Blah blah blah: regular text
"Blah Blah Blah" regular speech
'Blah Blah Blah' regular thought or flashback
"Blah Blah Blah" Kyuubi/demonic or summon talking
'Blah Blah Blah' Kyuubi/demonic or summon thinking
Who's the Hostage
By: EDelta88
Disclaimer: You can tell I don't own Naruto by how outrageous Shippuden became.
Chapter 13: Breaking Point
"Ah, now that we have finished observing events we don't already know of, where were we?"
"Um, nowhere?"
"No, we were most definitely discussing something."
"Nope. No, we weren't. Nothing at all."
"Something important… and entertaining."
"What?! There is nothing funny about you making fun of my youthful ignorance, Kurama!"
"Ah yes, your gross stupidity in relation to your mate and your blatant desire to copulate with you."
"…God damnit."
"You have no one to blame but yourself, brat. Then and now."
"By all the little gods! What did I do to deserve this?"
"You ignored the signs that your companion of the female persuasion that has stalked you for years and blatantly demanded your attention wanted you to bend her over any convenient surface and-"
"I get it! Seriously, I get it. I'm a dumbass. Can we move on now?"
"Nope."
"Why the hell not?"
"Because we are about to relive the cherry on top of your masterpiece of stupidity."
"What are you… oh no."
"As the kids say, Oh yes."
"Can we skip this?"
"As much as it pains me to sympathize with you pathetic mortals, I would prefer to skip this particular act of idiocy, but we've already established that there is no skip function on this ride."
"Damnit."
"Indeed."
Somewhere in River Country…
In the end, Naruto's plan for dealing with the situation was incredibly simple.
"Naruto-kun."
Just ignore her and she'll go away…
"Naruto-kun."
It's just the Stockholm syndrome talking. She'll get over it as soon as she realizes escape is possible and gets some distance.
"Naruto-kun, I'm bored," Hinata crooned, batting her eyes at him. "Come play with me."
Sweet Baby Sage! This wasn't fair. All he wanted was some peace to mourn the fact that he couldn't go home and this fiend in soft, smooth, touchable-damnit! Damn it all to the pit! How was he supposed to remain a good, honorable person when temptation hounded him so?
"Na-ru-to?" Hinata pouted, sticking out her bottom lip in a move that was so cute that Naruto was quite sure it had to be outlawed somewhere. "Pleeease?"
He just had to-
"Narutooo-" Hinata whined only to rear back as Naruto wheeled around to face her, looking furious.
"Will you stop!" Naruto exploded.
Hinata's eyes went wide. "I'm sorry-"
"No, you're not!" Naruto cried, throwing his hands up. "You just want me to stop being angry! No one's ever actually sorry. They just don't want Naruto to be unstable! Heavens forbid I have a temper or feelings! Fuck that! Nope! Naruto has to toe the line of happy and stupid or something's wrong! Just keep smiling, Naruto! Just shrug it off, Naruto! They didn't mean it, Naruto! Well, yeah! You meant it! You meant to pester me. You meant to push my buttons. You've been doing it the entire time and guess what, princess? I'm sick of it. So quit it!"
Hinata shrunk back, tears welling in her eyes as she curled in on herself. She'd never seen this side of Naruto. She knew about some of the things he was screaming about but… He'd always seem so untouchable, like none of it could get to him.
But he wasn't and it had.
"And another thing!"
Hinata flinched.
"You were supposed to go home!" Naruto shouted. "Home! Back to Konoha! One of us should be able to! But no matter how many opportunities I give you-no matter how many chances you've had to do the one thing I wish I could. You're still here! What the hell, woman! What's wrong with you?! What part of on the run without the protection from the village seems like a good idea to you?! How about instead of laying around playing at being a damsel in distress, you get out of here and actually make something of yourself?! One of us should!"
"But I lo-"
"Don't!" Naruto roared.
Hinata reared back as if slapped.
"Don't say it!" Naruto snarled. "Our ninja way is that we never go back on our word. Maybe that's just a fun theme for you, but that means something to me. My word is my bond. If I say something, I mean it. So, don't go using my nindo and then start saying things like-like-like that just to get me to do what you want! Got it?"
Tears welled in Hinata's eyes. "But-"
"Got it!?" Naruto growled. His heart ached and some part of him that wasn't swept in the burst of anger realized he was out of line, but he was too far in to stop now.
