Hinata got up early that day, filled with determination.
She knew the way to save Neji, or at least something that would help him recover.
It was something only she could do. And she was surprised to find that she wasn't scared, though it could mean her death.
Naruto was still snoring on the couch.
Hinata crept out of the flat, though Naruto was probably a heavy sleeper anyway, and breathed in the brisk morning air. Dew still shone on the grass around her, and it was like she was seeing it for the first time. She was allowed to stare at it as long as she wished; there was no servant saying "Come along, Hinata-sama, we have somewhere to be." She was free. She felt elated like she never had before; she was running through the streets of Konoha almost silently, taking in everything. It was like seeing with entirely different eyes.
She arrived at the Hyuuga compound and recalled the map and how she could get inside without being seen. This was difficult because there was a night guard; however, it changed at around 5:30. In those few minutes it took the practiced guard to change, she could attempt to conceal herself from byakugan and creep into the library's restricted section which surely contained the scroll she needed.
Hinata crouched in an almost predatory manner and activated her byakugan. Her room was almost right above the library, and normally she was not to be disturbed until 7:00 so guards would refrain from entering or looking inside. However, perhaps her father had told the guards to disregard that rule and wait for her return…
Her best chance was still to get into her own room, which was sure to be deserted.
She sneaked around the side of the building and silently a tree, checking that the occupants of any room with the window facing her way were asleep. There was a windowpane that would be extremely difficult to balance on, and the window was closed. Hinata didn't dare smash it with a kunai; that would make noise. She kept her Byakugan activated—the guard was on the other end of the hall.
Biting her lip, Hinata took a chance and leaped onto the windowpane. She flailed for a moment to keep her balance, then lost it and started to fall. She grabbed onto the edge of the pane, but now her feet were hanging over the window of somebody else's room and knocked into it dangerously. Then she recalled that this room was Neji's. There would be nobody inside it at the moment. Hinata closed her eyes, calming herself despite the burning of her muscles as she hung on to her windowpane. There was no way of swinging back up—there wasn't enough surface area to find purchase. Either way, her window was locked so it would be impossible to get in without making noise. Neji, on the other hand, probably didn't bother locking his window as he was a light sleeper and liked a bit of air. Thus, the window was just barely open and nobody had bothered to close it.
The guards definitely wouldn't be checking Neji's room.
Hinata steeled herself and let herself fall, this time managing to grab a bit of wood sticking out of the house's wall as a handhold and balance on the pane as a foothold. She ever so carefully eased the Neji's window open with her foot and slipped inside, landing noiselessly on the carpet.
Neji's room was much tackier than hers. The rooms got fancier with each level up. The Hyuuga compound was one of the few buildings with many floors in Konoha. And Neji didn't bother projecting his personality onto his room; while Hinata had put up photos of her friends and painted the walls purple Neji's was simply white. The bed was perfectly made. The only thing that showed it had ever been lived in was a single scroll on the ground. Judging by what TenTen had explained to her directly after being returned by a retrieval team, this was when she'd appeared on Neji's windowsill and suggested that they go avenge Lee. TenTen was a good friend of Hinata's, right from after the chuunin exams. Neither of them were really friends with Sakura or Ino because they didn't understand the obsession with Sasuke, and the fangirls also found Hinata and TenTen weird. However, once Sasuke had left Hinata and her started to become closer and Ino liked to fuss over her appearance and make her look nice for any event. Still, TenTen was closer to Hinata than either of them, and Hinata could tell that once she informed TenTen of Neji's fate she broke a little inside.
Hinata shook her head and forced herself back into the moment. There was a guard on this level who was coming close. He would see her soon!
It occurred to Hinata that the guards couldn't possibly keep the Byakugan activated for all 6 hours of their shift. It would drain enormous amounts of chakra, and the Hyuuga were not known for their chakra stores. They were quite pathetic actually. So maybe…just maybe the guard couldn't see through the door. Hinata concentrated on the guard's face with her own Byakugan—which was indeed straining her chakra reserves for keeping it activated for so long without battle adrenaline fueling her—and smiled. She'd been right. The guards apparently relied on noise, which was silly because a trained assassin would be silent. She would have to tell Father about that—oh, wait, she was no longer a Hyuuga. Oops.
Yesterday, she would have felt nervous and guilty about breaking into her own house. Now, she was just elated.
The library was now next door. Should she risk slipping out and trying to sneak into the library? No. She should wait for the guard to change. She checked the clock on the wall; it read 5:28. The guard would be changing right about now, and sure enough the guard stopped to report to the one taking his place. Hinata used this chance to slip out silently, then speed down the hall into the library, hoping the door wouldn't slam. She immediately ducked down beneath a shelf so that anybody walking in the hall would not see her through the glass.
