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When Neji had invited me to dinner, I asked that we make a detour to my house so I could change into more formal attire. Although Neji had grumbled a bit at the extended route, he too agreed that a first impression counted a lot when it came to his uncle. Once at my house, I instructed Neji to stay in the living room while I raided my wardrobe in search of a suitable kimono. Fifteen minutes later, I had donned a simple white kimono with a silver obi and lining, and, after fighting with my hair for a few seconds, I managed to twist it into a fairly presentable braid. Having decided to leave my kunai pouch behind, I had to stuff some of my trustworthy weapons into inconspicuous places in my outfit just in case. Once I was ready, I left my room and went to collect Neji, and I was amused to find him examining the various scrolls and souvenirs I had collected from our missions to different shinobi countries.
"We had only just had our first C-Rank, and that was to Suna." He stated, with a hint of jealousy in his voice.
"Well, we'd already established I'm cooler than you, so it's only fair I get better missions." I teased.
He smirked, but didn't reply, instead turning to face me. I watched as he took in my appearance, anxiously waiting for a verdict. I don't know what I expected to hear, but it definitely wasn't the simple; "Hn. White suits you." Before he turned on his heel and left the house.
With the only option left being follow him, I swallowed my surprise and ran, as fast as I could while being careful to not rip my kimono, to catch up with him.
"So, what should I expect?" I asked, masking my nervousness with curiosity.
Neji seemed to ponder the question before he answered. "Uncle will probably try to question your abilities, so try not to kill him when he underestimates you. He'll probably ask about your family… then I don't know."
I considered his answer, without making any promises. It all depended on how the Hyuuga head would go about those questions – if it was merely to state his curiosity, then fine, but if the point would be to degrade me, then I would get angry.
I was shaken out of my thoughts by Neji gripping my elbow, informing me that we had arrived. I looked around in slight awe as the brunette by my side nodded at the guards; inside the walls that separated it from the bustling streets outside, the compound was very quiet and peaceful, and I silently admired the beautiful gardens and the small ponds and training grounds. There were two buildings separated by the gardens in the middle; one a two-floor construction which stretched across the inner walls, and the other, a ground-floor building, obviously less grand than the main one, and I got the memo that one was the Main House, and the other the Branch House.
Neji led me into the bigger building, and I followed him as he took me through the many corridors until he finally stopped by the shoji doors. Giving me one last glance, he slid the doors to the side and walked in, with me on his heels.
"Haruno-san, glad you could make it." The deep voice of Hiashi Hyuuga greeted me. I took a moment to take in my surroundings; apart from Neji and I, there were also two other girls, one about my age or younger, and a couple of Elders.
I bowed. "The pleasure is all mine, Hyuuga-sama. Thank you for inviting me." I greeted.
The Clan Head nodded and motioned for us to sit on the cushions provided. While we waited for the meal to be brought in, I waited for the man to begin his game of twenty questions.
"So, Haruno-san, how long have you been a genin for?" Bingo.
"Two years, Hiashi-sama. Also, if you wouldn't mind, I would prefer to be called Sakura." I answered politely.
Hiashi just nodded again. "I heard that your team has been on many challenging missions, the most recent one being an A-Rank, if I'm correct?" that seemed to spark the younger girl's interest as she looked up. I nodded. "How did your team handle it?"
"I would say quite well. All of us came out uninjured and alive." I replied, curious as to where he was headed.
"But you had failed the official objective of the mission – your client ended up dead."
Bastard. You want to play dirty? Fine.
"The client's death was not due to my team's incompetence, but rather to the fact that he had lied about what kind of people were after him. I was not willing to sacrifice my teammates' lives for that of a deceitful man who valued money more than his life." I declared, the tone of finality in my voice. I saw Neji trying to resist the urge to face-palm, instead settling for an exasperated sigh.
The Hyuuga regarded me for a few seconds, before he nodded, as if agreeing to something he thought. "I see." I was tempted to say 'that's it?' but resisted. I didn't want to push my luck.
