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runespoorFirst part.
In the silence that surrounded her low words, Hinata measured that she'd succeeded in meshing the stutter of her early years and the nonsensical sarcasm of her days as a prisoner.
She faked a smile that gained in humor as she watched the astonishment on her friends' face, and thought that it was good, now they'd move on.
She hadn't been prepared for Shino's shifting in his chair.
"You – have?"
There was something in the alcohol. Or else everyone had drunk way too much of it, and no-one seemed the part, not even Ino, because the strain in Shino's tone would have been blatant even if she hadn't known him as well as she did. She inwardly cringed.
Up until now, I don't think Hinata realized Shino and Kiba would feel concerned for her about something like that.
It was also very fun to write this for Shino. I'm not a Shino writer/reader, and consequently I was interested in not showing him as monolithic as I usually tend to think of him. This Shino thinks of Hinata as kind of his little sister, and I enjoyed portraying him as somewhat vulnerable.
She threw a cautious glance his way. Between the two of them, Kiba was slowly blinking, his jaw dropped.
She nodded – and it seemed that everyone started speaking at once.
"You didn't tell us?" Kiba sounded about to cry.
My only explanation it that it comes as Teh Shock to Kiba.
Especially since he's never smelled another person on her – or so he thinks, because Neji and Hinata are part of the same family, they share more or less the same living space, so their smells are much more similar than any two random persons; also, what Kiba identifies as Hinata's smell is actually Hinata and Neji mingled, because the two of them have been sleeping together since she's twelve.
People's smell change at that age, and I'm supposing Kiba and Akamaru's sense of smell did too, so that's the reason he never noticed. (Yes, I thought about it.)
"Yay! WAY TO GO HINATA!" Ino shouted, bouncing in her seat.
That's totally what I'd have been thinking in their place. It made the more sense to have Ino say it because she's already slightly inebriated and I can't imagine any of the others saying that and remaining IC. Except for Naruto, but I planned on having him say something else already… *points*
"Told you so, now pay up," Naruto smirked at a stunned Sakura and a poisonous-looking Sasuke.
So why this line and not Ino's?
Naruto's interaction is directed toward his teammates. And SexGod!Naruto is one of my favorite pieces of fanon. (Also, the idea of Team Seven discussing Hinata's sex life is crack.) Naruto Knowing that Hinata's not a virgin parallels Hinata's intuition earlier – I like drawing parallels between the two of them even though I don't ship them ever since Sakura told Naruto that Hinata 'was a lot like him' when she was fighting Neji.
He's also the only one not taken aback by the news.
In my fanon, Naruto and Hinata are also the two most consciously sensual characters and the most ready to accept their sensations and urges, even if they absolutely don't plan on acting upon them, at least they never deny their existence.
Sakura being stunned is pretty straight-forward, mostly because she'd never guessed Hinata would have had sex than because she doubted Naruto's intuition.
Coincidentally, my Sakura tends to be rather scientifically-minded; I try not to overdo it, but she's definitely not the one who relies most on her intuitions of the lot. Part of the reason is simply because she's a medic-nin, and thus, to my simple mind, = logic. The other part is just my 'I think I'll go and take a jab at gender stereotypes before breakfast' bias showing itself.
On the other hand, Sasuke looks 'poisonous'. I used a word that, to me, has 'feminine' connotations, because he's not just furious at Naruto for winning the bet; he's jealous.
In the Team Seven centric more or less immediate sequel to this I started writing several times before giving up in frustration (now it's in the 'ded wip' folder), I explored a little of Sasuke's psyche (which I fail at, one of the reasons the fic never was finished) and it turned out that one of Sasuke's first thoughts/suspicions regarded Naruto. The reason he's not looking 'murderous' is because he doesn't actually believe it, but he still doesn't like having the thought crossing his mind.
And it's also that Sasuke is very ambivalent regarding Naruto's ease toward sex.
"Good for you," Shikamaru commented with a half-smile.
Showing Shikamaru as feeling such a private issue is something of his business was a challenge if I wanted to keep him IC, but I think I managed, mostly, because the half-smile makes him sound more 'adult' than the others.
'How bothersome' was never an option.
"How come you never told us about it?" Tenten demanded.
"It was during the war, wasn't it?" Chouji guessed.
Once more, I have a boy be the perceptive one.
Hinata chewed on her lip – she'd have to watch out not to let it become a habit – but everyone registered Chouji's quiet question. The implications immediately dampened their good mood.
What I like about this is showing that Hinata is never satisfied with herself, and is always watching the way she behaved.
So much for being done with it, but she supposed she had no choice. And honestly, if her formerly-private life could keep the spotlights off Team Seven, well, she'd just endure it, even if her head exploded with all the blood rushing there.
I tried to make it sound less 'Hinata viewing herself as martyr' and more 'Hinata viewing the situation as a mission'.
"It wasn't – one of those missions, right?"
The anguish she could see in poor Lee's eyes threatened to spill over. The group stiffened, and the look Temari sent her was distinctly compassionate.
Lee hadn't spoken yet. Besides, idealistic or not, he's a ninja and I think he must know of how things sometime go, no matter how he disapproves.
To me, there are many reasons behind Temari's expression, but personal experience is not one of them. I can't see Temari in those settings and I don't want to. :)
This, luckily, was a question she could answer.
"No, that's for the ANBU." That was what the ANBU and the Roots were for, but she kept her knowledge of the grimmest aspects of the inner workings of the village to herself. Beside, her evident bloodline limit – articulated to the fact that she absolutely and unapologetically sucked at genjutsu – ruled her out anyway.
I reworked this paragraph many times, not so much because of the writing style but because of the precise kind of background I wanted to set.
She's oversimplifying, btw. As a head of clan and a Torture and Interrogation-nin, she's aware of more bleak things that the vast majority of the Rookies.
For my reasoning behind Hinata sucking at genjutsu, see this dvd commentary. (basically I want her to have a weakness, and genjutsu allows for pretty pretty mind fucks, and according to the data books Hinata's bad at genjutsu as a genin, plus breaking of the gender stereotypes.)
They relaxed; Hinata's soft, coolly-spoken explanation has reassured them. She… should not have found their concern as touching as she did. What she should have done was divert the topic on an unsuspecting victim – like Lee, for instance, who blushed almost as much as she did and who'd have been the perfect decoy, but Hinata couldn't bring herself to do that.
"Sai?" she heard Sakura ask. "What's wrong?"
Oh. Hinata hoped she hadn't brought back painful memories – he'd been in Roots, and he was exactly the kind of porcelain doll that would be sent on those missions… Oh no, no, no. Sai had changed during the two years the war had lasted; she didn't want to think she'd recalled his days as a tool… But he was tucked between Tenten and Naruto; she could only watch the faces of Lee and Sasuke, who were facing him, to guess his reaction.
'Porcelain doll.' Snerk. I had the Sai/Sasuke comparison firmly in mind when I wrote that AND I NEED TO GET MY WHORE!SASUKE ANGST FIX SOMEHOW.
(If you read A Day in the Life, you'll know that there's a briefly mentioned OC who shares quite a few characteristics with Sasuke – missing-nin, too quiet, mysterious yet obviously dramatic past – whose coworkers/teammates judge is all-too-likely to whore himself out if it meant getting more missions. Just replace 'getting more missions' with 'getting closer to Itachi' and you'll get one of my basic premises for writing Sasuke. HI CANON CREEPY SNAKEMEN WITH TONGUE COVER-PORN.)
That was my big moment of managing to work Sai into the scene. I was very proud.
"Sai?"
Hinata's shoulders hunched, but she refused to let remorse claim her, and she bent forward to try and see Sai, matching Kiba's efforts, briefly wishing she could just use the Byakugan.
She doesn't because it'd be the rudest thing ever. I was mildly unhappy that I couldn't explain the reason, but even mentioning it seemed off; Hinata knows it'd be the rudest thing ever, she's not even going to think it.
Then he looked at her. It was a painful smile.
"You've been a prisoner, haven't you?"
Sai is the one mentioning this possibility because none of the others wanted to envisage it yet. Some of them wouldn't have thought of it on their own for a while, but others – Shikamaru, Temari at least – would have come to it.
And this shows that Sai has grown away from how emotionally-crippled (or however you think of it) he was over two years ago.
As if a switch had been turned, the group tensed; Sasuke's head jerked towards her, eyes piercing her from his far away seat. Kiba's face was pale with dismay.
Wha-
"You killed Kabuto," Sasuke's clipped voice said.
The undertones were obvious. There was a sharp intake of breath from her right – not Kiba whom she'd have seen, not Tenten – Shino, Sai or Naruto. There was a whimper from Sakura. Everyone else was frozen. Everyone knew Kabuto.
It was Naruto. Sasuke, Naruto and Sakura are those who know the most about Kabuto.
None among the others had made the connection as quickly as Sasuke; that's what I tried to show when I mentioned his reaction (if it's there, it implies that it was the most visible), and then everyone else's reaction after he said it. And he's just blunt and truth-oriented enough that he'd totally call it in front of everyone.
"No!" Hinata denied. She saw Temari flinch. Her protest sounded too loud and too fierce.
Name-dropping moment. I think it gives more emotional weight to the scene, so that's why I always tried to give one or more reactions, but not too many because it would have only achieved the reverse and been boring as hell. Besides, Temari is one of the most stoic of the characters present in the scene, so to have her react was indicative how wrongwrongwrong Hinata's reaction was.
"Hinata…" Ino's hand went to her shoulder, probably in a soothing gesture, and Ino's voice was more subdued than before.
Hinata had never been so red in her life.
She shook Ino's hand off her shoulder without an apology.
I wanted to use the word 'agitated' at some point in this scene. I didn't manage because it felt like it interrupted the flow and it was more 'tell' than 'show'. Usually I don't worry too much about that, but here it just seemed unnecessary – yes, we can see that she's agitated already. It'd have just been self-indulgent, because I happen to like the word.
Originally I'd made a bigger deal out of Hinata's lack of apology, but it seemed like it made her too prim, fussy and vaguely snobbish, so I kept it simple, so as to still indicate that in spite of her… agitation… (:D) her rudeness is something Hinata keeps track of. Remember when I said she's never good enough for her standards?
"No, he didn't – he never – Kabuto never raped me!"
…And she probably shouldn't have sounded that defensive either, but this was striking a little too close home for comfort.