The door slammed, and she winced. Her byakugan showed the new guard looking down the hall sharply, and walking toward the library. Oh no. What if he used his byakugan to check if there was an intruder or something? There was nowhere she could hide from the byakugan…
Then she realized something: were the Restricted section of the library not byakugan-proof, anybody could look inside and read any scrolls in the room, if with some difficulty. So in the room she would be safe.
But she soon realized the flaw in her plans—there was a guard at the Restricted section which changed only once a day, and it wasn't now. She would have to convince the guard she could get in. She had to take on the form of a qualified elder to get in. But if either guard used the byakugan or sensed a genjutsu, she was finished.
For a moment, she panicked. She shouldn't have attempted this, or should have thought it through more. She could die if thought to be an intruder! She wasn't good enough for this!
Then she remembered Neji lying on the bed, his eyes gouged out. She remembered Neji throwing himself in front of an attacker to save her one of the few times they'd been on a mission. She remembered that one time Neji had smiled down at her when they had been much younger, pride in his eyes. "You're learning fast, Hinata-sama."
Neji was more than just a cousin to her. He was her brother.
She made the hand signs and whispered "henge", walking out innocently to the guard of the Restricted section.
"Hiashi-sama," the guard said, surprised. "You are up early. Might I ask—?"
"I had trouble sleeping," Hinata said, glad she had used some extra chakra to change her vocal chords so her voice would match timbre of her father. "I would like to look at something."
"Of course," the Hyuuga nodded, and let Hinata pass.
Hinata couldn't believe it had been so easy. Security really was rather lax. She entered the restricted section, and her breath left her.
It was much, much bigger than it appeared from the outside; bigger than the library itself. Shelves and shelves of scrolls, lavish armchairs and fancy paintings and carpets laid out. It had the musty scent of old paper, and she instinctively knew that these scrolls, some of them at least, were older than the Leaf Village itself. The ceiling was impossibly high and made of a material that one could see through only from one side, so that natural light filtered through but outsiders could not see in, and fragile chandeliers hovered from the top. There were small tables set out with candles—the chandeliers had not yet been lit. It was just the blue light of dawn and the yellow light of candles. There were empty scrolls with paintbrushes and pencils also set out.
There was a librarian already working; clearly it was a common occurrence for some to come here even at the crack of dawn. In fact, Hinata noted that there were a few elders already around as the door shut behind her with a small clank.
The librarian, a young woman wearing glasses with dark hair piled up on the top of her head in a bun, came up to Hinata and said in a low but courteous voice, "Hello, Hiashi-sama. Is there something I may help you with or would you just like to browse?"
Hinata found her—or rather, her father's—voice at last.
"I'd like to see the scroll on the removal of the cursed seal."
The puppets just kept coming.
Sometimes Sasuke and she would end up back-to-back, but there was never any time to make a plan except the occasional order of "Get away, I'm going to use a fireball" or "cover me, I'm going to charge them" or "watch out, their weapons are spiked with poison."
Sakura and Sasuke may have been training in the same building for about a year at this point, but they mostly avoided each other and did what they could to avoid being a team. Now that they were facing a common enemy, they had to learn how to complement each other's abilities quickly. This was a battle where a single scratch could be lethal. No puppet was the same as another; there was no telling what weapon would be launched at them. I mean, who the hell uses a battleaxe as a projectile weapon?
I'd like to tell you that they both somehow got out of it without suffering a scratch, and then went on to complete their mission, but, well, that wasn't the case.
Sakura didn't know how long she'd been fighting; all she knew was that it was too long. Even though it took very little chakra to fuel each individual punch, she had to use so many of them as well as to leap high into the air or kick that it was draining away slowly but surely. After a while, she tried to detach herself, just let her body do the work, but the fatigue in her muscles stopped her. It screamed at her to pay attention, to end the battle. But there seemed to be no end to the enemies, and they weren't even facing the actual Akatsuki member!
She took down another puppet.
Will this never end?
Sasuke looked over to check on Sakura—only to see a puppet raising its arm and…
Everything seemed to slow as his sharingan told him what would happen next. "SAKURA!" he screamed, and suddenly it was like he was in the ice mirrors again, and it was the long-haired boy flitting around, and the senbon were too fast. She could never react in time; she was only looking up now…a blade caught him in the arm, and agony raced up to his shoulder.
He sprinted.
Sakura rammed her fist into the skull of another puppet, narrowly ignoring the mace it was wielding. In the noise, the explosions, the sound of metal against metal, she almost didn't hear the warning.
"SAKURA!" Sasuke yelled, in a fashion that Uchiha never did. Sakura looked up from her fight, barely, in time to see at least 100 senbon flying straight at her. There was no time to dodge or do anything... all she could do was close her eyes and wait for them to hit.
But they didn't.
