The Peculiar Relationship

The Hyuuga estate was in chaos, but only in silence. The air was heavy with something thick and unsaid, like grief before the tears, fear before the screams. Naruto stood at the center of it all, golden light pouring from his body in steady waves. His eyes glowed with focused urgency, and the chakra cloak danced around him like the wind before a storm.

Hiashi stood rigid, his usual calm shaken. Beside him, Kakashi Hatake, the Sixth Hokage, kept his arms folded, face unreadable behind the familiar slouch and mask.

“How?” Hiashi asked again, voice tight. “How can someone simply enter the Hyuuga compound, the most secure household in all of Konoha, and not only kidnap my daughter, but take Hanabi’s eyes?!”

Naruto clenched his fists, Kurama’s chakra crackling along his arms.

“That’s why Naruto is here,” Kakashi said softly, eye narrowed. “No one else can sense this.”

“Let me focus,” Naruto muttered. “Quiet.”

He closed his eyes.

Kurama's deep voice rumbled in his mind, calmer now, focused. We’ll find it. Whatever this is... it reeks of something old. Ancient. Not human.

Naruto opened his senses, and the golden cloak pulsed outward like a sonar. His breath slowed. He felt the roots beneath the compound, the flutter of insects in trees, the heartbeat of every Hyuuga.

And then—

There it was.

Something that shouldn’t be.

He stiffened. “This chakra...”

Hiashi stepped forward. “What is it?”

“It’s...” Naruto struggled for words. “It’s like Kaguya’s... not exactly, but it’s of the same blood. Alien, like it doesn’t belong here.”

Kakashi raised a brow. “Kaguya?”

Naruto nodded, eyes still glowing. “But there’s something else... it’s also like a Hyuuga’s chakra. But way more refined. Way more... ancient. Like a royal version of it.”

Hiashi’s lips parted slightly, the color draining from his face.

Naruto slowly raised his hand, pointing up.

“Where?” Kakashi asked sharply.

Naruto’s voice dropped to a whisper.

“…The moon.”

Hiashi staggered back.

“…The moon?” Kakashi repeated.

Naruto turned to face them both, voice firm now.

“They’re not on this planet anymore.”

—T~T—

In the Hyūga council room, a rare sight: Naruto sitting quietly, chin resting on his hands, expression grim. Across from him sat Hiashi, Kakashi, and Shikamaru, a tense silence draping over them. A single candle flickered on the low table, casting long shadows.

“The facts are clear,” Kakashi began, voice grave. “We’re dealing with someone of Ōtsutsuki lineage, possibly even a descendant of Kaguya. If that chakra really came from the moon… we’re not just facing a threat, we’re facing the impossible.”

“Then we do the impossible,” Naruto said. “We bring Hinata and Hanabi back.”

Hiashi’s jaw clenched. “She has no eyes now. If this had happened in my prime, I’d have torn moon apart to fix it.”

“We still might,” Shikamaru muttered. “But first, we need to figure out how to get there. Naruto, you can fly, sure. But to the moon? That’s a chakra strain even for you.”

“I’d make it,” Naruto replied. “But I’d be out of juice by the time I land, and if we’re ambushed, I’m done.”

Kakashi nodded slowly. “We can’t risk it. We need a shortcut. A way to reach the moon and still be combat-ready.”

“…A portal,” Shikamaru muttered, fingers tapping. “Space-time ninjutsu. We need someone who can bend dimensions like Sasuke can.”

All eyes turned to Naruto.

He blinked, then sat up straighter. “Sasuke.”

Hiashi’s brows lifted. “The Uchiha?”

“She has the Rinnegan,” Naruto said quickly. “She can open a portal to the moon. It’ll be like the time Kaguya flung us through those dimensions. Sasuke used her technique once—we can use that.”

Kakashi rubbed his temple. “She’s not a registered shinobi anymore. Any official involvement could be seen as violating peace accords with other villages.”

Hiashi raised a hand. “Then her involvement remains… unofficial. The nations don’t need to know. The Uchiha girl opens the door. That’s it. No battle, no mission.”

Kakashi gave a lopsided smile behind the mask. “That’s skating the edge of legality.”

