Optophobia
: fear of opening your eyes
Mission Type: compromised retrieval
Class: A
Date of Action: October 5
Assigned Operative: Hyuuga Neji (jounin)
Control Operative: Namiashi Raido (jounin)
Briefing: N/A
- - -
The truth was – though he had never before brought this to the attention of his care-givers – Neji's Byakugan didn't necessarily have to be fully active to see through things. That said, Neji had never deemed it prudent to make mention of this fact, not because he feared they might wish to exterminate such a deficiency ( it was more of an improvement) from the Hyuuga line, but rather that they might wish to replicate it. His clan being prone to self-destruction as it was, he didn't think they needed the prompting.
On a more personal level, the prospect of another person possibly alike in mind and body to himself scared the living day lights out of the prodigy. Hanabi was bad enough and that was without anyone suspecting, anyone knowing of the strange and undeniable defect in him. A Hyuuga prides himself on understanding his own strengths (and his 'occasional' weaknesses) and Neji knew it was a defect.
One of the major disadvantages to the Byakugan was simply that an enemy ninja deciding whether or not to come in for close combat is mostly likely gonna take one look at a Hyuuga's face, scream 'Screw that!' and sprint back to kunai throwing distance.
Suffice to say, Byakugan activation was pretty obvious and – to be honest – somewhat unappealing. The white eyes are conspicuous; the throbbing veins of chakra are damn hard to miss.
Most Hyuuga couldn't see things better than 20/20 without Byakugan. In addition to 'seeing-through' at will, Neji saw something like 15/20 and only half-listened to what people said because he read lips on instinct. A useful trait frowned upon by most Hyuuga. The Uchiha were notorious lip-readers; therefore, no Hyuuga were encouraged to learn the skill, much to the irritation of the Hokage. Among other things, Neji found with practice he could focus chakra enough to 'see-through' without fully activating (at which point Byakugan gets creepy). The 'other things' had served to thoroughly befuddle his relatives and give Neji stomach ulcers.
But back to that defect.
Neji's problem laid in the biology behind this wonderful doujutsu upgrade, that it is, in fact, somewhat overwhelming for the eyes and brain to coordinate that kind of sensory ability. Sure, it made reconnaissance a bloody walk in the daisy-strewn park, but Neji didn't think a generation of freaks would serve the Hyuuga well. The splitting – debilitating and utterly excruciating – migraines aside, Neji's depth perception would simply vanish from time to time. An optical illusion he was usually (dangerously) unaware of until he missed the first step up a flight of stairs (or ran into an enemy ninja he was certain had more of lead on him.) He'd long since then, learned to detect it, but it was a danger he feared would one day cost him.
Today was that day.
And it cost him.
From a figurative point of view he just hadn't seen this coming at all. Not until it hit him in the face anyway. From the literal…well…
- - -
Hiashi briefed him only shortly, a relatively painful and perfunctory gesture through which Neji sat, staring with a kind of previously dormant horror at his uncle. He couldn't remember what it felt like to be almost on speaking terms with the man, though he'd been on such terms just this morning. The extent of his vocabulary extended to 'yes', 'no', 'I understand' and various honorifics as needed. Not getting sick and subsequently throwing up in front of the Hyuuga Head fast became a matter of will while Hiashi worked through the details with him. He kept swallowing and finding his mouth full of nonexistent cotton.
He managed to get out of the room without any sign of wavering, he was proud of that at least, no greater test of his acting abilities than that instant where, under his uncle's all seeing eyes, Hiashi asked him, "Neji, can you do this?"
"Yes."
One word, and in that word every lie, every deceit, every fraction of shinobi trickery that had gained him the ground he now stood on. It felt weird to lie to his uncle now. As an emotionally brain-warped genin he'd exalted in his ability to deceive even the keenest eyes, the eyes of the Hyuuga and the eyes of others. (Not Hinata though, he'd never really tricked her, in spite of everything. They mutually read one another like windowpanes, whether they liked it or not.)
His head ached. His stomach ached. His chest – for whatever reason – ached too. 'Why?' He balked. With a slight shake of the head he took the question and flung it with merciless haste into the lower regions of his conscious to decay there until it ceased to plague him.
Neji spent the rest of the morning gathering equipment for his mission – the other one had been handed over to another jounin in light of Hinata's capture – letting himself fall into the familiarity of routine. Systematically he went through the checklists, the mechanical movements of preparation until he found himself staring avidly at the arrangement of weaponry and realizing he had nothing left to do.
He double checked everything.