Something cold settled in Hinata's stomach and began to spread through her. "Y-yes," she mumbled.
"You don't have to settle for me, Hinata," Naruto told her. "I don't have a future. If I ever really had a chance, it's gone now. You though? You have all the opportunities in the world. You can have whatever you want, whoever you want. I can't let you waste all of that for-for whatever this is. Because it's not real, Hinata. It's not. It's just the situation getting to you and one day you'll wake up and regret it and as your friend, I can't let you do that."
"But... I—"
"Don't," Naruto interrupted. He didn't want to hear it. He didn't want to hear the truth. He didn't want to hear the rejection. "Just don't. Go home."
Hinata didn't speak up this time. Too stunned to respond.
"Go home, Hinata," Naruto ordered. Then he turned his back on her and continued his work.
Silently, Hinata stood, slipping out of her bonds as easily as she would shed her coat before a bath and… left. Without a word, she left. Without a backward glance, she slunk out of their cave like a beaten dog.
Naruto didn't notice that she hadn't moved toward the roads that lead to Konoha.
"Go home, Hinata."
That's what Naruto had told her to do.
Go home.
Go back to Konoha.
That's what Naruto wanted her to do, but Konoha wasn't home for Hinata, it never had been. Konoha was just a place. The Hyuuga Compound was just where she laid her bed. Her family was just a group of people she had the misfortune to be related to. Home… to Hinata, Home was where her heart dwelt. When she was little, that was with her mother. Then she'd given it to a boy with hair like the sun and a soul warm like fire… perhaps she should have been more careful with how close she had gotten, but home had been Naruto and he didn't want her. So, she had no home, nowhere to go and nothing worth returning to.
Hinata didn't pay attention to which direction she was going, it didn't matter anymore.
Hinata didn't stop to find shelter when the weather began to change, she didn't care.
Hinata didn't notice when she got hungry.
Hinata didn't notice when she got thirsty.
Hinata didn't notice... anything at all.
Sometime Later…
It had been a long time since Naruto had dealt with real silence. The kind of empty space broken only by the wind in the trees or a faraway bird. There was always noise in Konoha. Even at night there were people out and about on some business or another. More than a few merchants never even closed for the night because of the hours some ninja kept. Then he had left, but Hinata had seemed to just... fill the space, talking to him, talking to the clones, humming some tune, or singing to herself.
Now, it was quiet.
Now, he had gotten exactly what he had asked for... and he hated it.
"What?" he irritably challenged one of his clones as it gave him yet another sidelong glance. "You want to say something?"
The clone shrugged. "Not really? It's just… quiet, you know?"
Naruto glared, then blew out a long breath. "Yeah, real quiet," he admitted reluctantly.
"Never realized how much—"
"Don't."
"But she—"
"I don't care if was nice having someone around for a change! It wasn't—" Naruto froze as the Freudian Slip registered.
It had been nice having company for once.
It had been nice having someone to come back to.
It had been nice having someone give a damn that he came back…
"Look, it doesn't matter, she's gone now and she'll be better off back home than on the run with us," Naruto sighed, shaking his head. Because that's what it came down to. Hinata was safer in Konoha. Hinata had actual opportunities in Konoha. Hinata could have a life in Konoha. This? Whatever the hell he was doing? This would catch up with him eventually and it wasn't going to be like whatever fairy tale she'd had floating around in her head.
Didn't mean he was excited to be on his own again… or proud of what he'd done.
It had been hours and the way she'd looked at him when he'd lost his temper was still stuck in his head. He hadn't meant to say the things he did. It wasn't her he was mad at and she hadn't deserved to have him unload on her like that, but at least she was headed home now. Still, it bugged him. He kept remembering her face. Something about her face, something about the way she looked at him was so…
Familiar…
He'd swear he knew that look from somewhere, something in her eyes. They were just so…
"Empty," he realized remembering how her pale lavender eyes seemed to lose their sparkle.
The way she had looked at him was just so… dead, broken, shattered, as though the soul behind them had been crushed wholly and completely. It was a look of…
Betrayal…
The foul word echoed in his mind as he remembered the nights after Sasuke defected; nights where he remembered staring into the mirror with those same eyes staring back at him.
But that didn't make sense! Why would she-
"You are quite possibly the dumbest mortal that I have ever met," the Kyuubi growled in displeasure. "And yes, I am including insects and invertebrates in that assessment. This is so bad that it's almost impressive!"