She is taking that like an accusation – one made against Kabuto and one made against her. Because, as said later, her views on sex with Kabuto were conflicted at best and she can't help feeling that at least some of her reactions at the time, or regrets, or dreams, or whatever, where tantamount to giving in; she can't help feeling that if something had happened, she'd have 'let' him.
Make no mistake, if something had happened between the two of them, given their situation, in a fic the warning would be at the very least 'dub-con' if not plain non-con.
There's no 'letting' in rape, but Hinata can't help but think of it like that.
"I wasn't raped," she continued more calmly in the ringing silence. "I wasn't raped. Neither by Kabuto nor by Orochimaru or by anyone. There was nothing like that. The interrogations – everything was entirely platonic."
I made several corrections there. At one point I'd written 'the interrogations were entirely platonic'. I added the 'everything' because Hinata is very confused about the issue of Kabuto and she prefers just throw it into a big category rather than dissect every single aspect of it.
She gave Uchiha Sasuke a look that would have been labeled 'defiant death glare of doom' on anyone else, but Hinata didn't glare. Sasuke didn't look completely convinced, and he pursed his lips in a way that Hinata thought meant 'I'll let you off the hook right now but don't think this is the last of it' (it was mostly directed towards Naruto), not that she could blame him.
I needed a reason why Hinata would be familiar enough with Sasuke's expressions to interpret them accurately, and learning them from watching his interaction with Naruto seemed probable enough, especially given the expression.
"Sasuke-kun?" Sakura asked for a confirmation.
So nobody had missed their little exchange. Goody.
Well, I don't think it's OOC for Hinata to be a little snide in the privacy of her mind at that moment.
The resident expert of All Things Sound Except Mind shrugged.
I know nobody cares about that line. It's one of my favorites in the whole fic.
"T's Kabuto we're talking about," Naruto intervened. "That guy was always a piece of work. …Er, not that I think it's normal to rape your prisoner, or that I think you need to be seriously fucked up not to want to do Hina – guys, aren't you supposed to shut me up when I do that? Sakura-chan? Bastard? Guuuuuyyyyyssssss…."
Naruto's whine couldn't cover Sasuke's snort or Sakura's giggles; the pink-haired girl had hidden her face behind her hands.
<3 Team Seven. I needed something to break the tension, and they did it all on their own.
The tension had disappeared, but Hinata couldn't even be mortified by Naruto's comments. She was too busy getting herself under control.
Of course Sasuke wouldn't believe her – and unless Shikamaru and Temari were a lot more stupid than geniuses and very clever people were supposed to be, they wouldn't believe her either. Sasuke had lived for three years with Kabuto, he couldn't possibly ignore his penchants for mind games – after all, he'd fled, hadn't he? He couldn't have been as completely under Orochimaru's control as she'd heard at the time.
Everything was entirely platonic.
Cue the obligatory flashback scene.
Btw, I brainstormed on my using the word 'platonic', because I come from Harry Potter fandom, and 'platonic' has come to have its own special HP-fandom-only meaning; pretty much the last thing I wanted was to be reminded of the Harry/Hermione ship as I wrote this.
As platonic as it was to have someone torturing you for weeks, with carefully measured control in their every move, smile, look, and a soft, soft voice when things were cutting or growing through her, and the hands of a healer. Platonic.
Everything was about games with Kabuto, and thankfully, Hinata was a lot more used to them than Sasuke had been. She'd been four years older than he'd been when he'd left Konoha, and she hadn't been a puppet to a godlike older brother. She'd been aware that everything about Kabuto was lies and manipulations.
My subtle attempts at giving the reader a timeline. (After several months spent on Celebrationverse, I think I can sincerely say, timelines are evil.)
Only marginally less blatant than my paralleling between Naruto and Hinata is my comparing Sasuke and Hinata. It comes from the idea that I think neither of them finds themselves entirely adequate.
And sometimes his hand would brush against her skin, or he'd give her a sunny smile, or he'd frown when he saw that his experiment hadn't gone the way it was supposed to, and she knew that he was slowly but surely driving her to paranoia.
There were worse fates.
There had been days, she'd felt like her breath was suspended to Kabuto's lips; days when she whimpered and he held her in his arms, letting her blood drench his clothes; days when he stroked her shoulders almost like a massage, which Hinata hated; days when her thighs parted under his gaze; days when she would have hated herself for not kissing him back if he had tried.
I've reworked this so many times it's not even funny.
So of course she'd been aware of how much of an unspoken point he made it that he'd never done anything sexual to her. It was always hanging above her head, part promise part threat.
(Not that he needed to; Hinata was all too aware of the fact that everything between them had been laced with chilling sensuality.)
I could've phrased that better, I think, because though the words 'chilling sensuality' convey precisely what I wanted to say and they're at the end of the sentence, I'm not actually all that glad about how they sound. The parenthesis was necessary because of the next sentence, even if it'd have carried more weight without.
And for that, she was pathetically grateful.
He tortured her and healed her and didn't come for – days? – and brought sweet warm food and let her take a bath and told her stories and smiled and gave her a cup of hot chocolate and said that he'd saved her life during the Sound's attack years before and announced that Kiba had been killed and didn't touch her and watched her from behind his silver glasses and broke her and was her only focus on reality and she'd killed him.
Reworking things way too many times? Check here too.
I'm very happy about this whole passage, too. I tried to make it about as comfortable-creepy as I could and to completely break Hinata's sense of time. I continue to like the casual mention of Kabuto casually mentioning that Kiba has been killed, too; at first it wasn’t situated right after Kabuto saying he'd saved Hinata's life, but I thought it worked much better with that contrast.
She'd brought the glasses back with her; when she'd been found by Nara Shikaku she'd been dazed and soaked in blood not her own. Even with her Byakugan activated, she hadn't been able to avoid all trouble on her journey back from Hidden Sound; she understood that she'd succeeded at all because the war against Konoha and Suna had decimated Orochimaru's ranks as well. The only chuunin who caught up with her wasn't someone important, and he had no idea that the Hyuuga existed; believing she was a genjutsu specialist, he chose to engage her in close combat.
I decided on Nara Shikaku because I wanted Random Tertiary Character, and I like the idea of it being someone that wouldn't know Hinata personally, but through their kid.
The inspiration for the mentioned fight comes from one of my wip that never got done. I thought that someone who didn't know about the Hyuuga would see a girl with freaky eyes and thus imagine that she'd use genjutsu, and like I said, my Hinata is awful at genjutsu; I thought it'd be funny that she'd be able to stay alive because someone would peg her for a genjutsu type.
(He was stronger and healthier than her, smiling at her like a predator – probably a snake – at a small weakened trembling mammal. Mongooses were small mammals, and Hinata had killed him.)
One of the most tired-out metaphors ever, but I like it. Inspiration for its use comes from Terry Pratchett's Discworld, where one of the characters (Magrat), who's consistently described as mousy, fights against two snake-like opponents; she's backed against a corner, and there comes the phrase about how mongooses are small mammals. That's the reason why the enemy nin is said to be 'probably like a snake', which is me cheating with my comparisons to make the use of the metaphor possible.
When she'd seen Nara Shikaku she'd thought for a moment she was seeing Shikamaru. Kabuto had said Shikamaru had been killed. He hadn't said that of either Naruto or Neji.
Explanation: Hinata believes in Neji and Naruto more than in anyone else. She would refuse to believe they died and would stop believing anything of what Kabuto says (even if she knows he's lying, the rest of what he says is believable to her; and even if she fears for Naruto and Neji, she'll refuse to think they may be dead, because Naruto is her role-model and her inspiration, and Neji is what she wants to be as a ninja, and her responsibility as her protective shadow). The issue is better explained in The Return.
Hinata then did the only thing she could think of, and put all her might in shaking the genjutsu. It was a powerful genjutsu – it had to be, when she could feel Kabuto's glasses in her pocket – Kabuto was a master in genjutsu.
-> Why I Make My Hinata Suck At Genjutsu. Conversely, why I like the idea of KabuHina.
She couldn't remember Shikaku's reaction, or the darkness claiming her as she'd outdone her last reserves of energy, trying to break the restrictions that had been put on her chakra – nothing except the determination that next time she wouldn't let Kabuto pull her into an illusion, next time she'd break his glasses into his eyes and slash him a wide scarlet grin, next time she'd escape.
She'd woken up to realize it hadn't been genjutsu. The hospital room had been quiet and blank, with Tsunade-sama and Morino Ibiki looking down at her. Hinata's first question had been for the blood-stained spectacles. They were intact, on her bedside. Then Hinata let Tsunade-sama and Morino Ibiki do everything that was needed to make sure she was what she claimed to be. She liked Ibiki a lot more than she'd ever liked Kabuto, but of course it wasn't comparable.
Here is the final paragraph of the Department of Backstory.
I tend to put a lot of backstory in my fics (at least that's how I feel, I'm generally worried about rambling too much about it), because oftentimes the backstory comes to me as I write it, at least in the details. It's not planned, because I can't write things I've thought too long about – I'm unable to write it, I'm blocked because it never feels like it's doing justice to the complexities I've imagined, or because I'm always running into a plot hole. I'm more a go-with-the-flow type of writer, so that's how backstory comes to me.
It's the only thing that comes easy to me and which I don't angst about, because I don't think about it until I'm typing it, and then it always feels like the best idea in the world omg.
And yet I always feel as if it's one of the most important things in a story, because that's what gives it depth and credibility.
I just thought Ibiki there would be cool and would make sense, plus it allowed me to put a sentence that'd imply how nicely twisted Hinata's feelings regarding Kabuto are.
These memories weren't welcome in this cheery restaurant, alive and well, with her friends and their embarrassing conversation, but they were an important part of her. Besides, the glasses hadn't left Hinata since. Maybe she'd show them to Sasuke later.
Casual mention of emotional scarring, check. Hammer-like transition, also check.
She could ask him what had been his stance towards Kabuto's – maybe in his case Orochimaru's – poisonous gifts. Given what she'd heard at the time and what she'd learned since, she doubted he'd turned them down.
It made sense, in a way; Sasuke was looking for power, so he took what was offered to him. Hinata had been nothing more than an experimental subject, and she never accepted Kabuto's gifts without the torturous knowledge that the more she did, the more she was relying on him, until one day would come when she'd be unable to survive without the blanket, and the bath, and the hot chocolate.
Hinata is always second-guessing herself.
Every time Hinata had met Kabuto's amused/sorry look, she'd blushed because she knew he could read her about as well as Neji always had, and he'd been entertained – startled at first maybe – by her efforts to remain her own person. Sometimes she'd break and take the favor, partly appalled by the feeling that she was selling her soul for a honeysuckle-scented bath, partly relishing in the temporary return to human decorum more than the fleeting physical comfort, partly steeling her pride and sharpening her confidence.