As far as recall, Neji couldn't remember what he spent the rest of that morning doing or why. The blanks in his memory frightened him, but for one reason or another he couldn't bring himself to do anything beyond fret unnecessarily about the baby dragon that seemed intent on eating up the inside of his belly and bursting out through chest. He'd never been this frenzied (frenzied? Was that the right word? Frenzied?) about a mission before, never. Hell, when he and the other rookies had suicidally blitzed off after a pack of A-class Sound-nin he'd been more or less confident that whatever happened he'd come back one way or another. For some reason that same infallible (slightly stupid) cockiness didn't apply now.
Why? Hinata. That's why.
That silly little girl with her baby face that refused to get any more mature even with two years to do so and he couldn't stop seeing that quavering little smile, that uncertain little turn of the lips. He couldn't stop seeing the flaws like a video run on repeat, with all her fallacies and inconsistencies blaring in his face in loud obnoxious lyrics, ugly singsong patterns.
She wasn't strong. He knew that much, she wasn't weak like she used to be but she was not prepared to handle a situation like this hideous new thing currently in the works. He couldn't protect her and save himself at the same time.
There was a storm of origami sparrows, wings tipped in razor blades and whirling crazily in his chest, tearing delicate rips in his resolve, letting it leak like blood, hot and acrid into his system. He hadn't let himself think like this in a long time, had pushed such things down and out of his mind whenever they clawed their way, ugly and rotting and so unbelievably unkillable back to the surface of his thoughts: That little bitch. If she could just take care of herself for five damn seconds this kind of thing would never happen. What a waste of breath, what a waste of Hyuuga blood and sweat. It would be better to let her die…
"I can't think this right now," he informed the empty air vehemently. "I can't."
And he couldn't.
So he didn't.
The Hyuuga prodigy wandered aimlessly until his disorganization took him through one of the ill-used side-doors into the branch family gardens. The unkempt twists of an ancient sakura tree bent up into an ugly angle near the wall of the compound, branches thick with leaves, having long since lost its petals, a thick layer of blossoms clotting the coy pond. Neji found himself standing against the trunk; palms spread against the bark while pressing his forehead gently against the rough wood, his bangs tangling in the grooves and splinters.
'I want to save her. If they hadn't ordered me to, I would have done so behind their backs. I would have.'
And that was true.
Ahh, yes, but they did order you, didn't they? That's the rub. That they assumed you needed ordering, they didn't suppose to ask you if you'd be willing to make such a sacrifice. They just pulled rank. As usual. As always.
And that was, he hated himself for admitting, also true.
It just hurt. It hurt and that surprised him. Not the mission so much as the attitude behind it and only just then, staring obsessively into the runnels of a tree trunk, did he trace the pain to its source inside him. It wasn't that he had to save Hinata and that the mission was dangerously close to (if not completely) suicidal; that didn't bother him. It was just that he'd kind of grown accustomed to thinking that just maybe his uncle trusted him – did he dare dream, respect him? – enough to ask him. It hurt to be put back in your place after getting spoiled for so long, two years toying with the dream. It hurts getting knocked down a peg.
…which was stupid, juvenile and completely, utterly selfish!
'Hinata fucking needs me and I'm crying over politics?'
Neji gritted his teeth, slamming down a wall of self-disgust between himself and the spider web of thought. He shut them out before he could cripple himself before he'd ever begun and instinctively he sagged to the ground, legs folding up underneath him until he was sitting at the base of the sakura. He closed his eyes, breathing. He fell into meditation by reflex, letting himself ease into the familiar rhythm of his own heart, his own chakra pathways laid bare inside his skin.
He was safe inside his skin, not safe inside his head, not safe outside his head, not safe anywhere else but inside the hot, racing lines of chakra threaded through him. He didn't dare take himself out of that, lest he drive himself insane with rhetorical what-if's. He tried not to dwell on the fact that, for at least a good portion of his life, he'd been more than reasonably certifiable. ("On the brink of pretty much freaking loony," as Tenten had once confessed. "I didn't want to say anything, because I was crushing like crazy, but you were kinda really messed up.")
'Kinda really messed up' did not begin to cover it, but it was as good as Tenten's tomboy, no-touchy-feely vocabulary got…for which he was grateful because Lee was touchy-feely enough for twenty emotionally deficient teenagers. Neji laughed a little, the reasons for which didn't bear thinking about because who the hell laughs when they're about to get horribly killed or tortured, again, probably horribly?
It was just then that it hit him – literally this time – and he never saw it coming.
Not that you ever do when it's a missing-nin.
A hand slammed over his mouth and yanked him to his feet, pinning his head against the tree with such brutal force that black galaxies burst into being inches in front of the young Hyuuga's nose.