Sakura cracked an eye open in time to see Sasuke's back and watch him fall, almost in slow motion, to the ground. She slid and caught him, already knowing what had happened and that the senbon had hit vital points, aimed impeccably. "No!" she screamed. "NO! Why the hell would you do that? How could you?"
"I don't know...my body just moved on its own." Sakura recognized the weakly choked out words from when Naruto had recounted exactly what happened in the land of waves. His face was deathly pale, blood flowing steadily from his mouth.
"Hang on, Sasuke," she said desperately as she dodged another kunai whizzing by her side, caught it, and threw it hard at the senbon puppet, causing it to explode. "I-I'm going to save you. I'm a medic-nin, after all." Sakura had never been a good liar, and Sasuke easily picked out the bluff.
"Kill Itachi...he has to die," Sasuke rasped out. "Tell Naruto that..." he coughed up blood.
"Shut up," Sakura snapped. She swiftly pulled out a senbon lodged into his heart. "It's no time to be saying your last words, you have to be as still as possible for me. I have to get us out of here"-she dodged a sloppily aimed senbon-"So just shut up!"
"No." Sasuke's coughs got weaker. "Sakura…I'm sorry for…"
Sakura bit her lip and shook her head, bodily heaved Sasuke onto her shoulder, and ran. Ran as hard as she could for as long as she could, ignoring the three kunai that flew into her arm and barely missed Sasuke. Finally she got out of the battle, far away, and collapsed on a rock. But there was no time to catch her breath or attend to her own wounds. The three kunai injuries would be troublesome, but Sasuke was the priority here. She pulled out the senbon as fast as she could, pouring out all her chakra to reconstruct nerves. She knew it couldn't be a very comfortable process, but Sasuke was at this point unconscious anyway. At the rate she was going, however, she knew there was no way she'd have enough power. The poison also had to be driven out, since there was no time to fashion an antidote. Her muscles were already weakening. All she needed was more power, more capacity, more speed. To breach her physical limits and...
Lee. Rock Lee. Sakura forced back tears as she remembered the hidden lotus and its user. The gates. She needed to open the gates. It was impossible to learn, but she still had to do it. She'd learned the Hokage techniques...she was a bit of a copy ninja, wasn't she? She tried to recall. Could the lotus even be used for medical chakra? No. Too risky. The lotus was out of the question.
If I activate my curse seal, Kabuto said it's very difficult to call forth medical chakra, she thought. But he said difficult, not impossible. It's my only chance. I bet it'll be more difficult, but… I can do this.
So, with a breath, Sakura let the markings crawl up her neck and around the left side of her body. They burned into her flesh, but she didn't notice as she kept pouring out chakra.
Going into second form is dangerous, Sasuke had told her. You can get stuck that way if things go wrong, and it uses up a lot of energy though it increases your capabilities.
She needed those capabilities. She continued to let the curse seal envelope her, not paying attention as her body grayed and weird things sprouted from it. All she was aware of was that her hands were now moving lightning fast to pluck the senbon, and her chakra, which had a different feel, was rushing through Sasuke's veins. His eyes flew open, and he let out a scream of pain, thrashing.
"Keep still, damn it!" Sakura yelled, but it was no use; Sasuke was blinded and deafened by pain. Sakura suspected her chakra was destroying a bit more than just the poison and needle fragments, but there was no way to stop it now. She was down to the last ten senbon, last five, last two. The last one was lodged straight in his forehead, and Sakura had to be extremely careful with it.
She kept sending chakra even though the senbon were gone in order to purge the existing poison. The chakra that was currently filled with the poison and senbon fragments had to be sent somewhere other than Sasuke's body. Sakura couldn't very well keep it to herself; it would kill her. So with an enormous effort, she forced the chakra out of Sasuke and, in the form of just a huge ball of energy, sent it toward a nearby rock. The rock exploded; Sakura shielded Sasuke with her body as well as she could, wincing whenever a rock bit into her flesh. She realized the curse seal had faded, and she was feeling utterly spent. When the explosion faded, Sakura collapsed and it was all she could do to roll away from Sasuke before she passed out.
"Hey...you awake?"
Everything was hazy. Her everything hurt. She was pretty sure she didn't even have enough chakra to conceal her chakra.
"Sakura. Wake up."
Who the hell would be so cruel? Waking up would mean moving, which was bound to be excruciatingly painful.
Slap.
Sakura shot up, pain simultaneously roping up her cheek and back. "You slapped me!" she said accusingly, looking at Sasuke.
"You weren't responding."
"Why you-" then it hit her. "Hey...you're alive!"
Sasuke stiffened. "Yes."
"Do you remember anything?"
