Experiment for Belief
Author's Note: I had this idea in my head for a while, but was unsure of whether it ought be a one-shot or a chapter story. I had decided that it would be a multi-chapter, but somehow found that it seemed to write itself more as a one-shot. I think it is rather poorly written compared to what it could have been, but I am uncommonly pleased with the first and most of the last scenes. It is likely that I will revise this at some point and turn it into a multi-chapter."What do you believe in?"
He glanced at her, not changing his solemn, stolid expression. "Why do you ask such a question?"
He had not answered, but she had not actually expected that. It was obvious that she had been around him too long as well when she, too, avoided answering the question. "I used to believe that I was in love with you," she whispered, so softly and barely audible that he almost missed it.
"Do you love me?" he asked in genuine curiosity.
She turned her face away, not willing to meet his eyes. There were many answers she could give, and all of them would be true. However, there was an answer that she wanted to give, but it would be entirely inappropriate to tell. "I depend on you."
It was not possible for her to tell how much she loved him.
Love was not something he understood. His thoughts were two-toned, with only black and white. There was control and controlled. He fought for control and thought of it as love. She would not tell him her true ideas because he was not like her. He was not as human as she was, with the weaknesses of emotion to drag down the mind and the weight of desires to burden the heart. Occasionally, he would behave almost affectionately towards her, and she would believe that they were in love. No one had ever been more in love, she would think, but she might have been wrong. According to him, no one falls in love; so mayhap she was not in love as she thought she was.
"Love me," he requested in quiet way that made him sound like a leader ordering a subordinate to do something.
That was almost enough, though, so she replied softly, "Yes."
They were both silent for a moment as they looked out at the night sky.
"I used to believe in true love," she whispered.
When he spoke, his tone was disapproving. "How childish."
"Did not you?" she persisted. "Before we grew up, so long ago? Did you ever believe in love, Neji?"
She heard him take a slight breath before replying almost reluctantly, "It was a very long time ago."
"Do you believe in anything anymore?"
"I believe in myself." His voice was so decisive that she felt forced away by the wall of his disbelief.
The female looked down at her hands. "I know," she said sadly.
There was a time ago, when the world was lovelier and people were kinder. It was in those days that he would accompany her to places, and her eyes would sparkle when he smiled at her. She would brew his tea and he would drink all of it and tell her it had been the most delicious he had tasted. He would take her dancing at night after everyone else had gone to sleep, telling her the nightly sounds were just for her. And when she was on the verge of crying--- and that was quite rare--- he would be the one to sit with her and tell her about the fountains of youth that flowed, and the places where no one wept.
Now, nothing was all right anymore, and she no longer "was", in many ways. She stiffened her face into an unnatural smile. "Do… do you believe in me?" she inquired, begging to know the answer.
He stiffened and his voice was rough with contempt. "Do not be foolish, Hinata. You are too old for such childish dreams."
"I know," she whispered.
Neji rubbed at his forehead in an attempt to ease the slight discomfort and dissuade the oncoming headache. At first glance, his body would seem as normal as usual. If one were to look more closely, there was a small red spot marking an injection in his upper arm. He frowned as he remembered that all he was valued as was an exceptionally skilled shinobi and now a test subject for an experiment.
The events of the last few hours passed through his mind.
It had been a cold evening when Hinata came out with the tea tray balanced in her hands to bring it to the training area for her cousin. He nodded politely at her in thanks when she put down the tea tray. They communications were generally concise and short like that, barely involving words if others could overhear them.
Unlike usual, she lingered after setting down the refreshments.
He waited for her to speak.
"Father desires to speak to you," she said quietly. It was only passing on a message, but in doing that, she had become a sort of glorified message runner instead of what she should have been. He pitied her for that.
"Thank you," he replied rather stiffly.
Of course, he had quickly had some tea before going to see the Clan Leader. Some of the other Hyuuga's saw him as he strode confidently through the paths there. Everyone knew that Hiashi's own daughter, the clan heiress, personally served Hiashi's nephew tea for breaks in his training. The Main House members saw it as a sort of affront to their own status that someone of their level should be waiting on someone of lower rank in the family. The Branch House members found Neji quite interesting and a few felt he was favored by Hiashi because of his closeness in blood. Neji ignored the curious, or sometimes contemptuous, looks given by his family and entered the audience room.
Hyuuga Hiashi and the members of the Clan Council sat in their positions in the room and looked down at him. Their gazes were piercing, but Neji knew how to react. After all, he could give such impassive glances himself. From the tension-filled atmosphere and the way they seemed uncommonly uneasy, he knew there had just been an argument of some sort. But how did it concern him?
