Naruto returned on the same day Sasuke left to the news that he had attacked Hinata on the way out. He sat as Tsunade healed Hinata's wound but it seemed that she would scar. He shouldn't have left. He should have taken that damn Uchiha out when he had the chance. He should have known he couldn't trust the stray with Hinata.
Tsunade was busy healing all the Genin that had been sent out to take Sasuke back but the Uchiha had full on turned on them and almost killed them had it not been because Jounin Maito Gai joined the fight. The Sound Four had fallen along with their back up, a boy from the Kaguya clan that had been the reason Sasuke even got away. The worst case was Hyuuga Neji who almost died from a hole in his body due to his attempt to take Sasuke to face the Hyuuga's justice for what he had done to Hinata. She sighed as she looked over the girl.
Jiraiya had informed Tsunade what was wrong with Naruto. This girl is extremely important not just because of the blond but also because apparently the Kyuubi approved of her. Now that was something even she would never have expected; to think that a Bijuu can have a soft spot for a human of all thing. But from what Kakashi had reported to her, Hinata has little to no mean bone in her whole body. She can be angry but her anger was the silent, simmering kind. She was far from a violent person and had adapted to control either boy's antic with a gentle firmness.
It worked too well, apparently.
From Inoichi report after interrogating Hinata while under sedative, he had concluded that Uchiha Sasuke held an unhealthy obsession with the girl. It seemed that in his loneliness, he had latched onto the first genuine kindness sent his way. His continuous exposure to Hinata's unique brand of gentle understanding had only made his interest in her grow to a toxic level. Tsunade knew Uchiha, she knew from the little collection she had with Uchiha Madara. They're extremely loyal but that come with a side effect.
There's a reason why her Granduncle Tobirama decided to keep them all in the village if he could have it. They have a very unstable emotional condition. Once an Uchiha fell in love, they will do a lot of things for their precious person, which is why when they lost them that love became murky and turned into extreme bitterness. He called this the Curse of Hatred.
The worst part was that their Sharingan aggravate this condition. With their photographic recollection due to their Dojutsu, this made overcoming their traumatic experiences harder than ordinary people. In the older days, she read that some Uchiha had to be put down by their own clan before they really do damage due to going insane from losing their loved ones. Obviously that was really, really back in the old days. Nowadays they have a thing called mental health.
Too bad that with endurance Shinobi is too stubborn to really deal with their mental problems, thus the fact that the psychiatrist job is the loneliest and most useless job in Konoha. Shinobi just don't talk about their problems.
They deal with it by acting crazy like endless training like Gai or openly reading porn like Kakashi or binging on dango like Anko. You get it.
Tsunade sighed. Naruto had informed her that Hinata wanted to become a medic to better help her team. From what she heard, Hinata had gone against her own clan's tradition by even learning the basic of Iryojutsu. She smiled. Naruto was cold, silent and almost creepy like a doll. When Tsunade had asked his reason for wanting to become Hokage, he said that he can't trust Hinata's wellbeing to other people wearing the hat. For her sake, he will become Hokage.
It would have been shallow but she can see his deadly and frankly frightening dedication from his blazing blue eyes. If what Jiraiya told her about his grandfather then...he would turn on the Daimyo and Konoha if it meant keeping Hinata safe and by his side. The boy doesn't care about Konoha but Hinata does and because Hinata cared, he will look after Konoha for her. He will even go as far as keeping the rest of the world safe if it meant keeping her safe.
She just needs to stay by his side.
Tsunade sat in her face, staring at Namikaze Minato's picture. He too had the same condition but his wasn't as prominent as Naruto's. Or perhaps he was just better at hiding it. Tsunade will never know. The only thing she knew was that Hiruzen had the right idea; securing Hinata's loyalty to Konoha equal to securing Naruto's loyalty and harming her equal to destroying not just Konoha but also the whole nation of Hi.
