Author's Notes:

Hello, boys and girls, and welcome back to the show! First off, I'd like to thank all of the people who reviewed to last week's chapter. Keep'em coming, folks!

Second, I've got a few clarifications to put out so LISTEN UP, MAGGOTS!!!

I made a mistake in the pairings. Instead of ShikaIno, it should be ShikaTemari. Sorry if I pissed anyone off, and I really sympathize with you. On that paring, I could go either way, honestly. Sort of as a way to make it up to anyone I might have alienated, I'm going to be writing an entirely different story, just for that paring. Think anywhere from one to five chapters, depending on what I can do.

Second, in case anyone was confused, I'm going to explain a little bit of the third chapter. When I wrote that, I was thinking along the lines of how sometimes, when the situation is desperate, people say things that they might not have been totally ready to say otherwise, which was sort of what Hinata was feeling.

And in case anyone has anything against this, THERE WILL BE ORIGINALXCANON PAIRINGS! Sorry, but the male/female ratio is just so off, I really couldn't go without it. God knows that at least a few unpaired characters deserve a little love in their lives, and being the royal sap that I am, I couldn't let them go without it. I won't give anything more than the names of the canon characters, but I have to, just because I don't want to give anyone a nasty surprise.

Ino and Kiba will be paired with original characters. No flames, or I eat you!

Aside from that, let's get to the, um… You know… Actual chapter?

Chapter Four:

The Wolf Who Cried Girl

That night, Hinata stepped through the Hyuuga complex with an extra dance to her step, an added musical element whenever she spoke, a new light in her lavender eyes.

She had dreamed of Naruto for so long, watched and worshiped every step he took.

And now, she finally had him.

"We'll, almost," she admitted internally. Still, it did nothing to counteract her almost chronic happiness. For the fifth time since the actual event, Hinata replayed that glorious memory in her mind.

"Hinata?" Naruto asked. The rain had long since passed, though neither could discern exactly how long ago that was. And hour, two, or more?

The dark-haired princess could feel Naruto's chest vibrate as he spoke, his normally baritone voice resonating within his body, producing a handful of deeper tones that could only be heard in close proximity. Which was exactly where she was.

Neither teenager had entertained the notion that, now that the rain was gone, it would be a good idea to separate.

For Hinata, the reason was obvious. It was him, her Naruto. She finally had him, and it was better than she could have ever imagined. His chest felt so wonderfully had against the side of her cheek, strong, smooth muscle providing an exceptional pillow. His arms encircled her more like armor than a cage. Anything that went for her would undoubtedly have to go through him first, no easy task to be sure. The warmth that radiated off Naruto's body was immense, a cozy blanket that seemed to cover every inch of Hinata's skin, even though the only skin being touched was the back of her neck as he gently stroked her hair. Hinata took a breath, savoring the clean, spring-like scent that hung around his skin and clothes. If she died there, in his arms, she would die happy.

For Naruto, it was slightly more complex. First and foremost, Hinata was his friend. He couldn't change that on a whim, a fact that they both silently acknowledged. He was willing to try, but the fact was that they didn't know much about each other, a fact that would take time to change. It didn't matter that her slim body fit against his so perfectly, that her silky blue-black-violet hair smelled so sweet, or that even the skin of her ear, whenever he accidentally brushed it, felt baby soft and smooth as satin. He was her friend, someone who he had never seen in a romantic light, and he was struggling with how plain and obvious her more-than-just-cute features now were, and how they contrasted with his formerly endearing and platonic relationship. That still didn't change the fact that she was his friend, and Naruto never abandoned his friends, no matter what they needed him for.

"Yes, Naruto-kun…?" she whispered back to him. Naruto couldn't ignore the way his heart missed a beat when she said his name like that, so breathless, with such adoration and emotion. Some would even call it weakness, vulnerability, but it touched Naruto's heart none the less.