"No, not much. I guess I got hit with senbon, judging by the fact that I'm having difficulty moving my body. About a hundred. Which makes me wonder how the hell I'm alive. All I know is that I woke up to find both of us in a pool of dried blood, you on your stomach with a huge rock sticking out of your back. I washed it out with water. You'll want to take a look at it."
"Hahah, yeah, I guess a rock must have exploded." Sakura figured it would be better not to tell Sasuke what had really happened. He wouldn't want to be in her debt, and probably wouldn't believe her anyway. She checked the wounds on her back, and realized she couldn't yet heal them.
"You're out of chakra," Sasuke observed. "You must've exerted yourself somehow."
"Er... I activated the curse seal," she said truthfully. "I went second form."
Sasuke raised an eyebrow, but he thankfully wasn't the type to pry and left it at that. In fact, he was going into brooding mode. "Akatsuki was there and we couldn't even touch them, and I'm thinking they got the one-tails. We've failed our mission."
"Well, you did get the ring," Sakura said. Sasuke nodded. "Still, going back to Orochimaru is going to be interesting. He wants your body so he won't harm you. Me, on the other hand... still, he gave us a deadline to be back and we're almost at it so we should head back."
Sasuke only nodded.
Sakura glanced behind the rock, then collapsed back. "Sasuke, there's a problem."
"…"
"There are just about 75 puppets still out there. I guess they can't sense us, but the Akatsuki hasn't called them back yet. The moment we show our faces, we're screwed."
"We have to conceal ourselves, in that case," Sasuke said. "I am in no condition to fight them, as much as I hate to admit it."
"I don't have any chakra," Sakura admitted.
"What we need is someone else to take care of them for us."
"Your wish is my command," Kakashi's voice said.
Both Sasuke and Sakura jerked, grabbed weapons from their holsters, and turned toward the voice. It was quite astonishing that they hadn't noticed two teams of ninja sneaking up on them… standing there was Kakashi, Ino, Shikamaru, Kiba, Temari, Matsuri, and Kankuro carrying an unconscious Gaara.
"What do you want?" Sasuke asked coldly, acting as though he were still the superior one. As if in this state, these nin couldn't kill him with a simple kunai.
"We have a deal to make with you."
"You're dealing with nukenin?" Sakura asked.
"Desperate times call for desperate measures," Kakashi said. He was obviously trying hard to keep his tone controlled. "We've managed to trick the Akatsuki, but not for long. They'll come after us. Sakura, Ino needs help with healing Gaara. She can supply you with the chakra to do it. In return—we'll take care of the remaining puppets, since you're obviously in no shape to handle them."
"I can still take them," Sakura tried. Kakashi raised an eyebrow.
"Sasuke isn't the only sharingan user. I saw from a kilometer away that you're out of chakra, Sakura. Don't try it."
"And if we refuse?" Sasuke, who had been attempting to make eye contact with any one of the team but failing since they knew better than that, asked.
"You can deal with the puppets yourself," Shikamaru answered.
"Why don't you just kill us and get it over with?" Sasuke asked casually, but Sakura answered the question for him.
"They're delusional. They still intend on getting us back to the village. And by all means let them try." She sent a steely look right at Ino. "But not this time. If I accept this deal, you are to let us go this once. After that it's fair game."
"And how do you know we'll hold to that?" Ino asked in a small voice.
"The Leaf's pointless sense of honor," Sasuke answered.
There was a silence as various glances, glares, and meaningful looks were exchanged.
Kakashi stepped forward. "So, is it a deal?" He held out his hand.
Sakura looked at the dying red-head. Akatsuki must have gotten their hands on him. "He tried to kill me once," she mused aloud.
Temari strode forward, seized her by the front of her sound-uniform, and hissed, "Look, you traitorous bitch, I don't care about this little feud, just say yes or no and stop wasting our time!"
Woah. Stressed-out much? "Temari, that was not at all helpful," Shikamaru muttered.
Sakura merely looked at Temari for a moment, then pushed her hand away. Then she extended her hand to Kakashi, looking at Sasuke who seemed emotionless (yeah, so what else is new?).
"It's a deal," Sakura said.
AN: Another sort of concealed SasuSaku moment... maybe. It just doesn't feel right to have them lovey-dovey...yet. I have to build up to that if that's the path I want to take with this fic, but I may just make them end up hating each other.
I got really into writing Hinata's stealth mission. I'm sorry. It was just so enthralling to have her sneaking around her ex-home, transforming into her father, and I could just see the library in my brain…gosh, I want to be there someday.
Hope the speed of this update was better! My muse cooperated for once! And I have a tiny bit of the next chapter written.
Reviews are what keep me going, please keep them coming! Those of you who just read and story-alert- yeah, I know, I do the same thing sometimes. But please try reviewing, just a few chapters. It makes both of us feel warm and fuzzy inside :)
Thanks for reading!