Fifty Shades of Gennin

She hardly dared to admit it, but Hinata had enjoyed herself. She realized this as she returned from the bathroom at the end of lunch, heading for the door through which Naruto and Sakura had already left, standing outside.

"Marriage, huh?"

Hinata stopped in the hallway. Sasuke stood to the side of her, leaning against the wall.

"What about it?" Hinata asked.

Sasuke looked at her. To be honest, it should have been intimidating, seeing his dark eyes that could change so easily into a striking shade of red. Sasuke Uchiha was an elite Jounin. He was already more than Neji Hyuuga's equal, meaning that he was stronger than her clan's strongest. To many it was not a question of whether he would become one of the village's utmost elite, but whether he was already there.

But Hinata met him when both just learned how to walk. She watched him grow up at the same time she did, and had been there to see the first time he held a real kunai in his hands. This was no longer that child, but still, she couldn't help but see it in him.

Sasuke's eyes slid from her to the open door.

"Naruto isn't like us," he admitted. "He can't keep his feelings to himself. Never learned how. He wears his heart on his sleeve, which makes him a terrible choice for politics. Even if I tell you that, will you stop chasing him?"

Hinata bowed. Sasuke sighed.

"Right. It was never your choice, was it."

He didn't say it as a question, so Hinata didn't answer.

"Father is scared of you," Hinata said.

"Of me?" Sasuke asked.

"Your clan. He fears you are growing too powerful."

Sasuke's arms had been crossed since the moment she spotted him. Hinata caught the way his fingers squeezed, tightening around his tricep.

"So Naruto is his solution," he said.

"A connection to the Hokage's family." They both looked out the door, toward where Sakura and Naruto were talking, the blond laughing at a joke that was probably his own. "Since it's inconceivable that the Hyuuga could fall behind, it must be because of outside help. The Hokage is his excuse."

"You're quite honest," Sasuke said.

Still looking out the door, Hinata said, "Have I said anything? I can't seem to recall."

Sasuke snorted. His amusement only lasted a moment though, before being chased off by a contained expression.

Considering the boy was almost as cool as a Hyuuga, it was impressive for his face to grow any less expressive.

"You didn't willingly give up your position, did you?" he asked.

"I certainly do not miss it," Hinata said.

"Right?" Sasuke openly frowned. "All the stuffy events, and the elders that are always nagging, and the way your father keeps looking at you… But the pressure is the worst. It's always there, weighing you down like damn weights."

Hinata flinched slightly. "What is it you're trying to say?"

Sasuke cleared his throat, pressing a hand to his lips and looking away.

"It's just… You're not missing much," he said. "Don't feel like you've lost anything."

He turned, moving deeper into his home. Hinata went the opposite way, out into the afternoon heat.

"And what were you two talking about?" Sakura asked teasingly when she arrived.

"Clan things," Hinata said simply.

"You're not about to start talking all weird again, are you?" Naruto asked, narrowing his eyes.

"Of course not," Hinata said. "...Namikaze-san."

"Gah!" Naruto wailed, closing his eyes the rest of the way.

"Glad to see you're having fun," Sakura said. "But I have an afternoon shift at the hospital, so…"

She turned away from the blond, clasping Hinata's hands.

"Good luck," she told the Hyuuga earnestly.

She left quickly after that, striding out of the Uchiha enclave as naturally as if she already lived there.

"Well," Naruto said, apparently recovered from his scare. "We should get going too."

"Us?" Hinata asked.

"Of course!" Naruto beamed. "We're not finished yet! An hour and a half's not up!"

O-O-O

Generally, Hinata thought she had a good understanding of Konoha's layout. Leaving the village had been deemed risky for her given her status and her lacking skills, so she had plenty of time to explore. Even the areas her father frowned on, like the slums or the merchant district, Hinata had wandered from time to time.

Which is why she was so utterly confused about where they were going.