One of my favorite paragraphs in the fic, even if the end of the last sentence never came out quite like I wanted it to. I remember spending a lot of time poring over my thesaurus and reflecting about exactly what I had in mind when it came to choosing the adjectives: 'amused', 'sorry', 'entertained', 'startled', 'temporary', 'fleeting'. It sounds like nothing – at least I hope it does – but I went through many questions if I was characterizing the two of them right, if I wasn't over-dramatizing Kabuto's reactions…
The honeysuckle is totally not chosen at random, btw; it's got 'honey' in it, and 'suckle', and it's a vegetal that can grow in the wild and which has parasitic tendencies. There was never a doubt as to whether I was going to mention it or some other flower. (Also, it smells sweet and intoxicating.)
"So, when was it?" Kiba asked in a detached tone that was as natural as Tsunade's youthful looks.
Damn, I feel like I'm quoting/referring to something there, and I have no idea what. That's frustrating, I hate when I don't know what's influencing part of my writing.
Nevertheless, Kiba faking a detached tone <3.
"Who was it?" Now, if even Shikamaru decided to have fun at her expense…
I wanted to say he had a half-smile again, but it'd already been the case and I didn't want to be too repetitive, particularly with characters who didn't have a lot of fic-space, even if it was the only way I could imagine him say that and not be OOC.
So to counter the 'omg so OOC' feeling, I had no other choice but tackle it directly and have Hinata comment on it.
Hinata would have liked to lash out, but one doesn't lash out against one's teammates unless one is a member of Team Seven, and the last thing she needed was to have Temari tease her on Shikamaru's behalf as well.
Every time I reread this passage, I find it unclear. (it wasn't when I wrote it and checked the fic to fix mistakes, I swear.) Obviously when Hinata thinks 'teammates' she's referring to Kiba's interjection; only the second part of the sentence concerns Shikamaru. Just thought I'd clear that up.
Lee himself was starting to smile.
"It was when that envoy of Hidden Mist ended up at the hospital, wasn't it." Tenten sounded unbearably smug. "That red-haired one, two years ago – a year and a half."
"It wasn't." Hinata wanted to retort that not everyone lost their virginity to a nin from another village, but she wasn't half mad enough to imply things in front of Temari.
Bring Your Own Subtext. (what I had in mind at the time, though, was possible Kankuro/Tenten and/or Temari's deflowering of Shikamaru, which, unlike KankuTen, is always likely to come up in the rest of Celebrationverse.)
And wouldn't you be slightly snide in Hinata's case? (I know the whole situation is teetering on the verge of OOC/unbelievable, but I so wanted to write The Rookies Learn Hinata Has Been Experienced For Longer Than Them. It only took me, oh, 7'000 words before I got into the part of the scene that was the reason I even started writing the fic in the first place.)
"Don't tell me you've been–" Naruto's eyebrows waggled "–celebrating?"
The other character I can imagine saying that line is Ino, and I wanted it to be Naruto for the Naruto-Knows-about-sex thing and the Hinata-Naruto connection.
Even the double punch he received from his teammates – Naruto had leant so far over the table to be able to look at her that Sasuke barely needed to move – wasn't enough to soothe the burn of Hinata's humiliation. Mostly because said teammates were watching her. Also because Naruto's scenario wasn't entirely off the mark. He was just a few years late, and it had in fact been about relief and acknowledgment, but he wasn't all that wrong. Ideally, she'd even have celebrated before joining her friends, and –
Hinata squirmed in her seat. She hadn't done that for years.
Keeping track of what she's doing wrong. She's not making a huge inner deal of it, but she's marking them down neatly in a part of her mind.
"It was a long time ago."
It was apparently a wrong thing to say, because she could feel her friends' curiosity positively shot up. Hinata envisaged using a transmutation technique, then discarded the idea. It'd only encourage them, and Hinata did not fancy fending off their combined efforts. Shikamaru would be able to hold her still with her own shadow, and then – escaping the grasp of Sakura and Naruto was a risible thought.
Originally I had Hinata imagining Ino being directly involved there, but it ended up weighing the rhythm down – Hinata wasn't sure what Ino could and couldn't do as far as jutsus were concerned, and I wasn't either, due to my not mentioning whether, for instance, Ino has had her arm cut off or still there but useless. Gratuitous moment of NaruSaku love.
"When?"
Ino had been the youngest of the girls to have sex; Tenten was the first, but Tenten was a year older than Ino, and a handful of months after Tenten's secret had been discovered (way too easily for a ninja, in itself a proof that Tenten rather liked the idea of showing off to the other girls), Ino and her then-boyfriend had "gone all the way". It had ended badly with the boyfriend, but Ino had still used it to lord over Sakura. It probably explained Ino's rapture.
Even when I'm not writing Ino->Saku, I'm writing Ino->Saku. I may be hopeless.
I think Ino would be the type who'd want to always be the first, and she felt Tenten's announcement was some sort of challenge, but I'm afraid my only explanation for Tenten is that she's one year older. And maybe she feels more mature to me than the others? (Don't make me speak about the 'then-boyfriend' debacle, please. I'll just pretend it never happened, or it's a private reference among the girls that Hinata isn't explaining.)
"Two years, three?"
Chouji's conciliatory tone held a hint of fascination.
Train wreck. Also, Chouji is trying to give her a way to give a vague answer by specifying only a period of time.
"More?" Shino coldly interjected.
Hinata didn't trust her voice to answer. In fact, she didn't want to answer at all. But Shino had a way to cling onto grudges that always made her feel rather guilty, and she was perfectly aware that soothing Shino's hurt out of guilt for Neji was not one of the healthiest things around, but she took it upon herself. Neji wouldn't let her do this (try and make him feel better) for him – to him – anyway. Probably he wouldn't even use it against her.
One of the reasons I mentioned Neji there is because, in other circumstances, I would easily have Neji say that. ("More?" Neji coldly interjected.) I have no trouble at all envisioning it. So I'm justifying my Neji/Shino assimilation by having Hinata do the same.
'Probably he wouldn't even use it against her' wasn't in the first draft, but I added it as a hint that NejiHina would be considered dysfunctional by many people; Hinata feels a twinge of regret about that.
"How much?" Sakura called when Hinata's tiny nod went unseen by half the table.
Even at the time, I think that was pure name-dropping. The question felt relatively neutral that many characters could ask it, and Sakura hadn't spoken for a long time. And it was a necessary question.
She had no choice.
"Five years ago," Hinata muttered. (And she'd been getting some on a regular basis since then, but she banned the thought far far away.)
The parenthesis was added later, so it'd be clear from this moment on that it hadn't been a fluke or a one-time thing.
"Five years ago?" The disclosure startled Temari out of her amused silence.
"Five years? Five?" (Ino, choking.)
"You were twelve?" (A mildly hysterical Tenten.)
"You were twelve?" Sasuke's disbelief shone through.
I love how Sasuke is unintentionally abitch bastard. I think I originally had someone else say that, maybe Sakura, but it's just so much funnier when it's Sasuke.
"Five years ago when?" Naruto was enjoying himself way too much.
I reworked these many times; I didn't want the identification tags to be too similar, and at the same time I wanted to have each remark attributed to a character. I had a lot of fun writing them, I'm not sure it shows.
Note how the one asking more than a rhetorical question is Naruto. Great big flag saying that he isn't shocked, even if he doesn't care all that much.
Shikamaru's eyebrow was downright inquisitive. If he decided he wanted to analyze the situation… This was bad. Better get it over with.
"After – you know." She made a significant glance at Sasuke, whose jaw clenched. "After you defeated the Sound Five."
To make things clearer – she's not addressing Sasuke, in fact she's addressing pretty much everyone but Sasuke, but she glances at him to let him know he'd better brace himself.
Immediately, she saw Sakura's hand disappear under the table, and Sasuke tilted his head, his black eyes accepting. Hinata knew that Naruto's leg had found Sasuke's ankle at the same time Sakura had grabbed the ex-missing nin's thigh. At least everyone's attention was focused on her. She really needed to have a talk with the three of them. She knew what they were, but they had no way to know that, what with their non-observational skills, and to act so blatantly in front of someone who might take it the wrong way – she had to let them know she was their ally.
I feel rather bleh about the second part of this paragraph, but I'm very much in love with the first part, particularly the 'accepting' expression in Sasuke's eyes (the construction of that sentence is the reason why I mention his eye-color, btw; I don't know it if shows, but I generally don't mention that, as we all know what color their eyes are, right? The only times I usually do mention it is when the PoV character has a crush on the character of whom they're speaking, or because it's a Hyuuga), and the show of Team Seven solidarity (and how it's directed at Sasuke here, and not distributed equally between the three: I OT3 them because it's rarely an equilateral triangle, no matter how balanced it is).
"Oh."
Slight dull in the general enthusiasm.
Lee looked confused, frowning, like he was trying to make sense of something but was missing pieces – all too true – and wasn't quite sure how to best word his question.
Hinata sighed. It was a small, soft sigh, but it was there. "Yes?"
I think I had first written Hinata's reaction as much more blatant; I changed it because it'd have felt OOC. However, even her patience has boundaries, and this is stretching them – but even then she takes it upon herself.
"But – weren't you – didn't you – wasn't it Naruto that–" Lee fumbled for words as the head of the Hyuuga morosely watched the last remnants of her privacy be torn away. Five years ago. Five.
'The head of the Hyuuga morosely watched'… In which I mix three types of speech and I like it. At first it was just 'Hinata' and if there was an adverb, it wasn't this one, but it was such a perfect opportunity for a falsely grandiloquent/grotesque contrast that I couldn't resist. I messed with italics in the 'Five years ago. Five' part as well, but in the end I decided against them entirely; I preferred the deadpan tone.
Lee is struggling with the idea that Hinata would have had a secret crush on Sasuke. It's a hint that Lee at least doesn't know exactly what happened between Sasuke and Naruto at the Valley, and that he remembers the event at Sasuke's Departure.
It was neither here nor there, she wanted to retort. She didn't, because Lee was by far the least responsible for the situation. And if she didn't say something, then everyone would assume things. Maybe that despair over Uchiha Sasuke going missing had driven her to such lengths. Hinata had no intention whatsoever of being taken for having been a Sasuke fangirl at any point of her existence – great for Sakura to have landed what she wanted, and greater for Ino to have got over it, but no. Just no. She drew the line there.
