Summary:
The eyes of the Hyuuga are as cold and glittering as the iced-over snowflakes. Are their minds, their hearts, their souls any different? [AU] [Non-Chronological Linked Drabbles]
General Disclaimer For The Entire Story:
I don't own Naruto. If I did, I'd have given Deidara more screentime, because he is awesome and a pyromaniac and thus doubly awesome. In fact, he's 120% awesomer, you could say. Oh, and the cover picture isn't mine, either. Should I change it? (Does anybody actually read this disclaimer?)
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(tenten knows neji's weak points far too well, that devilish woman)
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[Age 17]
(MagicSchool!AU)
"Must we continue forth with this odious task?" Hyuuga Neji, robed in elegantly minimalist beige robes, sighed with a long-suffering look.
Tenten, his (best) friend, and also the one dragging him down the starkly clean stone hallway, rolled her eyes with another (unseen) long-suffering look.
She herself was dressed in a very practical ensemble of a white vaguely Chinese top and the classic 'ninja pants' of Elemental 5 Academy, in a suitably muted red.
Elemental 5 Academy, the Japanese Magic School of choice, was actually formed of five different schools situated on five different islands, all relatively close in proximity to each other, and all cloaked heavily under the best (diabolical and evil and cunning and genius) protections that the ninja masterminds behind E5A's creation could brainstorm up.
Japanese wizards typically had their magic attuned to an elemental affinity, or more than one if they were lucky with the genetic potluck.
They also tended to have unique slang terms for their way of life, although that was the same for all the other countries' wizards.
Japanese wizards really didn't even refer to themselves as 'wizards' or 'witches' or 'sorceress/sorcerer' unless on a diplomatic formality; they defined themselves as 'ninja' (shinobi/kunoichi instead of wizard/witch), albeit ones who have adapted to modern times relatively well.
Survival of their culture had always been a priority, and when survival comes into question, people are surprisingly good at incorporating them they'd think.
"Yes, Neji, kami yes we must. If you're going to complain so much, why'd you agree to come to today's party, anyway? I thought you hated Sasuke."
"The Uchiha is unworthy of Hinata-sama's attentions; it is blatantly obvious that he will begin courting her soon, and the other Hyuuga will not stand for it."
"Still spouting that anti-Uchiha propaganda? Man, I'm not sure how much of that you believe, and how much of that is just because you care about Hinata. Aww, feeling a bit like an overprotective brother now? And that doesn't answer the question, by the way. I've hung around Ino for the past 5 years, and I've known you and Hinata since we were 12 and she was 11. I have experience in pushing questions and recognizing deflections, trust me."
"..."
Growling, and sounding far too alike to Inuzuka Kiba for his comfort, his admittedly panda-esque brunette friend paused and half-twisted, just enough to show a threatening glimpse of five shuriken splayed between the fingers on the hand not holding his arm in a vice-grip.
"..."
"Oh, don't give me more of that haughty stoic and unfairly expressive Hyuuga silence! Do I have to go and get Lee to help me... convince you to explain? I'm sure Gai-sensei would find it a friendship-bonding activity full of 'youthfulness'."
Oh, but she was evil.
Well-played, Tenten.
Well. Played.
"... I only agreed to come because Naruto would undoubtedly start ragging on me again for not attending his best friend's 17th birthday party. Who, by the way, I do not understand how he decided to become best friends with the same person who tried to kill him a year and a half ago."
Tenten could only shrug awkwardly in response, tucking away her beloved blades.
"Erm... who knows how Team 7 thinks? They're all dysfunctional. We're all dysfunctional. We're ninja."
The disbelief was implied in the flat and heavy silence that followed.
Luckily, Tenten had started moving again as soon as Neji had begun his reply, so the silence had only stretched yawningly for about fifteen seconds before they'd reached their destination.
The Barracks.
(Yes, capitalized.)
Everyone under the crazyhouse roof known as Konoha (Official Name: Elemental 5 Academy's Fire School Amid the Leaves) was housed in The Barracks.
There were, to be accurate, three housing sections under the widespread 'The Barracks' banner.
'Genin Barracks', for the D-Rank and below ninja.