"You… You realize that this… This is going to take some time, right?" he asked reluctantly. The blond ninja was loath to risk hurting Hinata in some way, but giving her a false love just to wrench her back to reality would obviously hurt so much more.

"Yes," was the response, without a single trace of hurt or rejection. Naruto exhaled a breath he didn't know he was holding.

"So…" he began, unsure where to begin. It wasn't this hard with Sakura, he reflected. He had never felt so unsure of himself before. "Would you… Um… Would you like to train with me, Hinata?"

The lavender-eyed girl giggled.

"Of course," she said, simply but happily, so unnaturally calm. "When?"

"How… How about tomorrow… at eleven?"

"Yes."

Hinata had a date. Her first date, with Naruto none the less. It seemed like a dream come true.

"Good morning, father," she said with a cheery smile as she entered the main-family dining hall. But rather than stay for breakfast, she made a beeline for the door. It didn't go unnoticed.

"Hinata, where are you going?" Hiashi said, polite and taciturn. Never mind that he was talking to his own daughter. She never did live up to her father's expectations.

Yet the eldest Hyuuga daughter never noticed when her father failed to return her greeting.

"I have a training session, father," she responded, her voice light and free as though Hinata lacked a care in the world.

"With who, might I ask?" her father responded. Hiashi knew that Kurenai wouldn't be available, as there was a meeting scheduled between the top-ranking Jonin and the clan leaders with the Hokage.

"Uzumaki Naruto."

"Thank you, Hinata. That will be all," the clan leader said bluntly, as though speaking to a subordinate.

This," he reflected as he began the walk towards the Elder's Counsel-room. "This is something that might require action."

Hiashi knew of his daughter's love for the Uzumaki boy.

He also knew of the Uzumaki boy himself.

"This clan is the oldest in Konoha. I cannot let its blood become tainted by the vessel of a demon."

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While Hinata made her way to the east training fields, one Inuzuka Kiba was inclined to visit the more local south training field. And he was not having a good time.

"Damn it!" he growled, pacing back and forth with Akamaru, his faithful nin-hound, following closely.

The shaggy, brown-haired dog-ninja had gone to sleep early, woken up early, and skipped breakfast to reach the training field early to meet up with Shino Aburame, his bug-wielding teammate. He, along with Hinata and Kurenai-sensei, made up Team 10, Konoha's newest tracking squad.

But Shino never showed up. Kiba couldn't have known that the bug-using ninja's father had brought him along to the clan-meeting that morning, but even if he had, the dog-user would have been angry anyways. It was just who he was.

"Where the hell is he!?"

"An Inuzuka? Waiting for someone? And I was told you guys had no friends," said another voice.

Kiba's head shot up. Akamaru growled, before giving off an angry bark.

Standing by the fence of the training field was a dark-clothed figure, clothed in a black stealth body-suit. The figure stood in the shade of a tree, the dark combined with the dark clothes making identification impossible.

"What's it to you?" Kiba growled. While he honestly didn't care about who that shape might be, he definitely didn't enjoy insults, especially in his already frustrated state.

"Doggy doesn't even know about his own clan's rivalries?" the form said, shoving off the fencepost to move closer. The first thing Kiba noticed was the coordination with which his new antagonist moved. It seemed oddly… Odd. Too graceful, even for a skilled ninja. "Or do you Inuzuka see as badly as you smell?"

Kiba's fists clenched and Akamaru let out another snarl. He didn't enjoy arguing, preferring to fight with his fists, something that he would no doubt get into trouble for, as he already had so many times. He was still in the doghouse, so to speak, for his last scrap, but this one was pushing it!

"You wanna make something out of this?" he bit out, sounding more like a growl than a sentence.

The figure stepped into the light, and Kiba's jaw dropped.

It was a girl. Now, Kiba was no stranger to the fairer sex. You'd be wrong if you called him a player, but you'd be even worse off to say that he didn't have a history. He was a pretty big hit with the non-ninja girls in the village, who apparently found his skills to be a big plus, and who didn't know him as well as some of the kunoichi.

