First Chapter of The Lost Heiress
Here is the first chapter of the Sasuhian fic idea I created. Please let me know your thoughts. This idea has consumed me, but I am having trouble executing it as I envisioned. Still very much a rough draft I have revised it twice so far after writing a few chapters.
Okay, I will stop my rumbling and present what I have
Shisui noticed it the moment it landed in the tree above him.
The mission has resulted in nothing so far.
Shisui crouched on a high branch, scanning the forest floor while reviewing the intelligence report for the fourth time in two days.
Suspected Akatsuki associate operating in the border region between Fire and Sound. Known connection of Orochimaru, one of the Sannin. Last confirmed sighting: forty days ago. Objective: observe, gather intelligence, do not engage.
He had been in this forest for the last six days. He had found the associate's last campsite, cold fire pit, supply cache already emptied, the kind of careful leave-taking that said a professional in their craft and a set of tracks that dissolved into nothing two kilometres north, and after that, silence.
Whoever he had been sent to find had either moved on or gone underground so thoroughly that even Shisui's Sharingan, spinning slowly in the low afternoon light, couldn't pick up a heat trail worth following.
He rolled his shoulders and looked around, trying to find any clues he had missed. He had supplies for three more days of fieldwork and exactly nothing to show for it. Shisui did not bring much with him as he thought this would be a quick mission. If they decide to keep him out here longer, he will have to stop at a nearby village to restock.
That same owl from before followed him, landing on the branch above him.
He glanced at it. Large, larger than the breed had any right to be at this latitude, with pale eyes that caught the last of the afternoon light in a way that was almost unsettling. It looked at him with the particular fixed attention of its kind and did not move.
It's dusk, he thought. They come out at dusk. It’s not weird for them to be out at this time. He couldn’t help but have a strange feeling about it.
He looked back at the forest floor. When he looked up again, the branch was empty.
He tried not to give it another thought and kept moving through the trees.
The Uchiha police force's intelligence division would not be pleased.
Going home empty-handed, he thought. That would not be well received.
He dropped from the branch, landed without sound on the forest floor, and turned west.
He had taken perhaps forty steps when he felt it.
It was not a sound. It was not a chakra flare. Whatever was watching him had better discipline than that. Could it be that the Akatsuki associate? Then this mission might not be wasted.
He did not turn around. He let his Sharingan bleed into his peripheral vision and continued scanning forward, easy and unhurried, giving no indication that anything had changed.
There. In the tree grove to his left. A shape in the shadows that was almost indistinguishable from the way the shadow fell between those particular trees at this particular hour, but not quite. The outline was wrong by a fraction. The stillness was too deliberate. Natural things did not hold that still.
He had walked into a perimeter.
How far back did it start? He thought about the last hundred meters. The bird that had gone quiet. The shift in wind direction hadn't tracked with the natural pattern. He had been inside this perimeter for at least three minutes without knowing it.
That was not a comfortable realization.
There she was, standing twenty meters behind him on the forest path.
Shisui's first thought was that she was small, way too small. His second thought, arriving immediately after, was that height was the least relevant thing about her.
She was a child, maybe seven or eight years old. Dark hair pulled back in a short bob with bangs almost covering her eyes, but he saw those pale eyes peeking through. The wind picks up, brushing the bangs away, revealing the Hyuga signature Byakugan's veins raised at her temples, and he understands in an instant that she had been watching him for much longer than the last thirty seconds. That she had been watching him since before he felt the perimeter. That she had let him feel it. Shisui wondered why a Hyuga child was out here all alone.
There have been no reports of a missing Hyuuga kid, except one, six years ago.
She dressed in clothes that didn't belong to any village he recognized. No headband. No identifying markings other than what he already noted.
She was looking at him the way he looked at targets in the field, with complete attention, no readable emotion, already calculating.
He had his hands loose at his sides and did not reach for anything.
"Hey," he said. Easy. Neutral. The tone he used with witnesses, informants and people he wasn't sure about yet. "I'm not looking for trouble."
"I'm heading west," he continued. "Just passing through."
Her eyes moved a micro-adjustment, the Byakugan tracking something, and he realized she was checking his chakra system, reading him at the pathway level with the efficiency of someone who had done it a thousand times.
Looking for weapons movements, he thought.
"You activated the perimeter seal," she said. Her voice was flat and soft and entirely without the register he expected from someone her age. No pitch of uncertainty. No question underneath the statement. Just information, delivered.
"I did," he said. "I didn't know I stepped in one."
"That's why I'm not already gone," she said.
"You have the Byakugan," he said.
