AN: I have to say, I'm impressed. From the first time I posted the prologue for Next, I have saved every "Story Alert" email notification I have received from . I have precisely 615 of them in a specially designated folder of my hotmail account (at the time of writing, anyway... I've had more since writing the first two paragraphs. Damn, it's hard to keep track of you all...).

I'm afraid to say all the "Favourite Author", "Author Alert" and god-only-knows what other alerts have been deleted, simply to keep things easy to remember... Many apologies.

I've been reading through my own story again, and I am actually quite surprised at how much detail I forgot I had put into things... It's like knitting a garment half-way, putting it down and coming back a week later to find you've forgotten which line in the pattern you were on... Hopefully I'll get back into the swing of it all very soon.

(Anyone else who uses OpenOffice noticed that the bottom-most toolbar of the window, just above the Windows Taskbar, says "Insert STD"? That's kind of freaky...)

Anyway, we'll progress with the next (hurriedly-written) chapter of Next, and a crazy heads-up to search for new Shikamaru-centric stories. I had an extremely weird urge to write a short about what Shika could do if he wasn't so damned lazy... It involved a Glaive. We'll see if I'm mental enough to write it. Or something else.

Chapter 23 then!

AN v2.0: Now that I've gotten a whole bunch of one-shots and an unintentional two-shot out of the way, I think I can finally start working on Next again. Stupid brain.

Look them up, if you wish; Akemi, A Letter to a Rock and Tale of a Tormented Heiress are all available for perusal at your discretion, unless you've already read them. If you have, thanks. I should've been writing Next but... I needed to get them out of my head.

Chapter 23: Tying it all together

Kyuubi no Yoko, the Nine-tailed Demon Fox, stalked about his small (for him) cage deep within Naruto's mind-scape. The tear in the paper seal that held the gates of his prison closed was no larger, nor any smaller.

The Bijuu was taking a little time to... procrastinate. He had been forcing a lot of his energies into the seal, and along his Container's chakra pathways to try and elicit a response; preferably healing the damage that made the Container look weak and pathetic in Kyuubi's eyes.

Still, however, no matter how much youki travelled the chakra pathways to that one small injury that refused to heal, it disappeared entirely. The places where damage still remained on his Container's body were the few places the Fox could not seem to direct any of his healing abilities, or that took every ounce of power he put into it and whisked it away to places unknown.

It was... frustrating.

Hyuuga Hiashi scowled as he read the daily reports. It was late, getting towards ten on the night, and he was still knelt in his study. Running the Clan was... a demanding task, but one that he could manage. One he hoped Hinata would manage, despite her weakness. She showed promise, wounding both Hanabi and Neji as she had, but what the paper in front of him said was a different matter.

His eldest daughter had been training so hard that the allotted budget for training dummies, targets and supplies had to be increased for the first time in five years. The household retainers were having a very hard time keeping the training sand-boxes raked properly as Hinata barely gave them the half-hour needed between practices to 'reset' the sand. It was becoming... troublesome.

Add to that the increase in training accidents the girl seemed to be getting herself in, and treating on her own... It was cause for concern. No Hyuuga Clan Leader should be without some medical techniques, but for one to show interest in following medicine as a profession within the Ninja world was almost unseemly. Hinata should, by rights, be taught as he had been; to be a fighter. Strength, speed, skill and stealth were the key points of that, not medical knowledge. She might have to be taken in hand and taught properly.

Maybe...

Hiashi closed his eyes and shook his head. He was loathe to admit it, but perhaps it was time he taught his eldest daughter properly, for once, in something she might excel at. He had been more like his nephew at the time, aloof and harsh, but he had found an outlet for his nervousness that had assisted in conquering that god-awful stutter. He had found the first love of his life, and hadn't ever forgotten.

Perhaps it was time to give Hinata her first love? Or what could help her find it, at any rate.

Hyuuga Hiashi nodded to himself, resolving his path for the following day before finishing his perusal of the reports and retiring for the night.

Hyuuga Hinata would learn something that would help her truly surpass her cousin as the pride of the Hyuuga Clan.

Noboyuki Aoi screamed as the thrown kunai stabbed her in the shoulder, the surprisingly heavy weight catching her off guard and spinning her about.

The girl fell, clutching at her shoulder as she fell to the ground with a heavy thud. Namikaze Minato was there in a moment, knelt at the silver-haired girl's side and doing his best to staunch the small flow of blood.