I think that if there's one thing Hinata might be unfair and maybe even vaguely contemptuous about, it would be that. I do think that her first reaction, should someone think she had a crush on Sasuke, would be 'Ew no'. I tried to make it sound like 'Hinata's pet peeve' more than like I'm bashing Ino and Sakura.
This is the thing Hinata is Hyuuga-haughty about. (Please tell me if you find the idea OOC; I know it may sound strange, but the way I see her it's perfectly IC.) Her reaction about Ino being better off entirely without Sasuke is related to the very unpleasant idea that they might think she (Hinata) was in fact crushing on Sasuke, and neither because she's jealous of Sakura landing Naruto (I hope I made that clear through the rest of the fic) or because she actually does think that.
Please note that she finds more disturbing the possibility of her friends thinking she had a crush on Sasuke than the likelier interpretation that she'd been driven to despair after Naruto being quasi killed.
At the other end of the table, Team Seven was distinctly ill-at-ease. Sai looked thoughtful.
Why Sai is thoughtful is open to interpretation, but mostly I needed to remind everyone (including me) that he was there, and after talking about Team Seven, it seemed a must.
Hinata smiled at them.
"It had nothing to do with you," she assured the lot of them, directing her words as much to the Uchiha as to Naruto. Sakura replied in kind, with a thankful smile. Maybe she should revise her previous judgment of the team's obliviousness.
Leaning back into a normal sitting position, she caught Shikamaru's calculating expression. This was very, very bad, she acknowledged.
Hopefully they'd get the hint that she didn't want to say any more.
…Wait, what was she thinking? Surely the last fifteen minutes had proven that even if one of them did get the hint, they wouldn't let common decency get in the way of their nosiness – research – right?
"I'm not going to tell you who," she added.
She waited for the inevitable response to her affirmation, someone quizzically opening their mouth to push some more.
That was me playing with my own expectations for what was about to happen; I knew, as soon as Hinata affirmed she wasn't going to speak, that someone would insist and that Hinata would only repeat the sentence.
"Who–"
This time, it was Temari, whom Shikamaru interrupted with a hand on her arm.
It made sense; of all of them, she was probably one of those who knew Hinata the least.
Again, I'm justifying as I write it.
"I'm not going to tell you," Hinata repeated with a smile. On Temari's left side, Lee fidgeted, and she saw Sasuke's eyebrows rising.
At first, there was something much less subtle as a reaction, but it was really too awful, so I changed it for that; the idea is that something in Hinata's tone or expression is slightly weird. Her smile is too distant (this is where you say Hi Kabuto).
The Sand kunoichi sent a narrow-eyed look at Shikamaru, who only removed his hand in answer. Temari's countenance relaxed. He'd tell her about it later, Hinata translated.
The silence dragged on for a few seconds, until Kiba started again in a falsely innocuous tone. He could have taken lessons from Naruto. Once more, she wanted to cringe.
"So… Five years, huh?"
"That's a long time," Shino blankly concurred. Hinata wondered what was coming now.
Team interaction! (:DDDD) I fail at it so very very bad when I'm writing Hinata, I never think of her in relation to her team, even when I'm writing her in the context of a mission, so I'm glad for this part.
On the other hand, it's the most painful to reread, because my mind is screaming BAD CHARACTERISATION BAD CHARACTERISATION OMG BAD CHARACTERISATION at the top of my lungs, so commentary here will be succinct.
"And here we were gettin' all worried about you!" There was a point of giddiness in Kiba's voice. "Planning to set you up on blind dates, an' all!"
I tried not to make him sound too much like Naruto. I tried.
Well, there was the bewilderment.
"You could have told us about it," Shino grumbled. Hinata's Shino-working-himself-into-a-miffed-huff alarm went off.
I like this sentence; I like showing that Hinata has a light humorous side. Inspiration for this sentence comes from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
askerian's Girls Have Needs Too; at one point Sasuke believes Sakura is going to tell him she's In Love with him and he tenses and gets ready to "hit the 'AVOID! AVOID!' button". Yeah, I don't know either how it came up, but when I was writing it the reference suddenly came up.
Besides, Shino-working-himself-into-a-miffed-huff is such a good memory. Of, you know, the only chapter we saw Hinata post-timeskip.
"Yeah, you could've," Kiba agreed. "That's what we're for! We're your friends!"
It would have gone over mightily. Hinata could just about picture the discussion. Even now, five years after the fact, Kiba was squealing in excitement.
"You needn't have kept it to yourself," Shino sulked on. "You don't have to hide from us."
She knew she'd been right not to worry about their feelings for her. She'd just have liked to have the evidence of their friendly-brotherly disposition at another time. One when she wouldn't have drowned in fully-deserved guilt.
"You know that, right?" Kiba checked.
The rest of the group had stepped down and let Hinata's teammates deal with the aftermath of the revelation. All thanks to Shino's quietness, which induced privacy and which even Kiba's relative buoyancy couldn't dispel. Not with Naruto starting again with the Team Seven comedy trio down the table, and Ino snarking back at Chouji and Shikamaru whenever she had the chance, exchanging conniving smirks with Temari during her commentary of the Naruto-Sakura-Sasuke scene, while Tenten did her best to keep Lee and Sai grounded in the discussion.
I needed to explain where everyone else was (mentally) during that discussion.
Hinata repressed the pang that Neji was missing.
"You know we value your trust, Hinata. You have no reason to be timid."
Here Kiba snorted and made to smack Shino on the head, but Shino dodged, and the hand only went sweeping past wiry hair (indoors meant no parka). "She's the head of the Hyuuga, you dork. She doesn't need any more of that 'asserting herself' crap."
Shino's dark glasses stared at Kiba. Hinata stifled her laughter.
"That 'asserting herself crap', as you say, is what allowed her to become the head of the Hyuuga in the first place."
"Oh? Like you're saying Hinata'd never have got confident without your help?" He was positively chortling.
"…No, I'm saying being encouraged into standing up for herself was the help."
"Sorry – isn't this just a liiiiittle contradictory here?" Kiba was playing - taunting. "My bug-sense is telling me that 'pressuring her into standing up' is very different from 'encouraging'."
Now I remember why I never write Shino and Kiba. I like the interaction here – including the incredibly corny humor – but I don't think it sounds like Kiba at all. He's like Naruto-Lite here.
"…Obviously." Shino's flat tone meant that he was taking Kiba's bait very seriously.
Hinata decided she'd let them get entangled in their own reasoning for long enough.
"Thank you, both of you," she said softly. As soon as she started talking the boys' gazes shot back to her, a similar air of attentiveness in Kiba's earnest features and Shino's composed body language. Once more, Hinata wondered what she'd done to deserve being treated like a leader. "I knew I could count on you to understand my reasons for keeping it private." Her lips twitched in a brief smile. "I'm sorry I never told you. But it was something I needed to do for myself."
Please understand. Hinata waited for their reaction. Please understand it had nothing to do with you.
Shino nodded once, gravely.
"We get it, Hinata," Kiba said. Then, hesitatingly, "You'll tell us, though? One day?"
Hinata looked away. Temari and Shikamaru were talking with Tenten without looking at each other, mannerisms easy and unconcerned; Sasuke was watching Sakura getting exasperated with Sai, his approving smirk getting more accentuated whenever Naruto's voice resonated in a snort.
Again with mentioning practically everyone: time for the wrap-up.
There would be months before Konoha settled back into its peaceful routine again, Hinata knew; months at least before the Hokage was pressured again into finding a successor, months before the Sand could spare a visit from its Kazekage, before Team Seven would have to face the first rumors, before some of them healed or jounins were chosen, before the Hyuuga council died out completely after endeavoring to wrestle her for power or circumvent her authority, before she could carry out her alliance with the future Hokage, the last of the Uchiha, and the rising star of the medic-nins of Konoha, before Neji's position was viable in the Hyuuga according to Hinata.
Before I'd decided more on the fic, I had Tenten as a jounin already (she was the only one, I think; I enjoy giving unexpected characters unexpected depths, and we know she's reasonably ambitious), but then I decided that their ranks hadn't changed (you may note that Hinata says nowhere she's a special jounin now, which I knew, but simply wasn't important enough for her to mention; at one point, I had written that the sex-related missions only applied to jounins, but then I decided that Hinata was a special jounin, so that had to go).
Part of that decision was because of my reluctance of meddling in canon affairs we knew nothing about (and still don't): is there a jounin exam? Are jounin nominated, instead? It was all very confusing.
Otoh, the special jounin thing was easy; there must be reason why they're special, right? So I decided that they'd be special because they'd be nominated solely by the Hokage, unlike normal jounin (who, in Celebrationverse, are selected either in an exam or by the Council or some combination of it).
In effect, they're different from normal jounins because they can't give or receive orders as easily; they're a bit on the side but they have less authority than jounin, but they can't be ordered around by jounins either. (in canon, special jounins are under jounins, which was something I didn't know originally; so I decided to translate that the way I explained.)
Something rang through her, steely like a kunai molded out of stubbornness. This was why she'd grown strong – the match which she'd never seen ending, which had sent her life spiraling into her control. Neji had stopped being blind, Kabuto had saved her life, and Naruto had sworn that when he'd be Hokage, he'd change the Hyuuga. Shino had reported the promise back to her.
Look how I mention the three men that 'shaped' her as far as Celebrationverse is concerned. (WTF imagery.)
If the head of the Hyuuga and the Hokage both bullied the traditions into bending their way – if other powerful clans approved – if the general opinion was swayed – if the Soke and the Bunke were suppressed… (Neji…) Provided she was strong enough…
A few months at least.
"I will," Hinata promised with a last thought to what the future had in store.
Will it surprise someone if I say originally, I planned to end the fic on that note.
The next part of the commentary will hopefully be done on Monday.
In the silence that surrounded her low words, Hinata measured that she'd succeeded in meshing the stutter of her early years and the nonsensical sarcasm of her days as a prisoner.
She faked a smile that gained in humor as she watched the astonishment on her friends' face, and thought that it was good, now they'd move on.
She hadn't been prepared for Shino's shifting in his chair.
"You – have?"
There was something in the alcohol. Or else everyone had drunk way too much of it, and no-one seemed the part, not even Ino, because the strain in Shino's tone would have been blatant even if she hadn't known him as well as she did. She inwardly cringed.
Up until now, I don't think Hinata realized Shino and Kiba would feel concerned for her about something like that.
