harder, I'm going to use gentle fist now," she warned as she put her kuni knife away.

Naruto nodded and prepared himself again. They moved back and forth, her dealing out punches and him dodging her, until one connected. Naruto dropped his stance and held his shoulder. She turned off her juitsu and came towards him.

"Are you okay Naruto?" She asked. She knew that being hit with gentle fist was painful since she experienced this herself when training with her father.

"That made by arm go numb," he said as he looked at Hinata.

"I'm sorry," she began, "let's go back to my house, I have something that will help with that."

He composed himself and followed her back to her house.

When they arrived Hinata had Naruto sit in a chair while she got something from her room. When she came back out she was holding a small container.

"You'll want to remove your coat and shirt," she said as she blushed.

"What if your dad comes in here?!" He gave her a look as if to say 'are you crazy.'

"He isn't home, it's just us Naruto," she replied.

A look of understanding dawned on his face. "Oh, okay," he said as he started talking off his coat. He had trouble because of the numbness and Hinata helped him get it off the rest of the way.

As he took off his shirt he looked at Hinata's face, she hadn't seen him without a shirt before and he wondered if she would be looking at his chest. He sat up taller and straightened his shoulders so that his chest looked a little bigger.

Hinata opened the container and showed Naruto the green liquid inside. "I'm going to put this on your shoulder and it should give you feeling back within a few minutes." She reassured him as she dipped her fingers into the liquid and then applied it to his shoulder.

He flinched when she made contact because the liquid was cold and because of her touch. She didn't stop when he flinched. She rubbed the liquid on his shoulder as she looked into his eyes. She broke contact to look at the rest of his chest. It was well defined and his muscles were a nice size. She wanted to rub her fingers over his chest and his arms and it took a lot of self control to stop herself.

Naruto watched her fingers as they made contact with his skin. He quickly got feeling back and he liked the sensation her fingers caused. He glanced in Hinata's eyes and saw her looking down at his chest, appearing to struggle with something.

"Hinata, you okay," he asked her.

She jerked her head up and took her hand off his shoulder, realizing she was spacing out while looking at his chest. "Yeah," she replied while she looked in his eyes and smiled.

He brought his hand up under the nape of her neck and held her head while he leaned down to kiss her. She was kissing him back when her father walked through the door.

Lord Hiashi took in the scene, Naruto sitting in a chair with his shirt off, holding onto his daughter as they kissed in his house. He became enraged instantly.

When he came in Naruto had let go of Hinata and stood up quickly, trying to put his shirt back on.

Hinata saw the look on her father's face and held up the balm. She started to speak when he held up his hand to silence her. "Hinata, please leave us, Naruto and I need to have a talk," he said through clenched teeth as Naruto gulped loudly.