When they left Sasuke's home, Naruto took her in the direction of the slums. They could be a bit rough for civilians, but trained shinobi were at no risk. It wasn't because the area was dangerous that ninja avoided it, but because there was simply no reason to visit.

Still, that was the direction Naruto took her, up until they hung a left, moving toward the outskirts of the villages. The houses grew shorter, one-story and ramshackle, with pipes running jankily down the walls.

Just as Hinata felt she couldn't be any more stumped, Naruto stopped in front of something. 

It was a hole in the ground. 

"Here we go!" Naruto stooped, lifting a circular metal plate to reveal a ladder down, running underground. "First one down wins!"

He won. It was hardly surprising. Hinata was too confused to move, and he didn't even take the ladder, just leaped into the dark. Hinata heard the thud of his landing, followed by manic laughter. 

Much slower, with very careful steps, Hinata descended the rungs.

The drop itself was probably about twenty feet in total. She found Naruto at the base, crouching from his landing. He grinned at her.

"Welcome!" he said. "To my second favorite spot!" 

He threw out his arms, and Hinata looked around. She didn't see very much.

They were on some kind of concrete pathway. It was awfully dark, so much so that they could only see the area right around them, illuminated by a cone of sunlight filtering down from the entrance. Hinata thought it was a tunnel, based on the curvature of the walls, but she couldn't even guess what its purpose might be.

"It's dark," she observed mildly.

Naruto blinked, as if just noticing. "Right! Gotta hit the lights."

He rose, approached the wall, and bent forward, running his fingers over it. Curious despite herself, Hinata watched.

"Not that bit there… Not here, either — I don't remember this being so difficult — is that… No… Aha!"

He pressed two fingers against a certain spot, channeling chakra, and the place came alive.

Hinata had been right. It was a tunnel. But to call it just a tunnel felt reductive. All around her, on every wall, seals were scrawled, woven together in such a perfect design that it boggled her mind. Some puffed out steam. Others had dim glows all their own, where varied colors mingled. Every individual mark was perfect. It had to be, or else whatever all this was would never last or work.

"What…?" Hinata breathed.

"Not too bad, right?"

"It's incredible," Hinata said, hardly realizing she said it out loud.

"Aww. Thanks."

She looked back, with dawning horror, to find Naruto blushing as he poked two fingers together. It sunk in depressingly fast.

"This is your work," she said, hoping he would deny it.

"Sure is!"

Hinata hung her head. She really just paid him — him! — a compliment. How… vexing.

"What does it do?" Hinata asked, raising her head and, with a bit of effort, moving on.

"It's simple," Naruto said. "This is Konoha's sewer."

Hinata flinched slightly. Which was silly, because no matter what he said there was certainly no smell, and not a single speck of grime. Every part of this area seemed clean and streamlined. It couldn't have been more different from how she pictured a sewer in her head, to be honest.

"Why did you make a sewer?" seemed like the most logical follow-up question.

Naruto didn't answer straight away, which was very out of character for him. He sat back, dropping his butt onto the concrete and looking around.

"Did you know, when they first founded this village, waste management was one of the biggest problems?"

"I did not," Hinata admitted. 

"Neither did I!" Naruto said. "Just like I had no idea it was still a major problem a couple of years ago, until I overheard my dad worrying about it. See, clan kids like us never had to deal with this sort of thing. But that neighborhood above our heads, and the rest of the slums around it? Things are different there. Stuff is always breaking. The Second Hokage set up working sewers for the whole village, but in places like this, that only counted for so much. The sewers broke. People were forced to deal with it. And because it wasn't working right, people kept getting sick. Can you imagine that?"

"It sounds terrible," Hinata said.

"It sounds wrong," Naruto said, "and once I heard it… it just wouldn't get out of my head, y'know? And you might not know this about me, but I'm kinda impulsive—"

Hinata snorted.

"—so I just couldn't let it go. I knew this was something that I could fix."