It was also very fun to write this for Shino. I'm not a Shino writer/reader, and consequently I was interested in not showing him as monolithic as I usually tend to think of him. This Shino thinks of Hinata as kind of his little sister, and I enjoyed portraying him as somewhat vulnerable.
She threw a cautious glance his way. Between the two of them, Kiba was slowly blinking, his jaw dropped.
She nodded – and it seemed that everyone started speaking at once.
"You didn't tell us?" Kiba sounded about to cry.
My only explanation it that it comes as Teh Shock to Kiba.
Especially since he's never smelled another person on her – or so he thinks, because Neji and Hinata are part of the same family, they share more or less the same living space, so their smells are much more similar than any two random persons; also, what Kiba identifies as Hinata's smell is actually Hinata and Neji mingled, because the two of them have been sleeping together since she's twelve.
People's smell change at that age, and I'm supposing Kiba and Akamaru's sense of smell did too, so that's the reason he never noticed. (Yes, I thought about it.)
"Yay! WAY TO GO HINATA!" Ino shouted, bouncing in her seat.
That's totally what I'd have been thinking in their place. It made the more sense to have Ino say it because she's already slightly inebriated and I can't imagine any of the others saying that and remaining IC. Except for Naruto, but I planned on having him say something else already… *points*
"Told you so, now pay up," Naruto smirked at a stunned Sakura and a poisonous-looking Sasuke.
So why this line and not Ino's?
Naruto's interaction is directed toward his teammates. And SexGod!Naruto is one of my favorite pieces of fanon. (Also, the idea of Team Seven discussing Hinata's sex life is crack.) Naruto Knowing that Hinata's not a virgin parallels Hinata's intuition earlier – I like drawing parallels between the two of them even though I don't ship them ever since Sakura told Naruto that Hinata 'was a lot like him' when she was fighting Neji.
He's also the only one not taken aback by the news.
In my fanon, Naruto and Hinata are also the two most consciously sensual characters and the most ready to accept their sensations and urges, even if they absolutely don't plan on acting upon them, at least they never deny their existence.
Sakura being stunned is pretty straight-forward, mostly because she'd never guessed Hinata would have had sex than because she doubted Naruto's intuition.
Coincidentally, my Sakura tends to be rather scientifically-minded; I try not to overdo it, but she's definitely not the one who relies most on her intuitions of the lot. Part of the reason is simply because she's a medic-nin, and thus, to my simple mind, = logic. The other part is just my 'I think I'll go and take a jab at gender stereotypes before breakfast' bias showing itself.
On the other hand, Sasuke looks 'poisonous'. I used a word that, to me, has 'feminine' connotations, because he's not just furious at Naruto for winning the bet; he's jealous.
In the Team Seven centric more or less immediate sequel to this I started writing several times before giving up in frustration (now it's in the 'ded wip' folder), I explored a little of Sasuke's psyche (which I fail at, one of the reasons the fic never was finished) and it turned out that one of Sasuke's first thoughts/suspicions regarded Naruto. The reason he's not looking 'murderous' is because he doesn't actually believe it, but he still doesn't like having the thought crossing his mind.
And it's also that Sasuke is very ambivalent regarding Naruto's ease toward sex.
"Good for you," Shikamaru commented with a half-smile.
Showing Shikamaru as feeling such a private issue is something of his business was a challenge if I wanted to keep him IC, but I think I managed, mostly, because the half-smile makes him sound more 'adult' than the others.
'How bothersome' was never an option.
"How come you never told us about it?" Tenten demanded.
"It was during the war, wasn't it?" Chouji guessed.
Once more, I have a boy be the perceptive one.
Hinata chewed on her lip – she'd have to watch out not to let it become a habit – but everyone registered Chouji's quiet question. The implications immediately dampened their good mood.
What I like about this is showing that Hinata is never satisfied with herself, and is always watching the way she behaved.
So much for being done with it, but she supposed she had no choice. And honestly, if her formerly-private life could keep the spotlights off Team Seven, well, she'd just endure it, even if her head exploded with all the blood rushing there.
I tried to make it sound less 'Hinata viewing herself as martyr' and more 'Hinata viewing the situation as a mission'.
"It wasn't – one of those missions, right?"
The anguish she could see in poor Lee's eyes threatened to spill over. The group stiffened, and the look Temari sent her was distinctly compassionate.
Lee hadn't spoken yet. Besides, idealistic or not, he's a ninja and I think he must know of how things sometime go, no matter how he disapproves.
To me, there are many reasons behind Temari's expression, but personal experience is not one of them. I can't see Temari in those settings and I don't want to. :)
This, luckily, was a question she could answer.
"No, that's for the ANBU." That was what the ANBU and the Roots were for, but she kept her knowledge of the grimmest aspects of the inner workings of the village to herself. Beside, her evident bloodline limit – articulated to the fact that she absolutely and unapologetically sucked at genjutsu – ruled her out anyway.
I reworked this paragraph many times, not so much because of the writing style but because of the precise kind of background I wanted to set.
She's oversimplifying, btw. As a head of clan and a Torture and Interrogation-nin, she's aware of more bleak things that the vast majority of the Rookies.
For my reasoning behind Hinata sucking at genjutsu, see this dvd commentary. (basically I want her to have a weakness, and genjutsu allows for pretty pretty mind fucks, and according to the data books Hinata's bad at genjutsu as a genin, plus breaking of the gender stereotypes.)
They relaxed; Hinata's soft, coolly-spoken explanation has reassured them. She… should not have found their concern as touching as she did. What she should have done was divert the topic on an unsuspecting victim – like Lee, for instance, who blushed almost as much as she did and who'd have been the perfect decoy, but Hinata couldn't bring herself to do that.
"Sai?" she heard Sakura ask. "What's wrong?"
Oh. Hinata hoped she hadn't brought back painful memories – he'd been in Roots, and he was exactly the kind of porcelain doll that would be sent on those missions… Oh no, no, no. Sai had changed during the two years the war had lasted; she didn't want to think she'd recalled his days as a tool… But he was tucked between Tenten and Naruto; she could only watch the faces of Lee and Sasuke, who were facing him, to guess his reaction.
'Porcelain doll.' Snerk. I had the Sai/Sasuke comparison firmly in mind when I wrote that AND I NEED TO GET MY WHORE!SASUKE ANGST FIX SOMEHOW.
(If you read A Day in the Life, you'll know that there's a briefly mentioned OC who shares quite a few characteristics with Sasuke – missing-nin, too quiet, mysterious yet obviously dramatic past – whose coworkers/teammates judge is all-too-likely to whore himself out if it meant getting more missions. Just replace 'getting more missions' with 'getting closer to Itachi' and you'll get one of my basic premises for writing Sasuke. HI CANON CREEPY SNAKEMEN WITH TONGUE COVER-PORN.)
That was my big moment of managing to work Sai into the scene. I was very proud.
"Sai?"
Hinata's shoulders hunched, but she refused to let remorse claim her, and she bent forward to try and see Sai, matching Kiba's efforts, briefly wishing she could just use the Byakugan.
She doesn't because it'd be the rudest thing ever. I was mildly unhappy that I couldn't explain the reason, but even mentioning it seemed off; Hinata knows it'd be the rudest thing ever, she's not even going to think it.
Then he looked at her. It was a painful smile.
"You've been a prisoner, haven't you?"
Sai is the one mentioning this possibility because none of the others wanted to envisage it yet. Some of them wouldn't have thought of it on their own for a while, but others – Shikamaru, Temari at least – would have come to it.
And this shows that Sai has grown away from how emotionally-crippled (or however you think of it) he was over two years ago.
As if a switch had been turned, the group tensed; Sasuke's head jerked towards her, eyes piercing her from his far away seat. Kiba's face was pale with dismay.
Wha-
"You killed Kabuto," Sasuke's clipped voice said.
The undertones were obvious. There was a sharp intake of breath from her right – not Kiba whom she'd have seen, not Tenten – Shino, Sai or Naruto. There was a whimper from Sakura. Everyone else was frozen. Everyone knew Kabuto.
It was Naruto. Sasuke, Naruto and Sakura are those who know the most about Kabuto.
None among the others had made the connection as quickly as Sasuke; that's what I tried to show when I mentioned his reaction (if it's there, it implies that it was the most visible), and then everyone else's reaction after he said it. And he's just blunt and truth-oriented enough that he'd totally call it in front of everyone.
"No!" Hinata denied. She saw Temari flinch. Her protest sounded too loud and too fierce.
Name-dropping moment. I think it gives more emotional weight to the scene, so that's why I always tried to give one or more reactions, but not too many because it would have only achieved the reverse and been boring as hell. Besides, Temari is one of the most stoic of the characters present in the scene, so to have her react was indicative how wrongwrongwrong Hinata's reaction was.
"Hinata…" Ino's hand went to her shoulder, probably in a soothing gesture, and Ino's voice was more subdued than before.
Hinata had never been so red in her life.
She shook Ino's hand off her shoulder without an apology.
I wanted to use the word 'agitated' at some point in this scene. I didn't manage because it felt like it interrupted the flow and it was more 'tell' than 'show'. Usually I don't worry too much about that, but here it just seemed unnecessary – yes, we can see that she's agitated already. It'd have just been self-indulgent, because I happen to like the word.
Originally I'd made a bigger deal out of Hinata's lack of apology, but it seemed like it made her too prim, fussy and vaguely snobbish, so I kept it simple, so as to still indicate that in spite of her… agitation… (:D) her rudeness is something Hinata keeps track of. Remember when I said she's never good enough for her standards?
"No, he didn't – he never – Kabuto never raped me!"
…And she probably shouldn't have sounded that defensive either, but this was striking a little too close home for comfort.
She is taking that like an accusation – one made against Kabuto and one made against her. Because, as said later, her views on sex with Kabuto were conflicted at best and she can't help feeling that at least some of her reactions at the time, or regrets, or dreams, or whatever, where tantamount to giving in; she can't help feeling that if something had happened, she'd have 'let' him.
Make no mistake, if something had happened between the two of them, given their situation, in a fic the warning would be at the very least 'dub-con' if not plain non-con.
There's no 'letting' in rape, but Hinata can't help but think of it like that.
"I wasn't raped," she continued more calmly in the ringing silence. "I wasn't raped. Neither by Kabuto nor by Orochimaru or by anyone. There was nothing like that. The interrogations – everything was entirely platonic."
I made several corrections there. At one point I'd written 'the interrogations were entirely platonic'. I added the 'everything' because Hinata is very confused about the issue of Kabuto and she prefers just throw it into a big category rather than dissect every single aspect of it.