Uchiha Sasuke does not know who had messed with and perhaps even if he did, he was just as mad to not care. Theirs are a battle of obsessions. One sought to protect her with pure dedication and the other sought to own her with brute force. One gentle and sly while the other cruel and direct. The girl's like a butterfly trapped in a web with two spiders. Tsunade can see what Naruto out to do. In this battle he's a better Yandere than Sasuke.
After all, Sasuke left a mark on her body but a scar in her heart that will ultimately strain their relationship with each other. In the end, his decision and impatience will only chase her away from him. Hinata will not stay with him, not without being broken or killed.
Meanwhile, Naruto have been guiding her mind to accept him as the best choice and weaved his cage around her heart slowly but surely. The blond has patience, that's for sure. Hinata would not even realize his cage around her and Tsunade knew that the main reason he aimed for the hat was to create the largest cage for Hyuuga Hinata, one that she won't dream to even run from; the perfect prison of love and the perfect paradise.
Konoha itself will become her cage. Her bonds with the people inside will become her chain. Her love for Naruto will become the willing lock.
The body can be trapped but the mind and heart will seek to escape. But the heart, once captured, will be caged along with the body and mind.
Tsunade sighed as her head lolled back, "I guess I have to at least give her a fighting chance,"
Dedication like Naruto was the stuff of revolution. She can see the same stubbornness in him that she saw in her grandfather. But people like him can snap perfectly and absolutely when their careful planning crumble with a simple action and in this case, Hinata's rejection. For someone like Naruto who cared for nothing and wanted nothing beside Hinata, his broken psyche was something to be feared. Nothing can be more frightening than a man that has nothing to lose, not even his life.
Tsunade will have to really be careful with Hinata. That girl had become the greatest asset of Konoha and perhaps the whole continent.
Naruto ran through the forest, mind focused on honing his not so original jutsu. It wasn't really original because he was using his Kongo Fusa and making them thinner than chakra string to use them as either ninja wire or puppet string. Akkorokamui is a good weapon but he's rather use that for open combat. Naruto has always been the silent assassin type and he fancied the ninja wire in most of his traps. He gets this idea from watching Kankuro from Suna.
It would be nice if he could control his opponents into attacking each other.
The tree before him burst into sections, cut clean with his chains. His fingers strained from the technique. He looked at them. It's not enough. He needed to be better. He needed to get to the point where slicing a whole limb was a matter of twitching and not a full movement. Tension...finger strength...so many things to study and experiment with. Not to mention...
He asked Shippou, "What do you think this Akatsuki want you for?"
Shippou shifted within his mind, "If they are hunting all nine of us, then the only thing that come to mind is nothing good,"
He stretched his fingers, "How bad is it?"
"World ending bad,"
Naruto stopped; his heart hammering in his chest. World ending...Shippou was worried enough that it will be world ending...
"Hinata,"
If the world ended, then Hinata will...
He crouched down.
Shippou looked up, "You're hyperventilating,"
Naruto gasped, struggling to calm down even as his haunted eyes shed cold tears, "Hinata will..."
Shippou moved uncomfortably. His prison grew so cold that ice started to form. This was pure terror. The boy is afraid, something that he barely ever feel. Shippou looked at the only source of light within the deep abyss of the boy's mind. His cage was carpeted with white lilies, their white petals glowing like the moonlight of his memory.
Naruto's mind was a void of nothingness, not even temperature. Shippou had never been more horrified when he woke up within his new prison. He was almost driven mad by his existential crisis, some part of his swore that the Yondaime had done the impossible and killed him. Then, the blond appeared like an apparition; the most unsettling human that Shippou had ever set eyes on.
A year later, the first bloom appeared and the flowers kept blooming through the days until they filled his prison. He had grown to take comfort in their light. To Shippou, Hinata became a source of comfort. Naruto's mindscape was a soul crushing darkness but her light lit up his world and subsequently Shippou's world. Ironically this was the most comfortable prison the Kyuubi had ever been locked in and was the perhaps the main reason why he didn't mind Naruto's brand of madness.