He watched her go very still, a quality of stillness that was different from the careful professional stillness of a moment ago. This was something else. Something that happened below the level of trained response.
“You know I never thought I would meet a Hyuga this far from Konoha,” Shisui says, watching for any movement from her but noticing nothing, so he continues.
“But I heard of a young girl who was kidnapped many years ago who looks similar to you.”
The possibility of finding her after all these years, alive no less, was slim to none. It wouldn’t hurt to see if he’s right.
Hinata watched his movement without uttering a single word. He can tell that she is calculating what to do next. Shisui has to proceed carefully, as this mission took a turn no one thought possible after all these years. The Hyuga heir had vanished six years ago.
Officially, Kumogakure had taken her. Unofficially… no one had ever found proof. And now a Hyuga child was standing twenty meters away in the middle of Fire Country’s border.
"Your name is Hinata," he said. "Your father is Hiashi Hyuga, head of the Hyuga clan in Konohagakure." He kept his voice level and calm. "You've been missing for six years."
He hoped that finding her here meant that she had escaped from wherever she was captured.
She turned around. “That has nothing to do with me.”
He had one second to read her face before she moved.
What he saw in that second was not relief. No recognition. Something that crossed her features like weather fast and complicated and gone before he could fully acknowledge it, instead a cold and immediate something that looked a great deal like rage.
She crossed the twenty meters between them in a straight line, no feint, no misdirection, and he sidestepped the first strike on instinct alone, her palm heel coming in at the angle of his solar plexus chakra point, precisely targeted, with a force that had no business coming from a frame her size. He felt the air displacement against his shirt as it passed.
He didn't finish the thought. She was already repositioning, low and fast, and he backpedalled two steps, fully activating his Sharingan because apparently they were doing this.
"I don't want to fight you," he told her, trying to deter her from fighting.
She came at him again, a combination this time, both hands, and he recognized the base of it as Gentle Fist. Still, the angles were wrong, the entries were wrong, there was something underneath the Hyuga framework that had been layered over it like scar tissue over a wound. He deflected the first strike, took the second on his forearm because he was half a second slow reading the modification, and felt his chakra network flicker at the point of contact.
She's actually trying to close my tenketsu.
He created distance with a body flicker ten meters, northeast, and landed in a ready stance and looked at her across the forest floor and recalibrated everything he thought he'd walked into.
"Okay," he said, mostly to himself. He really has to take this fight seriously, or he will end up seriously injured. He let out a chuckle. As absurd as that thought was, he knew better than to underestimate an opponent. Underestimating her would be a mistake.
She didn't give him time to finish readjusting or finish his thoughts.
She came out of the tree line on his left. He hadn't seen her move into the trees, which meant she'd used the half-second of his displacement to reposition, which meant she was reading his movement patterns already. The Byakugan's range advantage was fully in play now, her eyes tracking everything, and Shisui understood with sudden clarity that she was not reacting to him.
He went vertical, chakra to his feet, sprinting up the trunk and launching into the trees to gain elevation. She followed. Not climbing, she hit the trunk three meters up, kicked off it, gained height on a diagonal, and came at him through the leaves from the left with a precision that said she had mapped the branch structure in her Byakugan before she committed to the approach.
She used it to her advantage. Twisted into it, used his own hold as a pivot point, and drove a knee toward his midsection that he blocked with his forearm, and they were tangled for three seconds in the trees, branches cracking, before he released her and they separated.
She landed on a branch eight meters away and looked at him.
His forearm ached where he'd blocked the knee. He rotated his shoulder slowly and assessed.
She's faster than she should be. The modifications to the Gentle Fist are coming from somewhere, and that somewhere is nothing that exists in Konoha's training records. The Byakugan usage is beyond what any Academy student should have. She has been trained. Not generally, specifically. Intensively. For years.
She was barely ten years old.
He could end it. He had ended harder things than this. But the options available to him for ending it were limited by his unwillingness to hurt her, and the ones that didn't involve hurting her were getting narrower the longer this went on.
"Your father is looking for you," he tried again. "He never stopped—"
The stillness happened again. The emotion crossed her face.
This time, he read it correctly.
It was not rage. It was something different and more specific than rage. He could not imagine what she had to endure all these years. Whoever took her may have had a part in this reaction.
She didn't want to hear about her father, he concluded.
There’s a lot to unpack, he thought.
She dropped from the branch, and he dropped to meet her, and they collided in the space between the trees.
The Byakugan gave her information advantages that his Sharingan only partially compensated for. The modifications to her taijutsu were unpredictable in the specific way of the techniques. Pairing both together was a recipe for disaster.