She gave Uchiha Sasuke a look that would have been labeled 'defiant death glare of doom' on anyone else, but Hinata didn't glare. Sasuke didn't look completely convinced, and he pursed his lips in a way that Hinata thought meant 'I'll let you off the hook right now but don't think this is the last of it' (it was mostly directed towards Naruto), not that she could blame him.
I needed a reason why Hinata would be familiar enough with Sasuke's expressions to interpret them accurately, and learning them from watching his interaction with Naruto seemed probable enough, especially given the expression.
"Sasuke-kun?" Sakura asked for a confirmation.
So nobody had missed their little exchange. Goody.
Well, I don't think it's OOC for Hinata to be a little snide in the privacy of her mind at that moment.
The resident expert of All Things Sound Except Mind shrugged.
I know nobody cares about that line. It's one of my favorites in the whole fic.
"T's Kabuto we're talking about," Naruto intervened. "That guy was always a piece of work. …Er, not that I think it's normal to rape your prisoner, or that I think you need to be seriously fucked up not to want to do Hina – guys, aren't you supposed to shut me up when I do that? Sakura-chan? Bastard? Guuuuuyyyyyssssss…."
Naruto's whine couldn't cover Sasuke's snort or Sakura's giggles; the pink-haired girl had hidden her face behind her hands.
<3 Team Seven. I needed something to break the tension, and they did it all on their own.
The tension had disappeared, but Hinata couldn't even be mortified by Naruto's comments. She was too busy getting herself under control.
Of course Sasuke wouldn't believe her – and unless Shikamaru and Temari were a lot more stupid than geniuses and very clever people were supposed to be, they wouldn't believe her either. Sasuke had lived for three years with Kabuto, he couldn't possibly ignore his penchants for mind games – after all, he'd fled, hadn't he? He couldn't have been as completely under Orochimaru's control as she'd heard at the time.
Everything was entirely platonic.
Cue the obligatory flashback scene.
Btw, I brainstormed on my using the word 'platonic', because I come from Harry Potter fandom, and 'platonic' has come to have its own special HP-fandom-only meaning; pretty much the last thing I wanted was to be reminded of the Harry/Hermione ship as I wrote this.
As platonic as it was to have someone torturing you for weeks, with carefully measured control in their every move, smile, look, and a soft, soft voice when things were cutting or growing through her, and the hands of a healer. Platonic.
Everything was about games with Kabuto, and thankfully, Hinata was a lot more used to them than Sasuke had been. She'd been four years older than he'd been when he'd left Konoha, and she hadn't been a puppet to a godlike older brother. She'd been aware that everything about Kabuto was lies and manipulations.
My subtle attempts at giving the reader a timeline. (After several months spent on Celebrationverse, I think I can sincerely say, timelines are evil.)
Only marginally less blatant than my paralleling between Naruto and Hinata is my comparing Sasuke and Hinata. It comes from the idea that I think neither of them finds themselves entirely adequate.
And sometimes his hand would brush against her skin, or he'd give her a sunny smile, or he'd frown when he saw that his experiment hadn't gone the way it was supposed to, and she knew that he was slowly but surely driving her to paranoia.
There were worse fates.
There had been days, she'd felt like her breath was suspended to Kabuto's lips; days when she whimpered and he held her in his arms, letting her blood drench his clothes; days when he stroked her shoulders almost like a massage, which Hinata hated; days when her thighs parted under his gaze; days when she would have hated herself for not kissing him back if he had tried.
I've reworked this so many times it's not even funny.
So of course she'd been aware of how much of an unspoken point he made it that he'd never done anything sexual to her. It was always hanging above her head, part promise part threat.
(Not that he needed to; Hinata was all too aware of the fact that everything between them had been laced with chilling sensuality.)
I could've phrased that better, I think, because though the words 'chilling sensuality' convey precisely what I wanted to say and they're at the end of the sentence, I'm not actually all that glad about how they sound. The parenthesis was necessary because of the next sentence, even if it'd have carried more weight without.
And for that, she was pathetically grateful.
He tortured her and healed her and didn't come for – days? – and brought sweet warm food and let her take a bath and told her stories and smiled and gave her a cup of hot chocolate and said that he'd saved her life during the Sound's attack years before and announced that Kiba had been killed and didn't touch her and watched her from behind his silver glasses and broke her and was her only focus on reality and she'd killed him.
Reworking things way too many times? Check here too.
I'm very happy about this whole passage, too. I tried to make it about as comfortable-creepy as I could and to completely break Hinata's sense of time. I continue to like the casual mention of Kabuto casually mentioning that Kiba has been killed, too; at first it wasn’t situated right after Kabuto saying he'd saved Hinata's life, but I thought it worked much better with that contrast.
She'd brought the glasses back with her; when she'd been found by Nara Shikaku she'd been dazed and soaked in blood not her own. Even with her Byakugan activated, she hadn't been able to avoid all trouble on her journey back from Hidden Sound; she understood that she'd succeeded at all because the war against Konoha and Suna had decimated Orochimaru's ranks as well. The only chuunin who caught up with her wasn't someone important, and he had no idea that the Hyuuga existed; believing she was a genjutsu specialist, he chose to engage her in close combat.
I decided on Nara Shikaku because I wanted Random Tertiary Character, and I like the idea of it being someone that wouldn't know Hinata personally, but through their kid.
The inspiration for the mentioned fight comes from one of my wip that never got done. I thought that someone who didn't know about the Hyuuga would see a girl with freaky eyes and thus imagine that she'd use genjutsu, and like I said, my Hinata is awful at genjutsu; I thought it'd be funny that she'd be able to stay alive because someone would peg her for a genjutsu type.
(He was stronger and healthier than her, smiling at her like a predator – probably a snake – at a small weakened trembling mammal. Mongooses were small mammals, and Hinata had killed him.)
One of the most tired-out metaphors ever, but I like it. Inspiration for its use comes from Terry Pratchett's Discworld, where one of the characters (Magrat), who's consistently described as mousy, fights against two snake-like opponents; she's backed against a corner, and there comes the phrase about how mongooses are small mammals. That's the reason why the enemy nin is said to be 'probably like a snake', which is me cheating with my comparisons to make the use of the metaphor possible.
When she'd seen Nara Shikaku she'd thought for a moment she was seeing Shikamaru. Kabuto had said Shikamaru had been killed. He hadn't said that of either Naruto or Neji.
Explanation: Hinata believes in Neji and Naruto more than in anyone else. She would refuse to believe they died and would stop believing anything of what Kabuto says (even if she knows he's lying, the rest of what he says is believable to her; and even if she fears for Naruto and Neji, she'll refuse to think they may be dead, because Naruto is her role-model and her inspiration, and Neji is what she wants to be as a ninja, and her responsibility as her protective shadow). The issue is better explained in The Return.
Hinata then did the only thing she could think of, and put all her might in shaking the genjutsu. It was a powerful genjutsu – it had to be, when she could feel Kabuto's glasses in her pocket – Kabuto was a master in genjutsu.
-> Why I Make My Hinata Suck At Genjutsu. Conversely, why I like the idea of KabuHina.
She couldn't remember Shikaku's reaction, or the darkness claiming her as she'd outdone her last reserves of energy, trying to break the restrictions that had been put on her chakra – nothing except the determination that next time she wouldn't let Kabuto pull her into an illusion, next time she'd break his glasses into his eyes and slash him a wide scarlet grin, next time she'd escape.
She'd woken up to realize it hadn't been genjutsu. The hospital room had been quiet and blank, with Tsunade-sama and Morino Ibiki looking down at her. Hinata's first question had been for the blood-stained spectacles. They were intact, on her bedside. Then Hinata let Tsunade-sama and Morino Ibiki do everything that was needed to make sure she was what she claimed to be. She liked Ibiki a lot more than she'd ever liked Kabuto, but of course it wasn't comparable.
Here is the final paragraph of the Department of Backstory.
I tend to put a lot of backstory in my fics (at least that's how I feel, I'm generally worried about rambling too much about it), because oftentimes the backstory comes to me as I write it, at least in the details. It's not planned, because I can't write things I've thought too long about – I'm unable to write it, I'm blocked because it never feels like it's doing justice to the complexities I've imagined, or because I'm always running into a plot hole. I'm more a go-with-the-flow type of writer, so that's how backstory comes to me.
It's the only thing that comes easy to me and which I don't angst about, because I don't think about it until I'm typing it, and then it always feels like the best idea in the world omg.
And yet I always feel as if it's one of the most important things in a story, because that's what gives it depth and credibility.
I just thought Ibiki there would be cool and would make sense, plus it allowed me to put a sentence that'd imply how nicely twisted Hinata's feelings regarding Kabuto are.
These memories weren't welcome in this cheery restaurant, alive and well, with her friends and their embarrassing conversation, but they were an important part of her. Besides, the glasses hadn't left Hinata since. Maybe she'd show them to Sasuke later.
Casual mention of emotional scarring, check. Hammer-like transition, also check.
She could ask him what had been his stance towards Kabuto's – maybe in his case Orochimaru's – poisonous gifts. Given what she'd heard at the time and what she'd learned since, she doubted he'd turned them down.
It made sense, in a way; Sasuke was looking for power, so he took what was offered to him. Hinata had been nothing more than an experimental subject, and she never accepted Kabuto's gifts without the torturous knowledge that the more she did, the more she was relying on him, until one day would come when she'd be unable to survive without the blanket, and the bath, and the hot chocolate.
Hinata is always second-guessing herself.
Every time Hinata had met Kabuto's amused/sorry look, she'd blushed because she knew he could read her about as well as Neji always had, and he'd been entertained – startled at first maybe – by her efforts to remain her own person. Sometimes she'd break and take the favor, partly appalled by the feeling that she was selling her soul for a honeysuckle-scented bath, partly relishing in the temporary return to human decorum more than the fleeting physical comfort, partly steeling her pride and sharpening her confidence.
One of my favorite paragraphs in the fic, even if the end of the last sentence never came out quite like I wanted it to. I remember spending a lot of time poring over my thesaurus and reflecting about exactly what I had in mind when it came to choosing the adjectives: 'amused', 'sorry', 'entertained', 'startled', 'temporary', 'fleeting'. It sounds like nothing – at least I hope it does – but I went through many questions if I was characterizing the two of them right, if I wasn't over-dramatizing Kabuto's reactions…
The honeysuckle is totally not chosen at random, btw; it's got 'honey' in it, and 'suckle', and it's a vegetal that can grow in the wild and which has parasitic tendencies. There was never a doubt as to whether I was going to mention it or some other flower. (Also, it smells sweet and intoxicating.)