Instead, I asked; "Although it's a great honour and pleasure to be here, I must ask, why have you invited me, Hyuuga-sama?" on my left, Neji perked up and it seemed like the same question had plagued his mind as well.
"As Neji's guardian and uncle, I have the responsibility to review all of his potential female suitors, in order to choose the best match for him."
I saw Neji choke on his tea and I resisted the urge to sputter indignantly at the suggestion. "Hyuuga-sama! Neji and I-! We're not romantically involved! Our relationship is purely platonic!" I exclaimed, horrified at the mere notion, at the same time as Neji protested with a slightly more dignified;
"We're just training partners! I do not wish to court her! She's like a sister!"
I never thought either of us capable of blushing, but I could feel my cheeks burn with embarrassment just as clearly as I could see the pink tint that settled over Neji's cheeks and ears.
The Hyuuga Head regarded us with faint amusement. "Is that so?" he asked calmly.
"Yes!" we cried in unison, still trying to avoid looking at each other.
Hiashi merely continued sipping his tea. "I see." He said after a moment.
An awkward, albeit relieved silence settled in the room.
That had been my very first, but definitely not last visit to the Hyuuga compound. A year had passed since then, and my life fell into an easy routine; go on missions with my team, train every morning, go to the dango café with Anko once a week, unless one of us was away on a mission, train with Neji, spend some quality-time with my teammates, and then, Sunday evening would have me going to the Hyuuga compound for dinner with Neji and his cousins, occasionally joined by Hiashi-sama himself – I had become a frequent visitor, so I was easily admitted in by the guards.
In short, a lot of things had changed during the last year, but a lot of them also stayed the same; Team 13 had acquired few more nicknames, ranging from 'Team Troublemaker' to 'Team Prodigy', but one which amused the three of us to no end was 'Demon Siblings'. Someone must've seen how comfortable we are around each other, and how effective our teamwork had become, which made it seem like we were siblings. The 'demon' part probably came for the levels of destruction we were known to bring whenever we sparred or discovered something that annoyed/hurt/insulted us.
Our missions had also become more challenging; our record now consisted of 78 missions, nine of which were A-Ranks. We definitely broke the record of 'life-threatening missions taken by genin' – I had almost missed the D-Ranks we used to take.
At the moment, I was heading to our training grounds, wondering about what kind of genjutsu Kaoru would try to trap me in this time. As I arrived, I was met with the sight of Akane and Kaoru sparring, but it seemed that the brunette had been taken off-guard as he was laying on his back, trying to wrestle the redhead off of him with little success.
"Would you like some help, Kaoru?" I asked teasingly as I walked over to where they laid.
At the sound of my voice, Akane sprang to his feet and hugged me, completely forgetting about the pissed off brunette he'd been wrestling with.
"Sakura-chan!" he sang happily as he lifted me up and spun me around in circles.
"OK, enough." I commanded and whacked him over the head, to which he nodded and let me down.
"Shall we spar?" I asked after Kaoru had picked himself off of the ground.
"Yeah. I need to get my revenge." The brunette replied, glaring at Akane who stuck his tongue out in response.
I sighed. This was going to get messy.
A few hours later, we were joined by sensei who arrived dramatically, waving his arms in the air. "OK, my little ducklings, stop fighting now, we have a mission!" he tossed the scroll to Kaoru while he narrowly avoided a hug from Akane.
"Now, hurry and go pack, we're leaving in half an hour!"
"Actually, sensei," Kaoru interrupted, "I think you'll find that only the three of us are leaving." The brunette declared.
"Huh?" sensei asked intelligently. "What do you mean, Kaoru-chan?"
The tall teen turned the scroll around and pointed at the bottom paragraph. "You're needed at the borders. Since this only a C-Rank, we can easily handle it ourselves." He explained.
"Aw, but that's so boring…" sensei whined, and it was so alike Akane that I snorted.