"Really?" Naruto groaned. "We're going to do this now?"
"You're god damn right we're going to do this now, boy!" the Kyuubi snarled, his rage rolling over Naruto like a nearly physical thing, such was his wrath.
Naruto's eyes went wide. "What—"
"Do you know what my gift is, boy?" the Kyuubi interrupted, once more spitting boy like the cruelest of expletives.
"Gift?"
"Yes, gift, you ignorant, dirt-grubbing ape. Each of the Biju has one. Shukaku's sand. Matatabi's fire. Sound familiar?"
"Um… kinda?" Naruto muttered. "Shukaku is Gaara's biju, right? But who's—"
"Matatabi is the Nibi no Nekomata."
Naruto blinked.
"It hasn't even occurred to you that we have actual names, has it?" the Kyuubi snarled.
"I… kind of just assumed that you were all named like, Nibi and Kyuubi?" Naruto admitted sheepishly. "That's what everyone called you and… wow that sounds stupid out loud."
"Oh, trust me, it's much worse when you can see the thought process forming before you unleash these sorts of travesties on the rest of us," the Kyuubi drawled. "Now, since you can't even process the concept of a person having a name—"
"That's not exactly—" Naruto attempted to defend himself but the Kyuubi continued as if he hadn't spoken at all.
"—I'm going to assume that you don't know what my gift is?"
"Uh… no. No clue."
"Empathy."
Naruto blinked. "What?"
The Kyuubi breathed a long sigh. "Empathy," he repeated. "The ability to feel and project emotions. It was a… counterbalance. I'm significantly more powerful than my siblings. I don't need more power and neither do my Jinchuuriki. We need to understand the consequences of that power… or that was the idea of it, anyway. In practice, it's just a hellish existence of having to constantly listen to the innermost misery of countless thousands of mortals as they suffer in this blighted world."
"That sounds… terrible," Naruto muttered as he tried to picture it. "No wonder you attacked all those places in the stories. They must have felt like bees attacking your brain or something."
"That is… not inaccurate," the Kyuubi admitted.
"But what does that have to do with Hinata and—" Naruto started but before he could finish, something amazing welled up inside him. It was like eating Ramen with old man Sarutobi or when Jiraiya had shared an ice cream with him, but better, deeper. It was like he'd taken that feeling and rolled it up with his admiration for the Yondaime and that high he got every time he won a battle. It was as if he'd taken that and bathed it in sunlight, but even that didn't quite do it justice. "That… that feels wonderful," Naruto murmured, scrubbing at his watery eyes.
"Isn't it?" the Kyuubi asked smugly.
"Yeah," Naruto agreed shakily, a soft smile gracing his lips as a single tear trickled down his cheek. "What… what is it?"
What is it?
What is it?
What is it?
Something broke inside the Kyuubi as that question seemed to echo in his mind, hanging between demon and host as it repeated itself a thousand different ways inside his head. His host didn't know what love was. He cared for everyone else so deeply, so completely, and yet Naruto had no concept of what it really felt like to love someone, much less be in love with them. No wonder…
But that was a problem for another day.
"This is what love feels like," the Kyuubi finally answered.
"Oh," Naruto breathed. "Oh, wow…"
"This is what she felt for you."
Naruto blinked, staring blankly into space. She was… Hinata had felt this… for him?
"You see it now?" Kyuubi whispered from the depths of his mind. "Do you see what I have been trying to tell you all this time, ningen?"
Naruto gulped, trying to swallow the painful lump that had formed in his throat. "She loved me," Naruto whispered and suddenly the weight of his words fell on him, the sound of his own voice making them more real.
It had been real. Hinata had been in love with him. She had given him something he had wanted since he could remember and he had…
"What have I done…" he murmured, horrified as he turned to stare in the direction he had come from.
"Think not about what you have done," the Kyuubi quoted. "Think now about what you are going to do."
Naruto blinked again, rolling the words over for a moment before smiling. "Thank you, Kyuubi."
"My name is Kurama," the Kyuubi No Yoko rumbled with a wide grin.
Naruto responded in kind. "Well, I would have settled for calling you my friend, but Kurama… that has a catchy ring to it."
"Spare me your sentiment, Naruto," Kurama chuffed. "You have a female to catch up to and groveling to do."
"Groveling?"
"So much groveling."