Hyuuga Hiashi arrived a heartbeat later, stammering his apologies and trying to help Minato. He had thought Aoi would have dodged, would have leapt aside or simply dropped her shoulder, but he had been wrong.

That was unforgivable.

Hiashi watched, horrified as the trickle of blood from Aoi's shoulder started to spurt with the fury of a severed artery, the visible wound becoming infected and festering within the blink of an eye. Aoi's silver hair soaked the blood up like a sponge, turning a horrible dark red and growing sopping wet. Minato just sat there, glaring at Hiashi, and growled out three words.

Three words that haunted him, and would continue to do so until the end of his life; "It's YOUR fault!"

Tears fell from Hiashi's eyes as Aoi's corpse, completely drained of blood and bearing the stigmata of rotten flesh, many years old, reached up and began to choke the life from him.

Hyuuga Hiashi didn't yell as he awoke with a start. One moment he was sleeping, the next he was awake; It was always that simple.

He had seen too much a long time ago; his dreams held no real fear for him now.

It was dawn, the sky a strange orange as the sun started its rise. He could hear the sounds of someone training hard, and the breaking of wooden targets.

His daughter was awake, and the house had yet to begin its daily routine. Good.

"Hinata. Cease."

Hyuuga Hinata stopped immediately, her left hand still glowing with chakra and only two inches from striking the training log in front of her that wore, in her mind at least, the smirking and disrespectful face of her sister.

Hinata stepped back, standing straight, and then turned to her father. Hiashi was wearing something Hinata had not seen on him for a long, long time; a training kimono. It was slightly harder-wearing than the normal kimonos he wore, Hinata knew, but why would he be wearing one?

"Ohayo g-gozaimasu, Otousan." Hinata said, her voice cracking with the stutter but still as cold as she had sounded since the battle against Hanabi. Hiashi was... proud of that. Strength.

"Daughter. Come with me, I have something to teach you."

With that, Hyuuga Hiashi simply turned on his heel and walked away from her. Hinata was stunned. Personal training? From her father?! Hinata clamped down upon her surprise and hurriedly caught up with the Clan patriarch.

Maybe she'd done right by kicking Neji in the... No. Maybe she'd just done right by beating Neji in a match.

Uzumaki Naruto enjoyed the feeling of the dawn sunlight on him. It was cooler than usual, true, but an early start was always welcome. It refreshed him, kept him upbeat. So what if Ero-Sennin was being as big a fool as usual since he'd found out Shizune-nee-chan was 'legal' and quite pretty, Naruto had had a great time watching the medic-nin beat seven shades of hell out of the older man for even suggesting that she cater to his supposedly medical needs.

Naruto hadn't laughed so hard that early in the morning for a fair while; especially as he'd had two minutes extra of the entertainment than anyone else.

The two Sannin (or should that be Ni-Nin, Naruto wondered), himself and Shizune-nee-chan were walking back to Konoha, waiting until they were far from the gambling town before resorting to Ninja methods of travel; they were all meant to be incognito, after all. Kami knew what bounties were on Jiraiya's head, let alone the gambling debts and bounties on Tsunade's.

Naruto smiled, ignoring the future Echoes of himself who fell over, tripped, said the wrong things and were attacked by one, all, or a combination thereof of his travelling companions, and simply... enjoyed the beginning of the day.

Things were changing, he felt. And maybe, just maybe, for the better?

Hinata's eyes were wide open as she drank in the sight before her.

How had her father hidden this from her and everyone else?

She watched in silence as Hiashi danced about the training dojo she hadn't been in since Hanabi was seven, gasping every now and again as her father jumped, span, or made a move that broke the dance, but flowed nonetheless into one intricate weave.

It was... beautiful.

If this was what he intended to teach her... if this was what he intended to teach her after so many years of thinly-veiled disapproval and ignorance, she'd learn it better than he could teach her and she would break him with it.

Hyuuga Hinata was surprised, but not worried about the feeling of malevolence that she held for her father, nor for the vicious streak that was even now delighting her imagination with the image of her standing over Hiashi with a blade aimed at his throat, demanding his submission.

Hyuuga Hiashi would fall and pay for mistreating his new, firmer daughter. And she would delight in it.

Hyuuga Hiashi came to a stop, returning to his guard position and then sheathing his weapon.

Way back when, in the mists of time before Konohagakure no Sato had been founded by the Shodai Hokage and Uchiha Madara, the Hyuuga Clan had been a wandering group of ninja. Several times, the wandering clan had been set upon by foolish samurai who had thought to try and exterminate the white-eyed 'devils', no doubt thinking they would be heroes and chosen by the gods themselves should they succeed. The Hyuuga Clan had dissuaded them of that idea firmly.