"Come on, Izaya-sensei. When you're done, I promise I'll treat you to ramen." I offered, and his face immediately brightened up.
"Thank you, Sakura-chan! Now, shoo, the three of you, you've got a mission to complete!"
The mission was so painfully simple that we were back in less than six hours, and were on our way to the Hokage to give in our report. Once we were done, he told us to go to the borders to dismiss our sensei, since during the time we were gone a small battalion of Kumo shinobi attacked the East border, where sensei had been fighting.
When we arrived, it turned out the situation was much more serious than I had predicted – there were a lot of wounded, and it took a few seconds to locate the spiky blac mob of hair that belonged to our sensei. He was fighting three Kumo nins on his own, doing really well, since a few seconds later they were taken down, and he was moving on to the next ninja, but what he failed to notice was the masked man coming up behind him.
I tried to shout, to warn him somehow, but it seemed like my throat had clogged up and my body refused to move. I could only watch in horror as the ninja unsheathed his sword, and, with painful accuracy, pierced it through sensei's back.
They saw as their sensei, with dramatic slowness, looked down at his feet. A sword, no, a katana at least five feet long was protruding from his stomach, the blade bloodied, the tip dripping purple. Blood bubbled from his lips as the ninja behind him twisted the katana which was still sticking out of him.
They saw as his eyes began to glaze over.
"NO!"
Startled, the boys looked to their side where their teammate had been, only to realise she wasn't there. They heard a snarl and felt the familiar chakra signature spike furiously – Sakura had abandoned their side and ran to the man whose sword was still lodged in their sensei. She easily dislodged the man's hold on his weapon and literally threw her sensei away, trusting them to catch him. Kaoru did and immediately knelt down, laying his sensei out on the ground for Akane to heal, while he gazed with a horrified expression at his female teammate.
The rosette's eyes blazed with fury and unadulterated hatred as she glared at the man, lips pulled back in a beastly snarl. It was the first time Kaoru had seen her so angry and it frightened him. His eyes widened at how quickly the man went down, his skull smashed into smithereens. But his teammate didn't stop there; she danced across the entire clearing, destroying everything in her path, and earning a lot of cuts and scratches herself. A few seconds later, all that was left on the field were the corpses of the enemy ninja, and the stupefied Konoha shinobi. All eyes were on the petite pinkette with blood on her hands, but she ignored them all as she walked towards their fallen sensei.
As she drew closer, Kaoru noticed that the fury in her eyes had faded. In fact, everything had faded. Her eyes were blank, expressionless; lifeless.
She gazed down at the unmoving body of the man she'd come to know as her father in everything but blood. The anger and pain she felt a few minutes earlier was gone, and she felt numb.
"U-Um, he's still alive, but in a comatose state. I've healed the wound, but, this poison… it's so complex. I've never seen it before, I doubt the hospital has either. Until they find the antidote, we're… on our own." Akane summarised nervously, frantically wiping at his tears.
"So he's as good as dead, then. We were too late." Sakura stated bluntly, her face devoid of expression.
"N-No!" Akane spluttered. "Don't say that! And how can you be so… OK with this?!" he exclaimed.
The rosette gazed at him apathetically. "He's the third person who's left me without even saying goodbye." She looked at the sky, the bright sun mocking her grief. "The only way I can prevent myself from getting hurt again is by detaching myself from him. From you. From everything."
Before they could object, the rosette disappeared in a swirl of leaves, pulling off a swift transportation jutsu without so much as making a hand-seal.
The two boys exchanged worried glances, tears streaking their cheeks, wordlessly coming to an agreement that they should let the rosette be. For now.
I fled from the scene, but I did not want to go home. It held too many memories of the last time somebody had abandoned me. Although I felt numb to the pain, the fact that another person had slipped through my fingers still hurt. I ended up by the river and collapsed to my knees, my back against a tree. Sobs shook my body, and I allowed myself to cry, to shed the tears I had refused to shed for so long.