Hinata looked again. She wracked her brain, trying to recognize the seals around them, or at least make sense of where one array ended and the next one started. All she succeeded in was making herself feel dizzy.

This was what mastery looked like. Just as much as Fox's work in the Den. Just as much as Naruto's book of memories. Here, in front of her, was the kind of thing she had to be able to mimic a tiny fraction of, if she wanted to replace the seal she lost.

She sat down beside Naruto, just to his right.

"How did you do it?" Hinata asked.

Naruto looked at her. He smiled slowly, teeth shining in the light from his own seals, and began to talk.

Hinata listened with a level of focus she hadn't used often in her life, not since the days she was a failing heiress trying desperately to pass her father's mounting tests. The bulk of the seals here were storage based. Waste would be flushed down, pooling in a large room further up the tunnel where a stationed Chuunin would use their chakra to push it all into the first of the seals.

Next came the complicated part. The reason Hinata had not been able to spot a gap between arrays was because there wasn't one.

The entire tunnel was painted with a single, enormous seal.

"When you put something inside a seal, it freezes," Naruto explained eagerly. "That's why you can put someone that's injured inside of a seal, and the injury won't get any worse. But most people don't know that items actually enter one direction, and exit out the other. There's no way to notice when your seal is only the width of one scroll. Now, if the array kept on going…"

"Why isn't this sort of thing used more?" Hinata asked. "If what you say is true, you could transport things through seals between buildings, or even towns!"

Naruto scratched his head.

"I mean, yeah, you could! If you had somebody crazy enough to make the array." He held up a single finger. "One mistake. A single character being off, or one misstep in the design, and it wouldn't work at all. The whole thing would just be a waste of space."

"But this works," Hinata said.

"Sure does," Naruto said smugly. "This is what I love about sealing. It's so much more than just a way to fight. Can you imagine using Ninjutsu on a problem like this? You'd just end up spraying shit all over yourself!"

He cracked up while Hinata crinkled her nose at the crude joke. When a hand landed on her shoulder, Hinata jumped.

"Look!" Naruto said, pointing up. "This is my favorite part!"

Hinata had gone stiff. His grip was shockingly gentle, possibly because he himself barely seemed to realize he'd done it. His face was mere inches from hers, looking at the ceiling. His blue eyes were so close. She could hear his short, excited breaths.

The ceiling lit up.

There was no other way to explain it. First there was a puff of steam, a great hiss coming from all over the tunnel, and the next thing Hinata knew every painted character was glowing a bright blue, starting with the ones on their left and spreading quickly to the right. 

The glow illuminated them and everything else in the tunnel. It was a lovely color of blue, somewhere between the shade of river water and the evening sky. From Naruto's explanation, Hinata knew what this was. Another load of human waste was being sent through, after having pooled up down the tunnel and been sealed away by the on-duty chuunin. She couldn't help it. She giggled.

The idea of excrement being transmuted into something so beautiful was hilarious. It seemed unbelievable. It felt like a lie. And yet here it was, directly in front of her: the impossible made possible.

"Pretty awesome, right?"

Hinata turned her head toward Naruto's voice at the exact moment he turned his own. With so little distance between them already, the tips of their noses brushed. She was forced to stare at his face, whisker-marks standing out on his stretching cheeks, contorted by a wide grin. His eyes were the same color as the ceiling glowing above them.

Hinata was on her feet in an instant.

"An hour and a half is up!" she said loudly, reaching the ladder in a few quick strides.

"Awwww," Naruto complained, "but this was the best part! Don't tell me you hated it?"

Not trusting herself to speak, Hinata climbed quickly. She didn't look back, either, even as part of her begged to stay for a bit longer, and watch that beautiful seal at work.

But she was frightened to. Because she hadn't hated it.

Not the light show. Not the visit to the sewers. And not even the accident at the end…

When she reached the street, she was practically running. She needed to settle her thoughts. She needed something familiar. 

And she knew just what to use to do it.