But Neji hadn't made jounin at fifteen by passing out when unknown ninja attacked him willy-nilly. The same instant those black nailed fingers dug into his face, he slammed both hands hard into his opponent's gut, a burst of white-hot chakra ripping through the dark red and black robes, scything meanly into delicate internal organs that suddenly were not there because the attacking ninja exploded in a 'bamf' of smoke.
Byakugan came violently active, second lens recoiling into the optic cavity and the world filtered into chakra spiked white and blue-black omnipotence.
'I see you.'
Neji flicked two handfuls of lethal black senbon into his hands, spinning and hurling them – blazing blue-white chakra – at the figure who'd been looming there for God knows how long. The intruder blurred and vanished, taking three of the air-borne senbon with him. Chakra flared up, his arm up and fast blast of chakra knocked the same three senbon away as they came zipping back. A kunai sliced at his throat but Neji saw it coming. Snatched the offending wrist and thrust his palm forward, aiming for the vital organs under his opponent's unguarded sternum because real Juuken kills in one hit, not one-hundred-twenty-six.
However, his opponent – it seemed – was no stranger to hand-to-hand combat or Juuken. The other ninja yanked Neji's other arm hard across his body, putting Hyuuga's aim off and knocked his feet out from under him. Only by dropping his free hand to the ground and snapping his leg around in a reversing roundhouse did he stop his attacker from putting him in a death-choke. His world was roaring, blurring, black and white and see-through.
The grip vanished and Neji rolled up, somersaulting to evade the thrown kunai, hands plunging into a secret cache of senbon and hurling them into the air where his opponent will be. Out of the four: one caught the man in his the shoulder, stopping him and sending a spit-fire blaze of chakra through dormant nerves, setting off entire networks of pain receptors his opponent never knew existed in all likelihood. The shinjutsu needle was pulled free without a complaint but Neji was already unleashing the second wave.
Not many people knew he used senbon, because not many people lived through having a seven-inch needle through their eye.
(One is not teammates with Shomoto Tenten without learning something.)
Nevertheless, his adversary was no a stranger to good aim either and a kawarimi and a Kage Bunshin later, Neji was down another load of projectiles weapons and running because his opponent's hands beneath that shapeless robe were flying though hand-signs, deadly, lightening fast – so damn fast! – flickers of movement. All at once, the entire koi pond heaved, boiling out of its banks into a single, glistening liquid tendril.. Neji watched it swaying and coiling drunkenly, waiting. Then it lashed out. Kaiten stained the gardens briefly aquatic blue-green as violently rotating chakra collided with the watery asp and ripped the jutsu apart.
Heavy rain fell briefly, watering the gardens and soaking the intruder thoroughly.
"So you've had ANBU training," remarked the interloper softly. "So there is that at least."
Ignoring this ambiguous statement, Neji faced his opponent and slid into that dangerous trademark delicate fighting stance, arms flung out in that slanted symmetrical diagonal that so terrified most non-Hyuuga opponents.
'I can't miss,' Neji thought, the words strained even in his head. 'If I do…it's over.'
The man was in range. Neji exploded forward, blitzing into the man's unguarded front so fast even he was dizzy with the speed. Unhesitant he hurled into the Sixty-Four Strike, the first two blows slamming home under the interloper's collar bone, injecting hot chakra like poison into those shining blue pinpricks. The Four-Strike didn't quite land correctly and the Eight Strike ended as more of a three-strike and in horror, Neji realized – arms blurring, moving faster than the human eye could follow – that his opponent was dodging his Juuken.
Neji, in his history as a shinobi, had run into lots of opponents well equipped to handle his Juuken. He'd never, however, run into an opponent capable of out and out evading it. Not this close. Never. This didn't bode well for the foreseeable ending of this fight.
Doggedly he redoubled his efforts, moving fast he he'd ever moved through a Sixty-Four Strike, but for all his struggle managed to land only a third of the blows needed to stopper chakra and none of the vital points. The young prodigy retreated to a safe distance, panting. He felt exhausted, his whole body aching wildly though his antagonist had yet to really strike him. In a burst of red-hot frustration he realized the man wasn't even trying and if he didn't do something right freaking now he was doing to die. Fast.
Neji lunged back and landed again in Jukken stance, this time sliding his arms to that even more dangerous angle. Limp black bangs slithered down across his eyes, obscuring the sigil on his forehead protector. He'd never used this attack on another human being before, a giant swarm of spiders, in a panic, out-classed and out-matched, yes, but never on another living, breathing, member of his own species. (Not that he had a problem experimenting on this particular member of the human race.) He started to move –
The man held up a hand.