I had grown to care for my team, for Akane, for Kaoru, for Izaya-sensei. Now, having one of them ripped from me tore my heart into shreds, making my pain-filled sobs turn into animalistic howls of despair. All the emotion, the loneliness, the agony I kept bottled inside of me bubbled to the surface, and I found myself rocking back and forth, wishing this had never happened to me, that I had never become a ninja-
No.
No.
I will not allow myself to wallow in self-pity. To drown in my grief. I had gotten through my mother's death and became a ninja; I had gotten through my father's death and came out stronger. I will get through my sensei's… absence as well.
With that new mind-set, I drew in all the pain, despair and grief into myself, locking it in a cage in the deep recesses of my mind and throwing away the key. A blissful feeling of ignorance and numbness overtook my senses. I was going to make sure nothing like would ever happen. I was going to be even stronger. I was going to train until I dropped, then get up and train some more.
I set off home, the determination pushing the grief to the back of my mind.
All I need is the power to be able to protect my comrades. And I will stop at nothing to achieve it.
It had been a week since Izaya had been admitted into a comatose state, and nobody had seen the petite rosette since. Akane and Kaoru were starting to get seriously worried.
"It's like she's completely disappeared off the surface of the earth!" Akane exclaimed, pulling at his hair in frustration. "No one in the whole freaking village had seen her!"
"Calm down, Akane." The brunette instructed, though he too was concerned about his teammate's fate. "I think we should go visit her house." He concluded. The redhead nodded and fell into step with his taller friend, easily finding the pace that suited them both. On the way to Sakura's house, Kaoru decided to stop at the dango store to purchase some of the rosette's favourite sweets 'for consolation'.
Neither mentioned it, but both boys felt that they would find their teammate curled up and crying, still grieving for their sensei; which was why, when they finally arrived, they were surprised to find the front door open and the house empty.
"She's not here." Akane pointed out the obvious.
Kaoru nodded, but went inside regardless. Akane followed after him, but stopped dead when he took in the inside; every surface was covered with a thin layer of dust, and everything was so meticulously organised that not one book or scroll or cushion was out of place. In short, the house looked unused and uninhabited.
"This is creepy…" the redhead whispered. "It's like she doesn't live here anymore."
"She does." The brunette disagreed. "Look at this." He pointed to a closed door to his left; the only surface which wasn't covered by dust. "Do you think we should…?"
"Yeah." Akane cleared his throat and added. "Go ahead."
Carefully, Kaoru extended his arm and wrapped his hand around the knob, casting one last, questioning glance at the redhead, who nodded. Slowly, the teen moved his hand and turned the knob, almost fully and then-
"I wouldn't do that if I were you."
Both boys jumped away from the door as if it had burned them, heads snapping in the direction of the voice. Sakura sat on the previously empty coach, one leg crossed the other, gazing at them with curious eyes and the corner of her lips turned up slightly in amusement, but otherwise her face was completely expressionless.
"S-Sakura!" Akane stammered, his heart beating a mile a minute.
"Yes?" the rosette in question quirked an eyebrow expectantly, the amused half-smirk never leaving her face.
"What- why-! Why does your house look like you haven't lived in it for ages?!" the redhead accused.
"Because I haven't." Sakura replied blankly. At very intelligent 'huh?' that came from the redhead she elaborated. "I've been staying at Neji's for the last week."
Now it was Kaoru's turn to frown. "What were you staying at the Hyuuga's house for?" but the rosette ignored him as her eyes zeroed in on the brown bag clutched in the brunette's hand. A second later, Kaoru felt like an unknown weight had been lifted off of him and looked down in confusion only to realise that the paper bag was no longer in his hand. He looked up again and noticed that Sakura, who stood in the same place as five seconds before, was currently rifling through said bag, forehead creased in a light frown, before she pulled out a dango stick and shoved it in her mouth.
For a few seconds, Kaoru just looked back and forth at his hand, then at Sakura, then back again, before he shook his head and sighed. Akane was a lot more obvious about his surprise as he was outwardly gaping, his jaw slack, staring at the relaxed rosette with a mixture of awe and horror.