"So, when was it?" Kiba asked in a detached tone that was as natural as Tsunade's youthful looks.
Damn, I feel like I'm quoting/referring to something there, and I have no idea what. That's frustrating, I hate when I don't know what's influencing part of my writing.
Nevertheless, Kiba faking a detached tone <3.
"Who was it?" Now, if even Shikamaru decided to have fun at her expense…
I wanted to say he had a half-smile again, but it'd already been the case and I didn't want to be too repetitive, particularly with characters who didn't have a lot of fic-space, even if it was the only way I could imagine him say that and not be OOC.
So to counter the 'omg so OOC' feeling, I had no other choice but tackle it directly and have Hinata comment on it.
Hinata would have liked to lash out, but one doesn't lash out against one's teammates unless one is a member of Team Seven, and the last thing she needed was to have Temari tease her on Shikamaru's behalf as well.
Every time I reread this passage, I find it unclear. (it wasn't when I wrote it and checked the fic to fix mistakes, I swear.) Obviously when Hinata thinks 'teammates' she's referring to Kiba's interjection; only the second part of the sentence concerns Shikamaru. Just thought I'd clear that up.
Lee himself was starting to smile.
"It was when that envoy of Hidden Mist ended up at the hospital, wasn't it." Tenten sounded unbearably smug. "That red-haired one, two years ago – a year and a half."
"It wasn't." Hinata wanted to retort that not everyone lost their virginity to a nin from another village, but she wasn't half mad enough to imply things in front of Temari.
Bring Your Own Subtext. (what I had in mind at the time, though, was possible Kankuro/Tenten and/or Temari's deflowering of Shikamaru, which, unlike KankuTen, is always likely to come up in the rest of Celebrationverse.)
And wouldn't you be slightly snide in Hinata's case? (I know the whole situation is teetering on the verge of OOC/unbelievable, but I so wanted to write The Rookies Learn Hinata Has Been Experienced For Longer Than Them. It only took me, oh, 7'000 words before I got into the part of the scene that was the reason I even started writing the fic in the first place.)
"Don't tell me you've been–" Naruto's eyebrows waggled "–celebrating?"
The other character I can imagine saying that line is Ino, and I wanted it to be Naruto for the Naruto-Knows-about-sex thing and the Hinata-Naruto connection.
Even the double punch he received from his teammates – Naruto had leant so far over the table to be able to look at her that Sasuke barely needed to move – wasn't enough to soothe the burn of Hinata's humiliation. Mostly because said teammates were watching her. Also because Naruto's scenario wasn't entirely off the mark. He was just a few years late, and it had in fact been about relief and acknowledgment, but he wasn't all that wrong. Ideally, she'd even have celebrated before joining her friends, and –
Hinata squirmed in her seat. She hadn't done that for years.
Keeping track of what she's doing wrong. She's not making a huge inner deal of it, but she's marking them down neatly in a part of her mind.
"It was a long time ago."
It was apparently a wrong thing to say, because she could feel her friends' curiosity positively shot up. Hinata envisaged using a transmutation technique, then discarded the idea. It'd only encourage them, and Hinata did not fancy fending off their combined efforts. Shikamaru would be able to hold her still with her own shadow, and then – escaping the grasp of Sakura and Naruto was a risible thought.
Originally I had Hinata imagining Ino being directly involved there, but it ended up weighing the rhythm down – Hinata wasn't sure what Ino could and couldn't do as far as jutsus were concerned, and I wasn't either, due to my not mentioning whether, for instance, Ino has had her arm cut off or still there but useless. Gratuitous moment of NaruSaku love.
"When?"
Ino had been the youngest of the girls to have sex; Tenten was the first, but Tenten was a year older than Ino, and a handful of months after Tenten's secret had been discovered (way too easily for a ninja, in itself a proof that Tenten rather liked the idea of showing off to the other girls), Ino and her then-boyfriend had "gone all the way". It had ended badly with the boyfriend, but Ino had still used it to lord over Sakura. It probably explained Ino's rapture.
Even when I'm not writing Ino->Saku, I'm writing Ino->Saku. I may be hopeless.
I think Ino would be the type who'd want to always be the first, and she felt Tenten's announcement was some sort of challenge, but I'm afraid my only explanation for Tenten is that she's one year older. And maybe she feels more mature to me than the others? (Don't make me speak about the 'then-boyfriend' debacle, please. I'll just pretend it never happened, or it's a private reference among the girls that Hinata isn't explaining.)
"Two years, three?"
Chouji's conciliatory tone held a hint of fascination.
Train wreck. Also, Chouji is trying to give her a way to give a vague answer by specifying only a period of time.
"More?" Shino coldly interjected.
Hinata didn't trust her voice to answer. In fact, she didn't want to answer at all. But Shino had a way to cling onto grudges that always made her feel rather guilty, and she was perfectly aware that soothing Shino's hurt out of guilt for Neji was not one of the healthiest things around, but she took it upon herself. Neji wouldn't let her do this (try and make him feel better) for him – to him – anyway. Probably he wouldn't even use it against her.
One of the reasons I mentioned Neji there is because, in other circumstances, I would easily have Neji say that. ("More?" Neji coldly interjected.) I have no trouble at all envisioning it. So I'm justifying my Neji/Shino assimilation by having Hinata do the same.
'Probably he wouldn't even use it against her' wasn't in the first draft, but I added it as a hint that NejiHina would be considered dysfunctional by many people; Hinata feels a twinge of regret about that.
"How much?" Sakura called when Hinata's tiny nod went unseen by half the table.
Even at the time, I think that was pure name-dropping. The question felt relatively neutral that many characters could ask it, and Sakura hadn't spoken for a long time. And it was a necessary question.
She had no choice.
"Five years ago," Hinata muttered. (And she'd been getting some on a regular basis since then, but she banned the thought far far away.)
The parenthesis was added later, so it'd be clear from this moment on that it hadn't been a fluke or a one-time thing.
"Five years ago?" The disclosure startled Temari out of her amused silence.
"Five years? Five?" (Ino, choking.)
"You were twelve?" (A mildly hysterical Tenten.)
"You were twelve?" Sasuke's disbelief shone through.
I love how Sasuke is unintentionally a
"Five years ago when?" Naruto was enjoying himself way too much.
I reworked these many times; I didn't want the identification tags to be too similar, and at the same time I wanted to have each remark attributed to a character. I had a lot of fun writing them, I'm not sure it shows.
Note how the one asking more than a rhetorical question is Naruto. Great big flag saying that he isn't shocked, even if he doesn't care all that much.
Shikamaru's eyebrow was downright inquisitive. If he decided he wanted to analyze the situation… This was bad. Better get it over with.
"After – you know." She made a significant glance at Sasuke, whose jaw clenched. "After you defeated the Sound Five."
To make things clearer – she's not addressing Sasuke, in fact she's addressing pretty much everyone but Sasuke, but she glances at him to let him know he'd better brace himself.
Immediately, she saw Sakura's hand disappear under the table, and Sasuke tilted his head, his black eyes accepting. Hinata knew that Naruto's leg had found Sasuke's ankle at the same time Sakura had grabbed the ex-missing nin's thigh. At least everyone's attention was focused on her. She really needed to have a talk with the three of them. She knew what they were, but they had no way to know that, what with their non-observational skills, and to act so blatantly in front of someone who might take it the wrong way – she had to let them know she was their ally.
I feel rather bleh about the second part of this paragraph, but I'm very much in love with the first part, particularly the 'accepting' expression in Sasuke's eyes (the construction of that sentence is the reason why I mention his eye-color, btw; I don't know it if shows, but I generally don't mention that, as we all know what color their eyes are, right? The only times I usually do mention it is when the PoV character has a crush on the character of whom they're speaking, or because it's a Hyuuga), and the show of Team Seven solidarity (and how it's directed at Sasuke here, and not distributed equally between the three: I OT3 them because it's rarely an equilateral triangle, no matter how balanced it is).
"Oh."
Slight dull in the general enthusiasm.
Lee looked confused, frowning, like he was trying to make sense of something but was missing pieces – all too true – and wasn't quite sure how to best word his question.
Hinata sighed. It was a small, soft sigh, but it was there. "Yes?"
I think I had first written Hinata's reaction as much more blatant; I changed it because it'd have felt OOC. However, even her patience has boundaries, and this is stretching them – but even then she takes it upon herself.
"But – weren't you – didn't you – wasn't it Naruto that–" Lee fumbled for words as the head of the Hyuuga morosely watched the last remnants of her privacy be torn away. Five years ago. Five.
'The head of the Hyuuga morosely watched'… In which I mix three types of speech and I like it. At first it was just 'Hinata' and if there was an adverb, it wasn't this one, but it was such a perfect opportunity for a falsely grandiloquent/grotesque contrast that I couldn't resist. I messed with italics in the 'Five years ago. Five' part as well, but in the end I decided against them entirely; I preferred the deadpan tone.
Lee is struggling with the idea that Hinata would have had a secret crush on Sasuke. It's a hint that Lee at least doesn't know exactly what happened between Sasuke and Naruto at the Valley, and that he remembers the event at Sasuke's Departure.
It was neither here nor there, she wanted to retort. She didn't, because Lee was by far the least responsible for the situation. And if she didn't say something, then everyone would assume things. Maybe that despair over Uchiha Sasuke going missing had driven her to such lengths. Hinata had no intention whatsoever of being taken for having been a Sasuke fangirl at any point of her existence – great for Sakura to have landed what she wanted, and greater for Ino to have got over it, but no. Just no. She drew the line there.
I think that if there's one thing Hinata might be unfair and maybe even vaguely contemptuous about, it would be that. I do think that her first reaction, should someone think she had a crush on Sasuke, would be 'Ew no'. I tried to make it sound like 'Hinata's pet peeve' more than like I'm bashing Ino and Sakura.
This is the thing Hinata is Hyuuga-haughty about. (Please tell me if you find the idea OOC; I know it may sound strange, but the way I see her it's perfectly IC.) Her reaction about Ino being better off entirely without Sasuke is related to the very unpleasant idea that they might think she (Hinata) was in fact crushing on Sasuke, and neither because she's jealous of Sakura landing Naruto (I hope I made that clear through the rest of the fic) or because she actually does think that.
