Late at night.
Konoha Hospital.
Moonlight squeezed in through the window, laying neat, pale rectangles across the pure white sheets.
Uchiha Sasuke lay curled on his side, his back to the room.
His eyes, hidden in the darkness, stared blankly at the white glow of the windowsill.
His black irises were dull, like pearls that had never been polished.
His clan.
His brother.
His parents.
Sticky blood and shattered fragments of everything.
He did not even know what he was thinking.
Pain, grief, hatred, but more than any of that, numb confusion.
That morning everyone had been laughing and talking like always, yet by the time classes ended, everything had changed.
Sasuke could not understand.
What exactly had happened to his clan in the span of a single day?
He had been resting in this hospital room for days, and he still could not figure out why Itachi had turned so cold and heartless.
Tap, tap, tap.
Hurried footsteps and rough breathing echoed again from the corridor, along with hushed voices trying to stay quiet.
Phew.
Sasuke let out a long, heavy breath.
The hospital that had been so silent a short while ago was suddenly noisy.
His head was already pounding, and now the restlessness made it impossible to sleep.
Tap, tap.
The footsteps drew closer.
The nurses' soft mosquito-like whispers gradually became clear.
"Why are there suddenly so many injured kids? We are running out of beds."
"I heard the Academy organized a survival exercise and they happened to get attacked by ninja from another village."
"No wonder. Did you see how badly those two were hurt? Especially that girl, I didn't even dare press down when I was bandaging her…"
"Stop it.
I remember there are two empty beds in this room."
Knock, knock, knock.
A light knocking came from the door.
Sasuke narrowed his eyes and pretended to sleep.
He did not want to share a room with strangers.
Ever since the Uchiha massacre, every nurse and doctor who saw him showed that same strange expression.
Sympathy?
Pity?
He had no idea what it was supposed to be.
Whatever it was, their faces never stopped reminding him of everything he had lost, of a pain he could neither escape nor forget.
Knock, knock. Click.
The door opened anyway.
"Perfect, two empty beds."
"Is that kid an Uchiha…"
"Keep your voice down."
They were trying to whisper, but to Sasuke they were just noisy.
Rustle.
He yanked the blanket over his head.
The two voices paused, then, sensing his mood, quickly retreated from the room.
After a short while, the wheels of a medical cart rattled outside.
This time there were more people.
The footsteps were heavier.
Not the two nurses from before.
"This girl is heavy, give me a hand."
"One, two, three, lift."
Thump.
Creak, creak, creak.
The old bedframe groaned as if someone weighing several hundred kilograms had been dropped onto it.
"Huff, huff…"
The male nurses were panting hard.
"She weighs like a sack of rice."
"I hope when she wakes up you say that right to her face."
"How would that help me live longer?"
"What kind of attitude is that? Survive this and she'll be one of Konoha's new elite jonin."
"Elite jonin my foot, she can keep it."
Joking and arguing, they heaved another body onto the remaining bed.
Click.
The door shut.
Their busy footsteps faded down the corridor.
Even under his thin blanket, every word reached Sasuke's ears.
Curiosity tugged at him.
He quietly lifted the edge of the blanket and rolled over to look at the next bed.
Long, mercury-bright hair spilled across the pillow, catching the moonlight with a muted metallic sheen.
The girl lay spread-eagled on the bed, arms open, her delicate features completely exposed.
Blood spattered across one side of her face like a pattern of dark petals, and her cherry-blossom lips were pressed tight, a harsh streak of red showing between her teeth.
She was in a deep, injury-induced coma, yet there was no hint of frailty or weakness on her face.
Her bandaged chest rose and fell only once every seven seconds.
Each heavy breath was matched by a slow, steady thump of her heart, like a fearsome beast fallen asleep.
The kind that would devour anyone the moment it woke.
"Chasing Sun Haori…?"
It took Sasuke three full seconds to react.
He had never seen Haori's full face before.
At school she always wore a loose cloak, with a wide strip of cloth tied over her eyes that hid most of her features, making her look strange and mysterious.
If not for the fierce aura that even these injuries could not suppress, and that distinctive silver-grey hair, he would not have dared to be sure this was her.
Just from the nurses' conversation earlier, Sasuke could roughly guess what had happened.
Something had gone wrong during the survival exercise.
Ninja from another village had attacked the students.
Judging by the way the men had joked about it, whoever the enemy's main force was, they had obviously run into Haori, and had most likely died at her hands.
So as long as you survived a fight with Haori, you were qualified to be called an elite jonin?