Still, this was by far the most stunning girl he had met in his sixteen years of life. By far. She was slim and well proportioned, curved in all the right places, with long legs and a pretty face framed by a waist-length braid of black hair. Her skin was possibly her most captivating feature, a dark, rich wooden brown. Then, Kiba saw the eyes, a violent, burning purple. He had never even thought that a single look could be that intense.

The thing he noticed next was her gloves. They were made of black steel, and each finger was tipped with a razor claw.

He had been told about the clan family that wore those gloves, and what he had heard had not been good. His father had told him all about the Torakage clan, the Inuzuka's most hated rival.

"Listen up, Kiba," his father had told him when he was around eight. "You see that man, right there?"

The man in question had been Torakage Kyokan, the leader of the Torakage clan, who was sitting across the large room from Kiba and his father.

"Yeah, dad?" Kiba had responded, looking at the man in question

"That's the head of the Torakage clan. You watch out for them, Kiba. The Torakages are nothing but trouble."

Kiba heard and smelled the anger in his father's voice, and his childish mind took over.

"Dad hates the Torakages…" he considered. "So I guess I'll hate them too!"

Then, she stepped out from behind her father's chair. Her skin was as dark as his, her eyes and hair the same hues of black and violet, but she seemed somehow softer than her father. Her hair fell to shoulder length, and she wore it down, a few strands falling before her face. Her eyes seemed intense, yet gentle at the same time.

"Dad!" he had hissed, clutching his father's shirt-sleeve and tugging.

His father looked down on him, surprised by the urgency of the boy's summons. Under his father's questioning gaze, Kiba suddenly felt his ears and cheeks going hot, and a strange smell was coming off of him. Regardless, the boy pressed on.

"Is…?" he bit his lip. "Is she bad too?" he finally asked, pointing at the girl in question.

If it was any other girl, his father would have been pleased to no end by the growing maturity of his son. But it wasn't any other girl.

"Yes, Kiba," his father had said. "Even her."

Kiba hadn't put any stock in the grudge, at first. Then, around twelve years of age, he finally dismissed the notion of the purple-eyed girl with the black hair and dark skin as a child's dream. He was older now, and didn't have time to go chasing after some mystery-princess, like a dreaming young boy in his own fantasy world.

Even so, Kiba had never been much for the family grudge after his earlier years, having always been the black sheep of the family, especially when placed next to his older sister, Hana. Even so, the girl had insulted him!

"So what if I do?" the girl shot back, shaking Kiba out of his thoughts.

Kiba grinned. It wasn't often that he got to fight with a ninja outside of sparring, and all of his partner's moves were getting dull, anyways.

"Then let's get going," Kiba said, dropping down on all fours as per his family's fighting style, the Four-Legged Fist. Akamaru tensed, the huge dog readying for a charge. Kiba's fingernails extended to claws, his already overly large canine teeth extending to full-blown fangs, his mouth curling open in a feral grin. "Sit this one out, Akamaru. She's mine!"

The black-haired girl put her left hand before her, her right by her face, claws prominently displayed.

And Kiba charged.

They met as two opposites, Kiba coming in with powerful swipes and slams, battering his foe as much as he clawed at her. The still unnamed Torakage fought with more finesse, striking with carefully measured swipes, lightning-fast fingerjabs, and graceful, acrobatic leaps, handsprings, and tumbles.

Kiba was smiling the whole time. He had never been so evenly matched with an opponent, and he had never had a more exhilarating fight. Even his handful of barroom brawls hadn't been this much fun, and he had been thoroughly buzzed for every last one of them!

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"Hey, Hinata!" The blond ninja called to her. "Glad you could make it!"

And in that moment, all the calm Hinata had felt the day before had fled from her, leaving her more or less as she once was, stuttering and blushing.

"Um… I, ah…"

"Come on!" Naruto shouted, grabbing Hinata's hand as he dragged her deeper into the clearing. "I've got a new jutsu I wanna show you!"