"Neji," said the Clan Leader in a quiet voice. Everyone else in the room froze to listen to his words. The look on his face was sharp and cold. "You have been chosen for something of utmost importance."
Neji stood with an unreadable face. What was this thing of importance he had been chosen for? In one fleeting moment, he wondered if something like the Cloud incident with his father had occurred again, and they wanted to sacrifice him, but in the next, he knew that it was not so. It was something else--- obviously dangerous, or he would not have been so graciously invited to partake of whatever it was--- but significant enough to choose their clan genius for. He waited motionlessly for his elders to continue, ignoring the hairs that had flown out of his band and were now slightly obscuring the view. To move for such a petty thing would indicate disrespect, but he rather enjoyed not having to look directly at the men and women before him.
"Do you accept?" continued Hiashi.
It was a redundant question. Once someone had been chosen, they had to accept or face the consequences. As a Branch House member with a seal imprinted on his forehead, not accepting could be fatal. It was a rather silly part of protocol, but it allowed the Hyuuga Clan to keep up the illusion of choice for outsiders to see. "I do," answered Neji.
That had been how this all began. The thing of great importance he had to participate in was an experiment to enhance the Byakugan. He was no more than an experimental subject to them.
He had doubted the possibilities of this working, but started to find that he could see further and was even more powerful than before. Unfortunately, a side effect seemed to be headaches, but those were easily overcome.
Four weeks later, it was with a fearful mind that Neji beheld his cousin, Hinata, rubbing at her forehead similarly to the way he had done after the first injection. Though there could have been many other reasons, he somehow knew what the true reason was. They had taken her on as a test subject as well. He confirmed his suspicions by unexpectedly tearing off her jacket and checking her arm, ignoring the timid protests issued from her mouth. It bothered him greatly.
Life had been all right for him after the experiment began, other than the continual headaches. He had started to notice that it was often concentrated right where the lines of his Caged Bird seal were, but had not gotten an opportunity to tell anyone else yet. Now, his cousin had been submitted to the torture he had: of the knowledge that one was valued only as highly as an experimental subject.
To his surprise, she behaved normally most of the time but seemed to have gradually gained some sort of strange conviction in herself as a result of the experiments that showed itself in the most bizarre ways.
"Hinata, are you all right?" he asked monotonously after he had ripped her clothing for verification of his hypothesis, hiding the worry he felt from his voice, but letting it show in the troubled lines of his face.
"Of course, I am!" she snapped at him before flouncing off in indignation. "You never believe in me!"
He leaned back in astonishment at her unusual behavior. She rarely, if ever, shouted or spoke meanly to another. And the flouncing! When had that began? She generally walked off quietly in the way of a timid mouse.
A few days later, he was sparring with her when she backed away suddenly. Her eyes flashed red and she fairly roared in fury. He could have sworn that it looked like the famed Sharingan of the Uchiha Clan, if it were not for the fact that it had only lasted a moment before it faded and she collapsed. He hurried to her side and took her indoors. They did not speak of the incident to each other.
"Something is wrong," he said clearly to the overseer of the experiment. "She has changed too much."
"I believe things have gone perfectly," was the reply before a searing pain forced Neji to his knees and an attempt to grab the floor for support. "You will not question your superiors again. You will not speak of this to anyone."
That was the only time he brought up his concerns.
The third incident happened seven weeks after Neji's injections began and three weeks after Hinata's. It was so large-scale that it could not be covered up or ignored. To be quite plain, Hinata killed everyone in the Hyuuga Clan except for Hanabi and Neji, who were both absent from the compound at the time. When they returned, Hinata licked the blood off one of her kunai and jumped down to confront them.
"Sister," Hanabi tried to gasp, but she could not speak.
"I did it for all of us," said Hinata quietly.
"You killed them all!" shouted the younger girl, putting all her anger, disbelief, and terror into the four words.
Hinata moved towards her two remaining relatives. Neji stepped in front of Hanabi, both to shield his younger cousin and to hopefully talk to Hinata. He could hear the younger breathing heavily and see the stain of crimson on the lips of the older.
The murderer stared him almost regretfully and shook her long blue locks. "You do not believe in me," she remarked softly before leaving and escaping into the forests surrounding Konoha while the two cousins looked on the scene of massacre in shock.