Sasuke had no idea how much of that banter was exaggeration, but for them to talk like that at all, Haori's performance had to be terrifyingly impressive.
He looked again at the beautiful girl sleeping like a lion.
If he remembered correctly, his father, the head of the Uchiha clan, and his brother, touted as the clan's greatest genius, were also at that rank.
Yet the age difference between Haori and those two was huge.
This was what a real prodigy looked like.
Compared to someone who could do this at her age, that man who annihilated the Uchiha suddenly felt almost ordinary.
As for himself…
Sasuke lowered his gaze to his own hands.
Since childhood he had been scolded by his father and crushed over and over by the "average talent" Itachi.
Compared to Haori, he felt like only words such as "trash" or "dead last" really suited him.
Inferiority and pride were two sides of the same coin.
After the trauma of the massacre and Itachi's genjutsu, facing another peer whose talent eclipsed his own pushed Sasuke again from one extreme mindset quietly toward another.
"Snrrk… snrrk…"
Suddenly a loud snore echoed through the ward, jolting the brooding Sasuke.
He turned to look at Haori.
Her chest rose and fell slowly, the rhythm steady and heavy like the great bronze bell atop the school building.
Definitely not her.
Shaking his head, Sasuke sat up and looked past Haori to the bed on her left.
There, a blond kid covered in dried blood lay flat on his back, limbs spread wide, mouth gaping open.
Each inhale and exhale came with a thunderous snore.
The real dead last was right there.
Sasuke's self-loathing suddenly did not feel so overwhelming.
No matter how pathetic he was, he was still better than Naruto, wasn't he?
At least he could see how far he was from true genius.
That blockhead Naruto probably did not even realize what kind of height Haori had reached.
Thinking that, Sasuke felt the title of "dead last" was still some distance away from him.
With Naruto at the very bottom, things did not seem quite so bad.
Even his brain, which had refused to rest for days, started to feel a little sleepy.
His eyelids grew heavy.
He slowly closed his eyes.
"Eng… eng…"
The snoring in the ward grew louder and louder, until it sounded like an elephant bellowing at the zoo.
After a long, long time, the handsome boy tossed and turned, clamped his hands over his ears, and stared up at the ceiling, mentally counting the stars.
His eyes were full of despair.
Damn dead last.
"Eng…
Eng!"
Naruto snored on, mouth wide open, sleeping like a log.
The next morning.
Room 203, Konoha Hospital.
The first light of day flooded the room, washing the pale walls in a layer of liquid gold.
Three beds stood side by side, evenly spaced, dividing both the room and the sunlight into three neat slabs.
The black-haired boy with the black eyes now sported heavy dark circles.
Tilting his head, he stared at the still-sleeping silver-haired girl, cheeks tinged red.
His chest rose and fell slowly, matching each breath Haori took, as if he were trying to find the source of her strength.
On the other side, the blond, blue-eyed boy watched the girl's delicate profile and tried to decide if last night's blood-soaked battle had really happened.
The Lightning Release armor that nothing could pierce, the spear of lightning that broke through everything, the enormous fox locked in a cage, towering like a mountain, Haori with a hole in her chest and a maw full of fangs, and himself, just as monstrous in his own way.
He ran a hand over the arm she had bitten through.
The wounds there, along with the charred flesh all over his body, had completely healed.
Not even a scar was left.
It all felt too unreal.
Waking up in a hospital bed, even seeing the bandages wrapped around Haori's chest, Naruto still could not tell dream from reality.
He had also noticed Sasuke on the opposite bed.
He already knew about the Uchiha massacre.
Naruto did not truly understand what it felt like to lose one's entire family, but he could imagine it was not any easier than watching Haori's chest get pierced through.
Now was not the time to bother him.
Time crawled by.
The sunlight in the room grew brighter and harsher.
Haori's lashes trembled.
The one who had been hurt the worst finally squinted and drifted back to consciousness.
"Mmm…"
She forced her eyes open.
A soft glow greeted her.
The bone membrane in front of her pupils blocked most of the light, leaving only a hazy white blur.
With her chakra exhausted and her consciousness gone, the Shikotsumyaku's nerve-blocking effect had shut off, and now a needle-like pain tore through her chest.
The Byakugan is off.
Wait.
Haori instinctively moved to rouse her chakra and activate her Byakugan, then suddenly stopped.
Her fingers brushed over smooth eyelids.
The wide strip of cloth that had always covered her eyes was gone.
She guided the chakra gathering in her eyes back down.