'Chuunin Barracks', for the C-Rank and B-Rank ninja.
'Jounin Barracks', for the A-Rank and S-Rank ninja.
Rank graduation tests were administered bi-yearly, missions and training were daily, with some teachers being more thorough than others.
E5A's motto?
'Learn pain, love pain, live pain.'
Pein, a well-known and superbly-talented S-Rank teacher assistant who spent two months at each School and traveled for two months per year, had to briefly put up with a lot of ribbing and horrible puns.
('Brief', because then he Rinnegan'd the next offender through a stone wall and thus caused them to fall off a conveniently placed cliff into a conveniently located steep sea dive.
Don't worry, they lived; the shark fins were just Hoshigaki Kisame's shark summons out for a swim, and had, with considerable generosity, cut their swim short in order to rescue the unfortunate person.)
His adoptive sister, Konan, half-brother, Uzumaki Nagato, and other half-brother, Yahiko, were all quietly amused by his plight.
(Pein's parents were Nagato's father and Yahiko's mother, which is why he got the Rinnegan and the orange hair. The serious attitude is, as Yahiko jokes, completely from Nagato's side of the family.)
Which is all beside the point.
Without further ado, Tenten bit her thumb and smeared it across the identification seals carved into the super-deluxe-ultra-grand-master-champion-heavy-duty reinforced steel-iron-titanium-granite doors that were probably a foot thick and weighed more than five hundred pounds each.
(Nevertheless, even with the new flame-proof water-proof rubber-insulation oil-proof mended-with-scrap-metal and slathered-with-old-poisons [dubious] safety measures, The Barracks' doors [any three sets of them] never lasted more than a month without some sort of grievous damage harming it beyond repair or salvageability. More often than not, the grievous damage came from an explosion of some sort.)
They creaked open with appropriate melodrama, like an arthritic senior-senior-great-grand-citizen straining and wheezing and groaning with rattling bones and a flimsy cane.
(Haruno Sakura, Headmistress Senju's second apprentice, widely acknowledged as the best person you should go to for academic tutoring and healing, and the most likely one to read foreign myths, had named the gates' effect as the 'Sisyphus sonata'. Everyone else duly interpreted this as the 'sissy gates'.)
Tenten and Neji entered the Jounin Barracks.
.
.
.
"So! We all here? Role call, Forehead-girl!" Yamanaka Ino, of the famed mindwalker Clan bloodline (the approximate equal of a Pureblood with a family gift of Occlumency and Legilimency, although much more complex) ordered magnanimously, imperiously perched on an ornately gilded throne (most likely Alchemized/Transmuted [Transfigured]) and dressed in a rather short but undeniably pretty kimono.
The rest of the 'Konoha 12', as their generation's cluster of teams had been nicknamed, were sitting on the plain wooden floor in various states of relaxation.
Sakura, sitting in her regular clothes cross-legged next to her in a summoned armchair, rolled her eyes, but obediently listed off the names by memory, finding no need to waste any of her precious stationary on this task.
"Ino's here, I'm here. That's two. Shikamaru?"
"Troublesome," Nara Shikamaru (the Nara were the only ones with a shadow elemental affinity, as a result of their own bloodline) muttered from his spread-eagled position, staring up at the ceiling and finding it too much of a drag to create a similar seating, his clothes unchanged.
"Three. Choji?"
"Crnch, crnch, mm-hmm, I'm here," Akimichi Choji (the Akimichi were masters at revolutionizing the forms of potions/pills and coaxing even more efficiency out of their personal blends) crunched steadily through his favorite flavor of chips, leaning comfortably back on a unsealed recliner, with his usual outfit.
"Four. Tenten?"
"Yup!" she chirped cheerily, nudging her sulking teammate; they were sharing a conjured cabana, charmed to float a few inches off the floor.
"Five. Neji?"
"Here," he bit out curtly, busy suspiciously eyeing the dark-haired teen next to his cousin.
"Six. Lee?"
"I AM HERE MY BEAUTIFUL FRAGANT CHERRY BLOSSOM!" he roared, eyes glittering and eyebrows bushy-ing, simply sitting on the floor in his signature green suit and orange legwarmers.