Many had relied simply on the precursor to the Jyuuken, but on those few occasions when the samurai had attacked whilst on horseback...

Hiashi motioned his daughter to join him, and waited patiently while she stood and collected her own, slightly smaller weapon from the same ornately lacquered box Hiashi had retrieved his own from.

Hinata joined her father, standing exactly eight feet from him, and copied his stance. Hiashi nodded to her, and they began. For the first since Hyuuga Hizashi had surrendered his life in stead of his brother's, the Hyuuga Leader's personal training dojo heard the eerie rasps of a pair of Nagamaki whispering from their scabbards in perfect unison.

Jiraiya, Toad Hermit and least gifted of the Legendary Sannin, awoke with a start. He looked around hurriedly, fearfully, just in case anyone had noticed; they hadn't. Anything that could worry a Sannin would have to be damned scary, he knew.

It certainly shouldn't be the glares of two teenage boys stood over the dead body of their best friend.

Team Pervert had been assigned a milk-run mission, taking a simple scroll that contained information of tithes from Konoha to the Fire Daimyo. Then they had stumbled across a group of rogue ninja who shouldn't have been anywhere inside Fire Country at all.

The missing-nin, fearing discovery and censure, attacked. Team Pervert hadn't stood much of a chance at all, were it not for their exceptional abilities.

Jiraiya had attacked the ninja wearing a Rain hitai-ite immediately, sensing his skill and chakra capacity was far in advance of a regular Jounin. Jiraiya had been hard pressed, but had eventually killed the man. Too late to help his students, though... especially the one who had needed his help most.

Hiashi, Kami bless the boy, hadn't wasted any time in being nervous or being surprised at all, his Byakugan activating without a word or a hand seal, and that bloody frightening blade of his appearing in his hands with the poof of smoke that signalled a summoning from an equipment scroll. His kill-count for the day was three, including the one who he had chased down after the battle without remorse.

Minato had been luckier, getting only one to fight and kill, but still managing to help Hiashi with his final victim.

Aoi...

Aoi had been targeted by two missing-nin also. Both of them Chuunin level. She had done well, killing one using her brains and quite prodigious brawn, given her study of Tsunade's works.

And then, without warning, the second Chuunin got a lucky shot that shouldn't have been possible were it not for the supposedly dead ninja on the ground holding Aoi in place.

The silver-haired girl, the true Prankster Queen of Konohagakure no Sato, smartest kunoichi he had ever seen other than Tsunade, had died surrounded by her friends and teacher with a kunai stuck so deep in her heart she knew it was useless to even try and heal herself, and hadn't bothered. She had held out long enough to croak out a goodbye to her team-mates, and slipped away.

Hiashi's white battle-kimono had been soaked so thoroughly it might as well have been dyed with blood. It had still been wet when he and Minato had caught the survivor, tied him to a tree, and hacked off his arms one small piece at a time, tying tourniquets progressively higher and higher up the appendages until the enemy died, like Aoi, of blood-loss. With tourniquets helping, that was a damned long time. A lot of screaming, fainting, and reviving with smelling salts and injections of adrenaline from Aoi's personal stash of medicines and more mundane healing items.

Jiraiya had just... stood there and watched.

He was as bad, in a way, as Orochimaru. Let the boys torture and kill the bastard who killed a small piece of each of us when Aoi was murdered. Let them exact revenge, take their pound of flesh and allow them to take more in her name. Let the bastard suffer.

Worse things had happened during the war, but not many, and certainly nowhere near as many that were premeditated with such outright cruelty.

Such evil.

"Ne, Jiraiya-sama, thinking about something?"

Jiraiya blinked, broken out of his revelry by Shizune. She wasn't a bad kid, and it wasn't really his fault he'd forgotten about the young girl Tsunade had taken as an apprentice whilst she had been out on her travels. She'd grown over the last ten years, is all. Quite a lot.

"Eh, ah... Iie, Shizune-chan. Unless you want to give me something to think about, that is?" Jiraiya said, leering pervertedly at the black-haired girl.

"Agh! Hentai-Sannin no baka!"

Thus, balance was restored to the world when Shizune clouted Jiraiya about the head, and he told himself it wasn't for being a pervert... it was for failing Aoi-chan all those years ago.

AN: There we are, another chapter done. I know, I know, they're getting shorter steadily but I'm building to a very large one, I think. I'll try, 'tebayo! Hehe.