When the Byakugan was activated, the bulging veins at the sides of the face were really just chakra swelling the pathways under the skin.
That expansion was a physical reaction and could not be controlled by the Shikotsumyaku's muscle control.
If she tried to force it, it would be like biting a straw flat, then trying to suck water through it.
No matter how hard you tried, nothing would flow.
Until she smashed the Hyuga main house, if she wanted to use the Byakugan freely, the eye cloth was indispensable.
She opened her gem-like eyes.
She raised her hand and fumbled around the pillow and the headboard.
Like a severely near-sighted patient searching for her glasses, Haori patted around in confusion.
Sasuke and Naruto, who had been watching her intently, were both startled out of their thoughts.
Sasuke quickly turned his head away, pretending to look elsewhere.
To hide the fact that he had been copying Haori's breathing, his chest rose and fell in two guilty, exaggerated breaths.
He had no idea if that strange breathing rhythm was some kind of secret technique.
Between ninja, information was everything.
Stealing or prying into another's secret arts was absolutely taboo.
He and Haori were not close, and if she decided to use that as an excuse to beat him half to death, even the Hokage would have nothing to say.
Compared to his tangled thoughts, Naruto's mind was much simpler.
The moment Haori woke up, his heart full of questions, he rolled out of bed with a thump.
"Haori, you are finally awake! Last night…"
"Stop."
Haori held up a hand, cutting off the massive lump of chakra radiating from her left side.
At the same time, muddled grey doubt, bright orange joy, and all sorts of other emotions rose from that chakra mass, then, by some mysterious pathway, slid straight into Haori's mind.
What is this?
Thrown off by the unexpected sensation, Haori turned her attention toward the "chakra mass" on her right.
Compared to Naruto's, this was tiny, more of a sesame seed than a lump.
Even so, it was sending her a tangled mess of emotions too.
Dark yellow tension, green jealousy, grey-blue pain.
The feelings here were much darker, the colors more complex than Naruto's.
Most of it was blurry mixtures that were hard to sort apart.
Haori was certain she had not activated her Byakugan.
And the Byakugan could not sense emotion in the first place.
That meant this could only be the Nine-Tails' "sense of malice".
Since when could that sense distinguish feelings this clearly?
Watching the colors of emotion drifting constantly off the two clusters of chakra, Haori felt genuinely surprised.
She had always assumed Kurama's sensing ability would be vague and broad.
She had never imagined it would be this detailed.
It was not just about good will or ill intent.
Every tiny shift in emotion could be clearly perceived.
No wonder the Nine-Tails liked Naruto so much.
Naruto's mind was simple, and even his emotions were so bright and pure.
Just looking at those clear, warm colors made Haori feel a little better.
As for that other chakra point, whoever it belonged to, that was another story.
Good and bad mixed together.
There was no intense killing intent, no outright malice, but so many negative emotions intertwined that even if he was not a bad person, being steeped in that for too long made it easy to go to extremes.
Haori closed her eyes.
She sank fully into the sea of emotions around her, as if stepping into a brand-new world.
The feelings of the two boys lay openly exposed, with no secrets at all.
She watched and probed at will, and slowly began to map which colors matched which emotion.
Naruto saw Haori close her eyes and sensed her searching for something, as if her strange perception of the world had vanished.
His heart clenched.
Haori was blind.
If she had lost her way of sensing the outside world because of her injuries, that would be a devastating blow.
In Haori's perception, grey and yellow lights flickered across Naruto's body one after another, finally merging into a new grey-green she had never seen before.
This feeling was worry.
In a flash of insight, Haori fixed the meaning of that color in her mind.
"Relax, I am fine."
"Heh, that is great, I was so…"
Naruto's color shifted back from grey-green to bright orange, then sharpened into a blue-white burst of surprise.
Haori could not help silently marveling at how broken this new skill was.
As expected of Kurama, the strongest among the Tailed Beasts.
Even a seemingly minor ability from the original story was this powerful.
To use such a precise sensing technique only as a crude "good or bad" detector, this careless, wasteful style was exactly the kind of thing a naturally overpowered creature would do.
Thinking of the Nine-Tails' terrifying chakra, Haori could understand that laziness, in a way.
It was much easier to roughly scan for malice and then solve problems with a single Tailed Beast Bomb than to slowly analyze each color and its meaning.
She felt this ability was incredible precisely because she was still weak.
Clatter.
Just as Haori was losing herself in watching Naruto's emotions shift, the sound of a cart rolling down the corridor drifted in from outside the ward.
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