"That's enough, Hyuuga-san."
Neji obeyed out of simple surprise.
His opponent wasn't exceptionally tall, or at least, not much taller than himself. In the dark it may have been difficult to discern color, but Neji managed to construe the field of his cloak was black and the clouds printed on it a bloody scarlet, despite his adamant wishes for them to be another color ( green for example or marigold yellow. Just not red). The newcomer slipped a hand through the collar, pulling the top two buttons open twin snapping sounds and tugging it down from his face (eerily young) and lifting his hand to brush uneven black bangs from his eyes. From his right ring finger glittered a bright garnet stone. The kanji read 'scarlet'.
The lines of his face were uncompromisingly gentle, (a paradox only God could justify) his bland expression lidded his eyes, softening the thin, unmoving curve of his pale mouth. Delicate bone structure lent him an almost effeminate look, one that might have earned him some grief or admiration if not for the sheer psychotic indifference those eyes. There were dark lines etched below those eyes, grooves drawn in by heavy doujutsu use and three inky tomoe swam in the red rings of each eye, deadly and familiar.
Uchiha Itachi was standing in front of him.
He never saw this coming.
"Why are you here?" he whispered.
"Because it serves my interests," said Itachi mildly.
"What interest does Akatsuki have in affairs of the Hyuuga?" He gestured vaguely away. "I thought you were occupied kidnapping people in other countries. Am I mistaken?"
He knew Tsunade would undoubtedly crack his skull for speaking of that particular organization aloud, but when facing a member of said organization it seemed prudent to at least pretend to know how much shit you were in.
The murderer of the Uchiha clan merely inclined his head, eyes narrowing minutely. After a moment he said, "The interests of Akatsuki are separate from my own tonight, a mercy for which you should be grateful, Hyuuga-san." Those awful eyes glittered. "Otherwise, for knowing that name, I would have been obligated to cut your throat."
Neji stopped breathing.
A beat.
"You're shaking, Hyuuga-san."
Hands battered by years of Juuken coiled tight to hide the tell-tale tremble, only to immediately relax because instinct knows you don't do Juuken with a clenched fist. Neji choked down the miscellaneous emotional cocktail boiling in the back of his throat and managed to maintain the cold in his expression. He reached up to push his hair from his eyes, not because he couldn't see, but because his bangs were tickling his aching lips, bruised from the initial contact.
Once he regained control, he went on.
"What interests?" murmured Neji, clenching a hand at the back of his head, fisted unseen in his hair. "If they are your own, then an Uchiha should have even less reason to care about the fate of one Hyuuga. Again, why are you here?"
Ghost swarmed in scarlet irises. "To repay an old debt," he said.
Neji stared, talcum-powder eyes blank. "What?"
He was silent a moment.
"I wouldn't have picked you for ANBU," Itachi remarked at random.
The Hyuuga blinked.
"I would have made you a hunter-nin."
And because there was nothing to lose by asking, Neji asked, "Why?"
"A hunter-nin is the only branch of ninja," he said simply, "allowed to murder members of their own village."
"What do you want from me!?" The question was a little too frantic for his taste.
"Your cooperation," the missing-nin replied neutrally, "You need not understand. Just obey."
Neji glared. "No."
'One-Hundred...'
"You're mistaken."
'Twenty-Eight…'
Bloody eyes flitted up.
'Hands of…'
"I'm not asking."
'Hakke!'
Neji flickered …then he hit the missing-nin fourteen times.
Split seconds click by in bloody bruises. Neji struck over two-hundred-fifty pressure points in less than two seconds, blood welling beneath moon-pale skin. As he blitzed through a world caught in fast-forward, for just an instant he felt his pulse temper down, his blood chilling freeze frame in his brain and the Byakugan show him the world standing still. His vision was swimming. Bright pin-pricks glittered through the dark, a myriad of tiny, shining targets. Rapid-fire, his hands ripped into unguarded veins of chakra.
Too fast, like his hands have been dealing death while he's not looking, the two-hundred-fifty-fourth strike slammed the heel of both hands into the missing-nin's chest, unloading a shotgun explosion of chakra into fragile ribs and the rest of the world caught up like a car crash. Itachi shot backward, slamming into the base of the sakura tree like a broken marionette hurled against a wall, all whiplash and crack. Then he slumped to the foot of the trunk…
…and melted into a formless ooze of mud and leaves.
"Bunshin!" Neji hissed, disappointment tearing the word from his clenched throat.
"Your fighting style…" said a voice dispassionately.
Neji spun, dark hair whipping around his shoulders, wide-eyed, disbelief shocking all sensation from his body. The Uchiha was standing behind him, looking like he'd been standing there a while, waiting.