(Well, he was actually doing sit-ups on the floor, but that's basically the same thing. Lee's chakra coils ['magic system'] had been unable to push externally, but he had still made it into Elemental 5 Academy by having the taijutsu teacher Gai Maito vouch for him as his very own apprentice, securing a taijutsu scholarship for him.)
"S-Seven. Naruto?"
"Here, Sakura-chan!" he chirped even more cheerily than Tenten had, unable to resist bouncing restlessly on his self-created, very own bubble sphere, the soapy swirling effect distorting the orange of his tracksuit.
(As the greatest sealsmaster of his generation, adding a few expansion and stabilizing and force-field and protection and durability and friction seals onto a bubble wand had merely been his pet project for an especially boring Saturday.)
"Eight. Sasuke?"
"Hn," he sniffed, sitting stiffly in his summoned high-backed armchair, stately in his midnight-blue simplistic robes, and accepting a proffered cup of heliotrope tea from his neighbor.
"Nine. Hinata?"
"It is lovely to be here today," she answered courteously, kneeling in a precise seiza position on her transmuted and charmed floating tatami mat, regal in her understated mauve kimono, pouring a cup of tea for herself from the circular table levitating between them.
(Ino had put her in charge of keeping the party refreshments safe, as she was the best in putting up barriers and constructing offensive shields. Thus, the large dining table behind her, laden with food and enclosed by a rectangle of faintly shimmering wards.)
"Ten. Kiba?"
"And Akamaru!" he reminded her, grinning widely as he sat cross-legged on his conjured shell-chair, Akamaru in another shell-chair next to him, both of them unabashedly eyeing the warded refreshments.
"Akamaru is implied when I say Kiba. Eleven. Shino?"
"Last again," he murmured softly, falling silent on his transmuted wooden chair, having nothing more to say on the topic.
(Inwardly, he wondered if anyone would have notice him not coming.)
"Twelve. Sai's doing rehab with another Yamanaka, so he's not here. Alright, that's twelve, you crazy Ino-pig. What now?"
Ino conjured a foam ball and threw it at Sakura, the chakra construct fizzling out after Sakura reflexively punched it.
Disgruntled, the blond party hostess pretended she didn't see that and continued, a familiar mischief-making gleam in her eye.
"As tradition dictates, to celebrate Sasuke's birthday, we are going to play Truth or Dare, Veritaserum edition!"
"It's my birthday and I never agreed to any of this," Sasuke said, before being summarily ignored through ease of long practice.
"What tradition?" Shikamaru grumbled.
He didn't bother dodging the foam ball that bounced off his head and fizzled out after hitting the wall behind him.
"Did you sneak out Veritaserum from T & I again? The Transmutation and Iryo-nin specialists are going to ruthless if they find out," Sakura warned.
She received a dismissive hand-flap-wave-thingy-gesture for her efforts.
"So! Who's in?"
Nearly everyone started standing up to head for the door.
"I'm sorry, did I forget to mention to none of you will get the refreshments if you leave? Think of the tomatoes, the onigiri, the ramen, the cake, the mochi, the ice cream, the cinnamon rolls and wild grass salads and who knows what else?"
Some hesitated.
Smirking devilishly, Ino delivered the final blow.
"Everything was made or raised by Mrs. Akimichi, and then kitchens just so happen to be under renovation today."
Sasuke appeared to be the only one left standing.
"Oh, and as for you, Itachi agreed to help bind you if need be."
He grudgingly skulked back to his chair, sulking (brooding, he insisted, not 'main-pain angsting' like Naruto declares).
Hinata sympathetically offered him another cup of tea and a perfectly symmetrical tomato, in the commiserating fashion of the only sane people among madmen (and madwomen, in the interest of politically correct gender neutrality).
(Ino had bribed her to keep the wards up around the refreshment table beforehand, by sharing her plot and guaranteeing her a free-pass for one of the turns.)
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To be continued. Eventually.
So feel free to review-in with any questions, and if you want me to do a Triwizard (Quadwizard?) crossover extension to this mini-universe.
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-Review.-