W-What the hell was that?! I thought we were finally getting used to her ridiculous speed! So how-! I don't think she even moved!
Sakura paused in devouring the dango and looked up at them, a curious expression on her face. "Is something the matter?" she asked calmly.
"We wanted to know… how you were coping with sensei's, uh…" Kaoru trailed off, unsure how to finish.
"Absence?" the rosette asked absent-mindedly. "Quite well… or, at least, better than before." The rosette's tone was final and left no room for further questions.
Kaoru, having sensed that there were some things his petite teammate wished to keep a secret, nodded and smiled instead. "Would you like to spar?"
And seeing that tiny smile break through her emotionless façade was worth leaving his curiosity unstated.
A week later, Team 13 had returned to active duty, a fact which was almost immediately taken advantage of.
"Seriously, what does the old man want from us this time?" Akane groaned tiredly, annoyed at having to wake up at the crack of dawn.
"We won't know until we see for ourselves, so stop complaining." Kaoru pacified the redhead.
When we finally arrived at the Office, Akane sported a fist-sized bruise on his left cheek. The Hokage let us in, and I was surprised to see the old man alone, without the Elders behind him.
"Team 13, I'm assigning you a very important mission, currently a B-Rank, but with the possibility of spiralling out into an A-Rank or higher. Do you accept?"
After a chorus of 'hai's, he went into detail. "One of the rookie genin teams was just sent on their first C-Rank mission. Their sensei, Kakashi Hatake sent a distress signal and a request for back-up. They have just encountered the Demon Brothers, who were after their assignment; a civilian bridge builder, and he thinks there might be more dangerous people after them the closer they get to Wave Country. He doesn't want to put his genin under threat. Your assignment is to-"
"Get rid of those threats, right, Hokage-sama?" Akane cut in, grinning madly. When the Hokage nodded, a hint of a smile playing at his lips, the redhead whooped in joy.
"Your mission begins as soon as you're ready. Pack for a good couple of weeks. Here's the scroll. Dismissed!"
We were ready sooner than expected, packs on our backs and grins of various sizes on our faces. This mission was going to be very interesting, I could feel it.
"Let's go! We've got some serious ass-kicking to do!" Akane cheered, and was already pushing off into a run, but the brunette dragged him back by the back of his collar.
"Baka. Remember to stick to the plan. That means, no more fooling around, and listen to Sakura – she's the team's captain for this mission. Do you understand?" Kaoru demanded, playfully shaking the redhead in the air.
"Yeah, yeah, I get it, Kaoru-chan! Now, let me down!" Akane whined miserably. The brunette complied, an amused smirk on his face.
I smiled slightly at their antics. "Let's go. We still need to catch up to them." I said softly. "Don't fall behind, Akane." I ordered, though my tone was teasing.
"Sure, sure." He grumbled in response, and soon enough, we were running through the trees, the scenery blurring past.
We travelled in silence for a few hours, the only sounds being the bird song and the rhythm of our feet touching then pushing off the branches. Suddenly, Kaoru tensed beside me, seconds before I sensed it as well – the massive, impossible to miss trace of chakra, spreading a good few hundred feet across, and even reaching the water. As we got closer, the tell-tale sounds of voices reached our ears, and I could see three genin through the branches of the trees.
We've arrived.
Phew. That took a while.
Firstly, sorry for the break – I got snowed in (in ENGLAND!) and the internet just disappeared. But it's here now, and so is the chapter!
Please tell me what you think~!
If some of you think Sakura's moodswings were a bit too random, tell me in your review or a PM and I'll try my best to explain them.
I'm sorry for Izaya-sensei – his… disappearance was necessary to move the plot along. But he's not dead, I promise you! That was just Sakura's negative thinking.
On another note, the next chapter introduces Team 7! How do you think it'll go down?
Don't forget to REVIEW! They really motivate me to write more!
Love,
Invincible Shadow.