Itachi regarded him blandly. "…it's familiar."
The question swam in his ivory stare.
"You paused just a fraction before you attacked," explained the renegade. "I made the switch then."
He shifted his stance, letting the loose cloth of his haori slither over his wrists and past his fingers. Chakra flared out through him, hissing down his hands and pooling like warm venom in his fingers.
The Juuken prodigy snatched a load of shinjutsu needles from his hip holster and hurled them at the Uchiha and, using them as cover, blitzed a lightening-fast zig-zag across the dirt. Itachi met him half-way with a kunai. Sparks spit off the metal as they strained against one another, hands shuddering with the force of their pressure. Neji's entire body shook with the effort of attacking after such a heavy Juuken assault. Adrenaline and chakra making his hands hot and his eyes swim with heat-lines that didn't exist, but he didn't care.
"There's hatred in you," Itachi remarked easily, gazing down at the young Hyuuga, "but not enough."
He paused, as if for an instant thinking back to some blood-soaked memory. Moonlight broke into shivering white fragments in the water nearby. Quite suddenly the rogue shinobi had his mouth against Neji's ear, murmuring through his hair.
"I would have killed them all much sooner," he whispered harshly. "What are you waiting for?"
Neji recoiled.
"I'm nothing like you!"
"No. You're not." Itachi blinked. "You're like him."
Then Neji's legs buckled. He dropped almost elegantly to his knees, looking ridiculously startled. His eyes warped, his head screamed and the Byakugan blurred and distorted like a picture lacking depth perception. Numb, white spots swarmed in droves before his eyes, and he doubled up, stunned and deaf but through it all, like a radio signal through static, his own voice came through:
'Genjutsu. Good job. Now he can kill you casually.'
His stomach was clenched up, forcing acid, little dragons and an ocean of razor-blade origami up back of his throat. He couldn't move, he couldn't fight, he couldn't get free of this and he couldn't even figure out when the illusion had hit or in what manner it had broken in or how he hadn't, just noticed. Standing was like telling his legs to move with telepathy and no muscles. Nothing reacted. He felt sick. He'd lost control. He was afraid –
Itachi was watching him, unconcern in every line of that too-gentle face.
"I don't need eye contact," he explained blankly, almost gently.
He reached down, taking the paralyzed Hyuuga by the throat. He shoved Neji back against the sakura, trunk slammed between his shoulder blades and somewhere in the back of his jutsu locked brain he remembered he'd forgotten to say goodbye to Lee or Tenten. Why the hell hadn't he done that?
"Open your eyes."
Neji shuddered.
"Your teacher taught you well, but it's useless now." (Once upon a time Might Guy taught his young Hyuuga student how to fight a Sharingan.) A warm thumb brushed the corner of his left eye, tracing the scrunched crows-feet. (He said, "Close your eyes…and fight like usual.") "Open them." (And something about youthful exuberance.) "Look at me."
His eyes flow open and he was looking Itachi – now directly – in the eyes.
Through the Byakugan chakra was reversing flow in the missing-nin's body, bright beads of it spiraling through his veins toward his skull, gathering like two spinning suns in his eye sockets. The Uchiha's free hand was tangled in his hair near his left ear, holding the young Hyuuga's gaze forward, into the bloody maelstrom of his Sharingan.
"If you must blame someone for this," he said softly, "blame your clan. Blame your cousins, your uncle, your family." Itachi leaned close, his voice a murmur, humming hypnotic poison in the Hyuuga's head. "It was they who bred this obedience into you, not I."
The three tomoe melted into an inky swirl in Itachi's irises. Thin red capillaries threaded through pale sclera, chakra throbbing so powerfully the aura was palpable, the black congealing and warping into a perverse three bladed pinwheel. Neji didn't have it in him to do anything but stare it down as his death raced toward him in whirling shuriken clouds of red and ebon-black. Randomly he pointed out:
"You don't even know me. Who am I to you?"
The other ninja didn't say.
"One month," said the Uchiha. "One month to teach you to hate. I expect you to do well. After all, you will be representing me, Hyuuga."
For the next ten seconds, there was silence.
Author's Note:
Hmm...haven't got much to say. Thank you so much to those of you that are reading, it makes writing a story all the more enjoyable to know there's an audiance being catered to. Speaking of which, for any really dire naruto fans, you cannot miss Secondhand Faith, by Lellian. Best writing and eye-catching plot I've seen in a long, long time and updated pretty much weekly. It's a crime if you don't read it. It's far better than this story, you should be there now. Go in fact. I insist.
Now...seriously.