Naruto dragged Hinata towards the weapons-training area of the field, which was adorned with a cluster of wooden poles, each with several spars jutting out from the core, set at angles to mimic a blade in a parry.

Finally, Naruto released the Hyuuga's hand, and finally, she was able to breathe again.

"What…? What happened?" Hinata wondered. "Everything was so right yesterday… Why did it change?"

The next thing she saw was a volley of hand-seals, a hand clenched in a claw, and she knew exactly why she was so flustered.

"Wind Release: Force Cannon Jutsu!"

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Insert Musical Accompaniment:

Buried Alive, Alter Bridge;

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A sphere of energy, not unlike the one that had torn through the training field the other day, but this one painted an incandescent green, began to form in between his fingers. Then, the wind began to swirl around the knuckleheaded shinobi. At first, it was only a breeze, gently tugging at his clothes, ethereal fingers running through his sunny hair.

Then the wind began to grow as it visibly gathered around his extended arm and the growing attack in his palm. It was unformed, unfocused at first. Really, it was just Hinata's guess; all she knew was that the growing gales were somehow centered on her love.

The swirling gusts were growing stronger now, whipping around the clearing, making Hinata's hair, longer than it had been when she was young, a detriment to her vision. Fumbling for a hair-tie, she collected the dark strands and bound them in a single tail behind her head. It still managed to move in the wind, but at least it wasn't in her face.

Naruto looked so strong, so amazingly fierce, powerful, and deadly. There was only one word Hinata found that really fit, and it was male. The scene playing out before her, Naruto's face holding a grin of sheer boyish delight, the muscles in his bracing arm clearly outlined under taught skin, the open body of his orange and blue vest flailing around rakishly in the wind, came across as dramatically, definitively, male.

The wind began to truly form around his arm, like streamers of green. They sprung out from the joint of his shoulder, winding down his arm and coming together before the growing, glowing ball in his hands.

Like the point of a storm-born javelin.

"Wind Release: Tempest Arrow Jutsu!"

As the blue-eyed Chunin uttered the first two words, the streamers that formed the head of the arrow began to spin, uniform in their curve, like the point of a drill. The Hyuuga audience felt the hair on the back of her neck go up on end. Her ears couldn't quite detect it fully, but there was a whine in the air, an almost unperceivable but undoubtedly unnatural pattern of vibration in the air. Curiosity over took the pale-eyed kunoichi.

"Byakugan…" she whispered. She felt the familiar twinge of discomfort as her chakra suddenly changed directions and began pooling rapidly in her lavender eyes. It took only a moment for the kekkei-genkai to fully activate. Once Hinata could see in more detail, what she saw was far more shocking.

Hinata saw Naruto's entire chakra system in all of its irregular glory, from the normal network, which was so bursting with energy that it glowed white-hot, like the heart of a sun, instead of blue, to the curious and equally bountiful swirling addition on his stomach, to the active pores that girdled his shoulder, where searing white light was shifted and molded into a more usable emerald-green.

At the end of his arm, glowing green, those streamers were more substantial.

They were blades.

Then, with a slight thump, the spear of energy shot from his palm like a lightning bolt, passing through the many-armed posts in its path, leaving a trail of green as it went. The holes were clean, without a single singe, crack, split, or rough surface, as though the material had simply ceased to exist.

The blast continued, going through at least half of the twenty-plus posts that were spread throughout that portion of the training-grounds, before shooting off into the trees beyond.

Naruto's arm was still in front of him, and the claws of his fingers closed into a fist.

And the spear exploded in all directions. Huge blades, invisible edges formed of nothing but focused masses of displaced air, cut down oak and ash, and pine in a full circle around, leaving nothing but stumps standing, carving tracks in the ground.

If Hinata's jaw wasn't already in the dirt, it would have flown from her face at the slightest breeze.

Naruto was grinning like a fool.