There was nothing else to do, so Neji went to the Fifth Hokage to confess what had gone on behind the high walls of Hyuuga. The man who had forbidden him to speak of the experiment was rotting under the sun and waiting to be incinerated and carted off, so Neji was free to express his opinions. He told about the day he had been chosen and the day the experiments had begun. He spoke of the day he believed Hinata might have started getting the injections as well and of her strange behavior. He did not tell her of the last few words Hinata had spoken before fleeing. That was also Hinata's secret, which he was not permitted to speak of.
Tsunade listened in silence and then asked her permission to perform some tests on him.
He obliged.
When the results came in a few weeks later, they found that the Caged Bird seals tied into the immune systems of their carriers. That was why the drug had gone through Neji without causing much harm, except for the headaches when his seal suppressed his body from attempting to force out and attack the foreign things. Hinata had no seal, so her body reacted freely. She had become deranged either as a side effect of the drug being rejected or as a result of her body fighting against it all the time.
Tsunade also believed that Hinata had somehow developed the Sharingan, which was not entirely impossible considering that the Sharingan had branched off from the Byakugan in the first place. That extra edge, in addition to her newfound power, would have made it quite simple to kill off her entire clan. Knowing that he had been correct did not quite make Neji as happy as he could have been. There were rather terrible parallels to the Uchiha case that made the whole matter unsettling.
He also had a sick, sinking feeling that part of the reason she had agreed to be a participant in the experiment and then become deranged was because she had been promised strength and that she had felt they believed in her. Unlike him. What if he had said he believed in her so long ago?
To everyone's surprise, Hinata wandered back into Konoha and the Hyuuga compound a week after she left. Passerby's heard her rambling about seals, Hyuuga's, and who knew what else. She offered no resistance when a squad of ANBU arrived, but fought terribly when they attempted to take her away from the compound. Tsunade and Neji were called to the area, the former because she was the Hokage and one of the most powerful people around and the latter because he was someone they knew could possibly match the mad female with his firsthand knowledge.
Neji came first, and Hinata disabled him quickly. While the cursed seal stayed his sanity, it also stayed his power; her power level had gone far beyond his own. She walked proudly towards him, like a conquering goddess, but there was a feeling of joy that could kill in her demeanor. Neji was loathe to turn his eyes away from her, but knew he had to loosen himself from the confinements first. He did so.
The two backed away from each other and stood as they had in numerous spars and conversations. They were in the same sparring area they had often been in--- the one place where many others could watch from the balcony and feel that they were spectating what they controlled. Both the cousins could remember the numerous white eyes watching their fights here unblinkingly, their long hair waving in the wind even as their figures was rigid and unbending to create an slight illusion of flexibility. This time, though, it was the combatants who were in control.
Unlike as in a usual spar, she made the first move. In the past, she only began conversations. She tore across the field quickly and ripped off the band covering his Caged Bird seal. Then, with some fast handseals, she removed the unnatural lines marring his skin. He stared at her in shock. This was what he had always wanted, but now that he had been an experiment subject and was without the seal…
She looked into his eyes and captured him. Neji fought at first, but then let himself be taken by the orbs and relaxed. He suddenly felt that he was in another world, where she controlled time and place. Similar to the effect of the Magekyou Sharingan. His eyes snapped open and he realized it was the same as it had been before: the situation of looking out into the evening sky and just the two of them standing there.
Her eyes had lost the strange look it had taken on in the real world. Here, they were normal and she was truly Hinata once again. "What do you believe in?"
Neji looked at her, mildly shocked that the conversation was beginning the same as it had before. "Why do you ask such a question?" he wondered.
"I used to believe that I was in love with you," she whispered.
He hesitated for a moment before answering her wistful statement. Was this replaying a memory or was it a chance to change things? He would try. "I love you. Do you love me?" Neji desired only an answer this time, not the privilege of asking.
Her reply was different than it had been before. It was what she had wanted to say, both then and now. "I love you very much."
They were both silent now, as there was no need to imitate the conversation completely now that it had changed and gone. There was no need for him to ask her to repeat what she had just said, for once was enough to know. There was no need for any more words--- except one question.
"Do you believe in me?" she asked quietly. She had a feeling that if she did not ask now, she would not have another chance.
Her instincts were true.
Somehow, something warned them of their limited time although neither of them had any way of knowing that in the one moment Hinata had used to take Neji into that other plane, someone was destroying both of their bodies. Neji no longer had his seal and he would eventually become deranged as well. Tsunade would kill both the children before they could fall again into that horror for themselves and danger for others. It was better for them that way.
"Yes," he replied.
There was nothing more to say.