These white lilies represented Hinata, the light of his soul and his love for her.
Unknowingly the boy had chased away the hatred of the Kyuubi through loving a girl so completely that he would sell his soul to the Shinigami to keep her safe. That's why to Shippou, Hinata became important to him. She too had become the light in his world, literally and figuratively. Whenever she's injured, the flicker of his hatred sparked to life. For that girl who comforted him with Naruto's incomprehensible love for her, Shippou knew he would go for miles to keep her safe.
The dark void felt like the night sky to Shippou whenever she's nearby.
The darkness grew comfortably bright whenever they interacted.
Shippou's loneliness disappeared whenever Naruto let him use the blond as Shippou's mouthpiece to talk to her. If there's anyone Naruto would share Hinata with, it will be the Kyuubi. Ironically Naruto trusted Shippou with her wellbeing more than he trusted her family. He told Shippou that should he ever fall, then Shippou's allowed to use his corpse to continue protecting her. He gave the Kyuubi permission to possess him to continue existing in her life.
His dedication for her was that absolute.
Shippou breathed, "Calm down. We will get stronger together. We won't let the world die. Hinata won't die for as long as either of us yet lives,"
Naruto appeared and looked at the giant fox sealed within him, "Promise?"
A childlike wariness with endless hope echoed in his mind and voice.
Shippou smiled, "Let's start with my name,"
Naruto's eyes widened.
"My name...is Kurama,"
Jiraiya watched as Tsunade taught Hinata personally. The girl had been traumatized by what the Uchiha had done. Hinata had taken to wear a kusari with turtle neck and put on a baggy sweater on top. She had also started to grow out her hair instead of trimming it short as she was prone to do before Sasuke left. She has been talking to a Yamanaka psychiatrist to get over the scar left on her body. The fact that the Uchiha had tried to invade her system with his tainted chakra was what traumatized her so much. It felt like a violation of the most intimate manner.
Naruto has been sending white lilies and mini sunflowers via Kage Bunshin to Hinata. He had been apologetic the whole time that in the end Hinata had been the one to comfort him. He succeeded to make her focus on something other than her trauma because after that he will often visit her with cinnamon rolls covered with white glaze. He didn't know why but whenever he saw her eat those rolls, his pants felt uncomfortable.
Those cinnamon rolls really looked like his Uzumaki kamon from above.
Whenever she took a bite of it, it felt like she was biting into him. Whenever the white glaze smeared her lips, he had to hold back from licking his own lips. It felt like she was eating him...
Whenever his clone disappeared and Naruto received those memories, he will have to stop his personal training with his chains. His legs would feel weak and his loins would be on fire. He didn't do anything, enjoying the sensation more than wanting to deal with it. They soon disappear anyway.
But one evening, he was walking through the woods when he saw Hinata heading deeper to where he knew the waterfall fell. Curious, he followed her and he hid himself as she stopped by the water. She looked around but Naruto had become an expert at hiding from the Byakugan especially now that he's capable of making such seals.
His eyes widened as she started to strip before him. Naruto had never seen Hinata naked before. He respected her privacy at least that much but this time...this time as she was covered less and less, he couldn't move. The sight before him captured his imagination completely. Her naked form stood under the moonlight and she looked like a fairy of legends as she bathed under the pale ethereal glow of the night. His pants felt constricting.
She moved and he was hypnotized, not knowing when his hands started to move to the burning sensation under his belly as his blood roared in his ears. He absentmindedly wondered what she was doing until he noticed that she was expelling chakra to shield herself from the water of the waterfall. Her failure to completely keep her body dry added to her beauty. He gulped as his eyes shuddered.
She stopped her secret training just as he exploded in his hands, her breast swaying for her hard breathing, further hypnotizing him. White liquid smeared his hand and the leaves by his feet. Naruto looked down in wonder, a little confused by his action and what had happened, "Huh?"