Please note that she finds more disturbing the possibility of her friends thinking she had a crush on Sasuke than the likelier interpretation that she'd been driven to despair after Naruto being quasi killed.
At the other end of the table, Team Seven was distinctly ill-at-ease. Sai looked thoughtful.
Why Sai is thoughtful is open to interpretation, but mostly I needed to remind everyone (including me) that he was there, and after talking about Team Seven, it seemed a must.
Hinata smiled at them.
"It had nothing to do with you," she assured the lot of them, directing her words as much to the Uchiha as to Naruto. Sakura replied in kind, with a thankful smile. Maybe she should revise her previous judgment of the team's obliviousness.
Leaning back into a normal sitting position, she caught Shikamaru's calculating expression. This was very, very bad, she acknowledged.
Hopefully they'd get the hint that she didn't want to say any more.
…Wait, what was she thinking? Surely the last fifteen minutes had proven that even if one of them did get the hint, they wouldn't let common decency get in the way of their nosiness – research – right?
"I'm not going to tell you who," she added.
She waited for the inevitable response to her affirmation, someone quizzically opening their mouth to push some more.
That was me playing with my own expectations for what was about to happen; I knew, as soon as Hinata affirmed she wasn't going to speak, that someone would insist and that Hinata would only repeat the sentence.
"Who–"
This time, it was Temari, whom Shikamaru interrupted with a hand on her arm.
It made sense; of all of them, she was probably one of those who knew Hinata the least.
Again, I'm justifying as I write it.
"I'm not going to tell you," Hinata repeated with a smile. On Temari's left side, Lee fidgeted, and she saw Sasuke's eyebrows rising.
At first, there was something much less subtle as a reaction, but it was really too awful, so I changed it for that; the idea is that something in Hinata's tone or expression is slightly weird. Her smile is too distant (this is where you say Hi Kabuto).
The Sand kunoichi sent a narrow-eyed look at Shikamaru, who only removed his hand in answer. Temari's countenance relaxed. He'd tell her about it later, Hinata translated.
The silence dragged on for a few seconds, until Kiba started again in a falsely innocuous tone. He could have taken lessons from Naruto. Once more, she wanted to cringe.
"So… Five years, huh?"
"That's a long time," Shino blankly concurred. Hinata wondered what was coming now.
Team interaction! (:DDDD) I fail at it so very very bad when I'm writing Hinata, I never think of her in relation to her team, even when I'm writing her in the context of a mission, so I'm glad for this part.
On the other hand, it's the most painful to reread, because my mind is screaming BAD CHARACTERISATION BAD CHARACTERISATION OMG BAD CHARACTERISATION at the top of my lungs, so commentary here will be succinct.
"And here we were gettin' all worried about you!" There was a point of giddiness in Kiba's voice. "Planning to set you up on blind dates, an' all!"
I tried not to make him sound too much like Naruto. I tried.
Well, there was the bewilderment.
"You could have told us about it," Shino grumbled. Hinata's Shino-working-himself-into-a-miffed-huff alarm went off.
I like this sentence; I like showing that Hinata has a light humorous side. Inspiration for this sentence comes from
askerian's Girls Have Needs Too; at one point Sasuke believes Sakura is going to tell him she's In Love with him and he tenses and gets ready to "hit the 'AVOID! AVOID!' button". Yeah, I don't know either how it came up, but when I was writing it the reference suddenly came up.Besides, Shino-working-himself-into-a-miffed-huff is such a good memory. Of, you know, the only chapter we saw Hinata post-timeskip.
"Yeah, you could've," Kiba agreed. "That's what we're for! We're your friends!"
It would have gone over mightily. Hinata could just about picture the discussion. Even now, five years after the fact, Kiba was squealing in excitement.
"You needn't have kept it to yourself," Shino sulked on. "You don't have to hide from us."
She knew she'd been right not to worry about their feelings for her. She'd just have liked to have the evidence of their friendly-brotherly disposition at another time. One when she wouldn't have drowned in fully-deserved guilt.
"You know that, right?" Kiba checked.
The rest of the group had stepped down and let Hinata's teammates deal with the aftermath of the revelation. All thanks to Shino's quietness, which induced privacy and which even Kiba's relative buoyancy couldn't dispel. Not with Naruto starting again with the Team Seven comedy trio down the table, and Ino snarking back at Chouji and Shikamaru whenever she had the chance, exchanging conniving smirks with Temari during her commentary of the Naruto-Sakura-Sasuke scene, while Tenten did her best to keep Lee and Sai grounded in the discussion.
I needed to explain where everyone else was (mentally) during that discussion.
Hinata repressed the pang that Neji was missing.
"You know we value your trust, Hinata. You have no reason to be timid."
Here Kiba snorted and made to smack Shino on the head, but Shino dodged, and the hand only went sweeping past wiry hair (indoors meant no parka). "She's the head of the Hyuuga, you dork. She doesn't need any more of that 'asserting herself' crap."
Shino's dark glasses stared at Kiba. Hinata stifled her laughter.
"That 'asserting herself crap', as you say, is what allowed her to become the head of the Hyuuga in the first place."
"Oh? Like you're saying Hinata'd never have got confident without your help?" He was positively chortling.
"…No, I'm saying being encouraged into standing up for herself was the help."
"Sorry – isn't this just a liiiiittle contradictory here?" Kiba was playing - taunting. "My bug-sense is telling me that 'pressuring her into standing up' is very different from 'encouraging'."
Now I remember why I never write Shino and Kiba. I like the interaction here – including the incredibly corny humor – but I don't think it sounds like Kiba at all. He's like Naruto-Lite here.
"…Obviously." Shino's flat tone meant that he was taking Kiba's bait very seriously.
Hinata decided she'd let them get entangled in their own reasoning for long enough.
"Thank you, both of you," she said softly. As soon as she started talking the boys' gazes shot back to her, a similar air of attentiveness in Kiba's earnest features and Shino's composed body language. Once more, Hinata wondered what she'd done to deserve being treated like a leader. "I knew I could count on you to understand my reasons for keeping it private." Her lips twitched in a brief smile. "I'm sorry I never told you. But it was something I needed to do for myself."
Please understand. Hinata waited for their reaction. Please understand it had nothing to do with you.
Shino nodded once, gravely.
"We get it, Hinata," Kiba said. Then, hesitatingly, "You'll tell us, though? One day?"
Hinata looked away. Temari and Shikamaru were talking with Tenten without looking at each other, mannerisms easy and unconcerned; Sasuke was watching Sakura getting exasperated with Sai, his approving smirk getting more accentuated whenever Naruto's voice resonated in a snort.
Again with mentioning practically everyone: time for the wrap-up.
There would be months before Konoha settled back into its peaceful routine again, Hinata knew; months at least before the Hokage was pressured again into finding a successor, months before the Sand could spare a visit from its Kazekage, before Team Seven would have to face the first rumors, before some of them healed or jounins were chosen, before the Hyuuga council died out completely after endeavoring to wrestle her for power or circumvent her authority, before she could carry out her alliance with the future Hokage, the last of the Uchiha, and the rising star of the medic-nins of Konoha, before Neji's position was viable in the Hyuuga according to Hinata.
Before I'd decided more on the fic, I had Tenten as a jounin already (she was the only one, I think; I enjoy giving unexpected characters unexpected depths, and we know she's reasonably ambitious), but then I decided that their ranks hadn't changed (you may note that Hinata says nowhere she's a special jounin now, which I knew, but simply wasn't important enough for her to mention; at one point, I had written that the sex-related missions only applied to jounins, but then I decided that Hinata was a special jounin, so that had to go).
Part of that decision was because of my reluctance of meddling in canon affairs we knew nothing about (and still don't): is there a jounin exam? Are jounin nominated, instead? It was all very confusing.
Otoh, the special jounin thing was easy; there must be reason why they're special, right? So I decided that they'd be special because they'd be nominated solely by the Hokage, unlike normal jounin (who, in Celebrationverse, are selected either in an exam or by the Council or some combination of it).
In effect, they're different from normal jounins because they can't give or receive orders as easily; they're a bit on the side but they have less authority than jounin, but they can't be ordered around by jounins either. (in canon, special jounins are under jounins, which was something I didn't know originally; so I decided to translate that the way I explained.)
Something rang through her, steely like a kunai molded out of stubbornness. This was why she'd grown strong – the match which she'd never seen ending, which had sent her life spiraling into her control. Neji had stopped being blind, Kabuto had saved her life, and Naruto had sworn that when he'd be Hokage, he'd change the Hyuuga. Shino had reported the promise back to her.
Look how I mention the three men that 'shaped' her as far as Celebrationverse is concerned. (WTF imagery.)
If the head of the Hyuuga and the Hokage both bullied the traditions into bending their way – if other powerful clans approved – if the general opinion was swayed – if the Soke and the Bunke were suppressed… (Neji…) Provided she was strong enough…
A few months at least.
"I will," Hinata promised with a last thought to what the future had in store.
Will it surprise someone if I say originally, I planned to end the fic on that note.
The next part of the commentary will hopefully be done on Monday.
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-04 07:02 pm (UTC)Oh yes. First, I did catch the Terry Pratchett reference. Also, were you aware that there is a video on youtube recording the interactions between a snake and a rabbit. Basically, the snake harasses the rabbit for a while, before the rabbit gets his, and chases the snake up a tree. I thought it was really funny, in a you don't have to be a mongoose to be the furry mammal that defeats the snake kind of way.
Also. By HP-fandom-use of platonic, do you mean its usage in Paradigm of Uncertainty? Because that fanfic definitely misled me into thinking that platonic meant one thing, and then I learned that it meant entirely another in school, and it just confused me in general.
Also, I really liked the idea that Hinata lost her virginity first but kept very quiet about it. The end of this fanfic made me very happy, when I first read it.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-07 09:53 am (UTC)I never did manage to read Paradigm of Uncertainty, but actually it's the fact that a long time ago (shortly after GoF was published, if I remember well) JKR said in a interview that there was nothing romantic between Harry and Hermione and their relationship was 'purely platonic'. This, of course, launched a uber-debate about the many meanings of platonic, and I don't know how the H/Hr side of fandom remembered it, but on the R/Hr side, it's always been remembered and heavily quoted/referred at. (at least it was before I left HP fandom - been drifting out of it for the past year and a few months and completely left it in the summer).
HP fandom: bringing confusion to the sanest minds since 1980!
I couldn't imagine Hinata bragging about it, unless maybe it was to Naruto. :D again, and the last part of the commentary's up!