Her stamina was remarkable, and it made him wonder where she would be in the future.
Not retreating, moving, forcing her to chase, using his body flicker in short controlled bursts to pull her across the terrain, up and down elevation changes, through the denser sections of the forest where the canopy closed and the light dropped. He watched her breathing. He watched her movement. He watched for the moment when the calculations behind her eyes had to work slightly harder to keep up.
It took longer than it should have.
A half-second of hesitation in her repositioning, not much, barely visible, but the Sharingan caught it. She was pulling from reserves now rather than surplus. Her strikes were still precise, but the speed behind them had dropped a fraction.
He let her close the distance one more time. Let her commit to the combination. Read it three moves out with the Sharingan, let the first two strikes land on his guard, feel the impact shudder through his forearms, and on the third, he stepped inside her reach and got his hand to her face.
His Sharingan caught hers.
"Sleep," he said quietly.
The genjutsu slipped into her mind like falling water.
He made sure of that. Not a command that would fracture anything, just a suggestion, soft and total, settling over her consciousness like the first moment of a dreamless night.
Sleep. You're safe. Sleep.
She fought it for two full seconds. He felt her trying to push back against it through sheer will, her chakra spiking in one last effort, and for those two seconds, he held his breath because he had never had someone resist it even partially,y and she was nine and still—
He caught her before she hit the ground.
For a moment, he simply stood there, her weight light in his arms. Too light. A Shinobi her age should not have hands like that, callused across the palms and knuckles, the kind of wear that came from years of striking training posts and practicing chakra control drills. What he sees with people twice her age.
He adjusted his grip slightly and saw the smaller details now that the fight had stopped.
There was faint bruising along her forearms. The older scars were hidden beneath the sleeve of her jacket.
Training injuries. Repeated ones.
Not the kind of child one should have.
Her face, relaxed in sleep, looked younger now. The hard, calculating focus from moments before had disappeared, leaving behind something closer to the age she should have been all along.
Someone had turned a nine-year-old into a perimeter guard.
He thought about the intelligence report. The Akatsuki associate. Orochimaru's connection.
He thought about the perimeter seal she had placed around this section of forest, and what that meant about what was nearby, and why a nine-year-old child would be running perimeter security on a location connected to Orochimaru of the Sannin.
He looked north, toward where the tracks he'd been following had dissolved into nothing two days ago.
She wasn't passing through, he realized. She was stationed here. This is her post.
The realization arrived slowly at first and then all at once, the way the worst ones always did.
He thought about the campsite.
The cold fire pit. The supply cache emptied with professional thoroughness. Nothing left behind. Nothing careless.
He had assumed experience.
A seasoned operative covering their tracks.
Because the alternative had never occurred to him.
He thought about the tracks. The way they moved through the terrain was deliberate, efficient, confident, practiced, and controlled. The kind of movement you expected from someone who had done this for years. And the way they had simply stopped two kilometres north. As though the person making them had stepped off the earth entirely.
He had spent six days tracking a child through this forest and never realized it.
He looked at her again. At the callused hands. At the cut on her cheekbone. Even though unconscious, she held herself with a compactness that was not rest but readiness, some part of her still braced for what came next.
What did he do to you, he thought and not for the last time will he think it. What did he make you into? What else do you know that we don't know you know?
Something moved above him.
The owl was back. It sat on a branch directly overhead and looked down at him with those pale unsettling eyes, and it did not fly away when he met its gaze, and it did not look at him the way owls looked at things they were not interested in. He looked at the girl in his arms.
The owl looked at him for one long moment as if making a decision. Then it spread its wings vast, silent, larger than they had any right to be and lifted from the branch and disappeared into the dark between the trees heading north.
Back toward the perimeter. Back toward the post.
Hers, he thought. The certainty of it settled in his chest without evidence and without doubt. It's hers.
He adjusted his hold, settled her weight against his shoulder, and turned west.
He had two days of walking ahead of him and a mission debrief that was going to be one of the more complicated conversations of his career. He had six days of intelligence notes that needed to be entirely rewritten. He had a report to file that would begin: The Akatsuki associate was not an associate. She is nine years old, and her name is Hinata Hyuga, whom I was tracking for six days without knowing.
He thought about the owl. About what it meant that a child in Orochimaru's custody had formed a summoning contract. About what it cost to hold that contract, the chakra, the training, the sheer will required to maintain a bond like that through whatever those six years had contained.
He thought about what she must have needed it for.
Something to come back to, he realized. Something that was only hers.
Behind him, somewhere in the dark of the forest, something large and silent kept pace from the shade above, and did not leave until the tree line ended and the road west began.
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