Summoner Nin

Page 29

"Thanks, Hinata!" Naruto grinned, taking Hinata's offered sugar cookie.

"I-I-I – y-y-you – u-u-um," she stuttered, her face turning an outrageous red.

Kiba chuckled and decided to save her. "C'mon, Naruto. We gotta go before Iruka-sensei finds out!"

"Oh, yeah!" Naruto agreed, stuffing the cookie into his mouth enthusiastically. "Let's go!"

"Bye, guys!" Kiba said, running out of the schoolyard with Akamaru at his tail; Naruto following close after with a wave of his hand.

Hinata took a deep breath and put a hand over her heart in hopes stilling the thundering rate it was beating at. He was so bright and enthusiastic and could keep up with Kiba's speed that his very presence seemed to sweep her off her feet. His ability to keep on smiling despite being bullied and looked down up was astounding. His strength was unparalleled by any other. She could still feel his chakra floating in the vicinity even after he was long gone.

Shino, who was beside her, calmly sat down on their bench and counted the ants crawling in the flowerbed. After a good minute or two, Hinata somehow managed to find her bearings and sat down beside him, still out of breath. It was so obvious to her friends why she was the way she was in front of Naruto Uzumaki. Fortunately her friends were mostly boys and they weren't going to rat her out.

As for Ino… Well, Ino mostly kept to her girlfriends and only occasionally talked to Hinata, so there was no breach of security on that front… Hinata smiled. It was strange how she began to view everything in her life like a mission.

At eleven, Hinata still couldn't talk to Naruto without either making a fool out of herself… or faint (which also constituted as "making a fool out of herself"). She had thought by now, what with Naruto being friends with most of her friends, that she would be able to hold some sort of conversation with him!

Hinata really was useless in that aspect.

Zero, on the other hand, was perfecting dang fine!

"Are you upset, Hinata?" Shino asked. "Why? The boys have decided to skip class again."

Hinata forced a smile and shook her head. "No, Shino. I… I just hope they won't get in trouble."

Shino frowned. "They will. Why? Their behaviour is unacceptable by the Academy's regulations."

She sighed and turned her attention to the sky. She knew that somewhere in Konoha, but certainly not within the Academy's grounds, that Shikamaru was looking up at the clouds too. She wondered what the boys did when they skipped classes – did they all go cloud watching with Shikamaru? At all that expansive white, so thick and fathomless? So blank and gazing.

So like the Byakugan.

Her eyes drifted downwards. There was a few times in which she had seen her cousin in school, and even fewer acknowledgement from him. He was like a ghost, floating down the halls and across the schoolyard – there, but not there. Not for her anyway. It was even more disorienting to cross his path within the Hyuga Compound where he was, according to rules and traditions, obliged to acknowledge her with a bow. But it was in his eyes, so white and blank and filled with hate, that made those encounters stifling, made her want to hold him and tell him that it was alright to cry…