The Color Wheel
Arc I, Childhood: Indigo / Blue
Synopsis: There is one label amongst many that Hikari doesn't mind.
Labels are as familiar to Hyuuga Hikari as her own chakra. Growing up as a Main branch member of one of Konoha's noble founding clans, she has spent her entire life struggling to live under the labels and expectations of her overbearing family.
Graceful. Contrary to rumors, the so-called 'Hyuuga grace' is neither innate nor instinctive. It is honed and cultivated and nurtured under the watchful eyes of the clan elders, each of whom take careful consideration of her progress and respond with sharp words and harsher criticisms. She bites back her retorts, until she snaps and carelessly throws a scathing remark in their direction.
"And yet, you seem to have lost all of your own vaulted grace!"
She is punished with a round of Hakke Rokujūyon Shō, left to unblock her overloaded tenketsu on her own after being sent to her room without her evening meal. To this day, she believes the look on the elders' faces was worth it.
Postured. She thinks of it as such a meaningless, silly thing, but she suffers under the countless lessons on posture and protocol with not a single complaint. She has lost track of the number of items that she has balanced at the crown of her head: porcelain cups filled with scalding hot water, a stack of plates that threaten to hit the door frames, a scroll balanced perfectly on one end with the tassel tickling her ear.
She never looks at her reflection as she does this, embarrassed at how ridiculous she must look and afraid that she will be distracted enough to let the items balancing on her head fall.
After all, it has happened to her before, and once was more than enough.
Prudent. While the clan elders may like to think that wisdom comes only with age, she is not so narrow-minded. There are sensibilities she possesses that she cannot find in her own father, sensibilities like cleaning her own room by herself or using the grass to clear most of the mud off her sandals to save the cleaners that extra effort. The way she sees it, she won't end up like her father, who punishes the maid for misplacing his scrolls and the cleaners for delivering his sandals late.
She starts to think not only does age bring wisdom, it also brings a loss of sense and courtesy. Because in the end, if she can save someone just a little bit of effort by doing something so simple as scraping her sandaled feet through the grass or dusting her own room, what's the harm?
In reality, it because Hikari is already too much like her father for her liking.
Composed. If stoicism by clan was ever a contest, she has decided that the Hyuuga clan would win, hands down. She had once thought the Aburame would trump her clan in this one instance, but the kikachu-wielding family has the protection of high-collared coats and large hoods and tinted goggles, whereas her family has nothing to hide themselves but their own skin. Logical detachment and removed indifference are the masks she must master even before entering the Academy.
She finds it disappointing that composure is equated with emotionlessness within her clan, because when she attends dinners at the Fire Capital and mingles with other noble girls, they find it so, so easy to smile and laugh and be happy without losing any of their calm poise.
Hikari herself has only learned to project cool detachment, and can only watch and wish.
Deadly. She mistakenly believes this applies only to shinobi, but she is surprised to learn that all Hyuuga, Main and Branch members alike, are taught how to kill a man, albeit with different tools. But while the Main branch relies on the Juuken and the Juuken only, she is fascinated by the other half of her family.
When she sneaks into the Branch family training grounds, she is in awe of the destroyed earth and bloodied ground, leftover from the ninjutsu and kenjutsu spars she secretly observes from afar. They are deadly in a way she longs to be, and it is all too soon when she is overwhelmed by the sheer monotony of practicing her Juuken stances day after day.
The first time she manages to infuse her chakra into her evening tea, she smiles.
Strong. Nobody has to tell her that she needs to be strong. Born into her position and choosing her profession, being weak was never an option to begin with, and she doesn't stop to even linger on her weaknesses. If anything, it is one thing she and the elders agree on - she hates the flaws that eat at her strength, and she does all she can to eliminate anything that can cost her in the long run.
When she works, sweats, and bleeds herself down to the bone, she always lets herself momentarily believe that she is strong enough. She fantasizes, for that brief moment, that she has no weaknesses, and she is all strength.
Then reality comes crashing down, and she knows she is not strong enough. Not yet.
Diligent. It is confusing to her that diligence within her clan compound's walls means something different than it does outside of that barrier. To other shinobi, the word is exactly what it means - working hard and striving to improve and excel through perseverance, rigor, and dedication. For others, that means climbing the ladder of success higher and higher, with a seemingly endless path of possibilities ahead - always something new to learn, something to improve upon, something to change.
For her, diligence is practicing her Juuken katas with religious zeal. It feels all wrong to her, and initially she starts imagining the different ways opponents could defeat the signature Hyuuga taijutsu, just for fun. It becomes less fun when she realizes how large her list becomes.
It is crippling when she is beaten every day by the orphan who is her new teammate.
Proud. She finds that the pride she holds as a Hyuuga becomes her downfall. Somehow, for everyone in her family, pride in their clan's ancestry and history has warped into arrogance and conceit, and she has learned the hard way that too much hubris is always followed by a larger serving of humility.
It is by far too difficult to accept the truth, and so it is beaten into her day by day by her teammates and her sensei. Everything her clan has imposed on her is stripped away, and she learns quickly that in the shinobi world, labels mean nothing - regardless of who you are at home, in battle you still bleed the same red as everyone else.
It takes a while to sink in - she is not invincible simply because she is a Hyuuga.
Silent. A noble shinobi clan the Hyuuga may be, but just like the rest of the world it is a male-dominated community, ruled by chauvinistic male ideas of female gender roles. For her it is especially infuriating, because although she is a Hyuuga and a kunoichi, she is first and foremost a female - and females, especially of the Hyuuga variety, are expected to be seen, and not heard.
It infuriates her and gnaws at her feminist side, to be forced to act as dressed up dolls with the personality of a mouse. They want silence? Well, she goes one step further.
She becomes invisible.
Beautiful. Beauty was never something she paid much attention to - after all, with beauty comes attention, and that is the last thing she wants. And other things are more important, things like diligence and strength and composure and grace. Of course, although she briefly looks over herself every morning, she doesn't stop to wish that her neck wasn't so long, or that her eyes weren't set so far apart, or that her knees weren't so bony. She doesn't look at the things that make her wish for something different...
Or so she desperately tries to tell herself.
And so when her new, mousy teammate smiles at her and tells her that she has beautiful hair, "like the twilight sky," she rolls her eyes and turns away. And when that same teammate offhandedly compliments her slim figure, her pearly eyes, and her pale skin, all on different occasions, she pretends to let the words roll off her back like water.
But then she locks herself up in her room, and whispers the words to herself as she looks at her too-long neck and wide-set eyes and bony knees, and exhales slowly.
"Beautiful."
She feels ridiculous just saying it, and she doesn't think it's true at all, but it feels like the one thing that is hers, and she begins to smile.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently." ~Friedrich Neitzsche
A/N: So an attempt at some character depth for one Hyuuga Hikari. Good? Bad? Meh?