“But it’s not crossing it,” Shikamaru said. “It’s the best option.”

Kakashi stood. “Then we have a plan. Naruto, Shikamaru, Sakura—you three will form the retrieval team. Assemble gear, scrolls, and chakra reserves. We move as soon as the gate opens.”

Naruto nodded, already standing. “I’ll talk to Sasuke.”

—T~T—

Back at the Uchiha estate, Sasuke was slicing root vegetables with precise, meditative movements. The broth on the stove bubbled slowly. She was halfway through wondering if she should make Naruto’s favorite miso when she paused—brow twitching.

Something felt… off.

She wiped her hands and turned just as Naruto slid the front door open with more urgency than usual. Behind him, a silent procession: Hiashi. Kakashi. Shikamaru. Kiba. Sakura.

Sasuke raised an eyebrow.

“We need a heater, Naruto,” she said blandly. “It’ll get colder soon. Sleeping in the same futon will only work for a few more weeks—”

Then she noticed the air. Serious. Charged.

Her face shifted. “What happened?”

Naruto glanced at her, guilt flickering in his eyes, then turned to the others. Kakashi stepped forward.

“We need your help, Sasuke.”

No teasing. No sarcasm. No jabs about domestic life.

Just the unspoken weight of the world.

Sasuke folded her arms. “...Go on.”

—T~T—

The sky was overcast, grey clouds rolling low above the Uchiha Clan compound. Cold air nipped at their necks, and the silence was so thick that even the crows had stopped cawing.

Naruto stood tall in the middle, dressed in the attire Sasuke had gifted him on his birthday—a sleek black jacket with an orange zipper running down the center, four brass buttons glinting faintly in the pale light, two near the collar, two near the hem. On his left bicep, the red band with the Uzumaki crest fluttered gently in the wind. His orange pants were cleanly pressed, his expression set. Serious. Focused.

Sakura, clad in a modified flak jacket over her crimson battle gear, cracked her knuckles with a subtle roll of her shoulders. Shikamaru, his hair tied high and his vest slightly wrinkled as always, stood with hands in his pockets, eyes half-lidded but sharp.

Behind them stood Hiashi, arms folded, his gaze steel. And beside him, Kakashi, unusually still, his hands resting in his coat pockets, the wind tugging gently at his silver hair.

Sasuke stood before them all, a strange look in her eyes. Her Rinnegan eye glowed faintly beneath her long bangs. She walked up to Naruto and straightened his jacket collar with a sharp tug.

“Be safe, idiot,” she muttered, eyes not meeting his.

He smiled, soft and honest. “I’ll come back, S’ke.”

Sakura leaned sideways with a smirk. “Okay, okay, let’s not start kissing now, please.”

“Shut up,” both Naruto and Sasuke muttered in perfect unison.

With that, Sasuke exhaled, raised her hand, and her Rinnegan flared open—vibrant violet, swirling with power. The air cracked like thunder as a portal tore open mid-air, shaped like a ripple of glass breaking inward. Purple light poured out in steady pulses, humming low.

Sakura nodded once. Shikamaru sighed.

“Let’s get this over with.”

Naruto turned to Sasuke one last time and gave her a brief, confident nod. She didn’t return it, just watched.

And then they stepped into the portal—one after the other.

As the last flicker of their silhouettes vanished, the gateway blinked shut.

Sasuke stood still for a long time, wind ruffling the hem of her robe, the place they disappeared from still glowing faintly.

She pressed a hand to her chest.

“Come back safe,” she whispered, more to herself than to anyone else.

—T~T—

It had been nearly six hours.

The Hokage’s office was unusually silent, a tension that made the air heavy enough to press against the lungs. Sasuke stood near the window, arms folded tightly across her chest, her gaze locked on the distant horizon though her thoughts were far elsewhere. Hiashi sat straight-backed on one of the chairs, composed but stern. Kakashi leaned slightly against his desk, flipping through a folder he hadn’t read for the past twenty minutes.

“They should’ve made contact by now,” Hiashi said, voice low but sharp.

“They were prepared,” Kakashi replied, his tone calmer, but his one visible eye was darker than usual. “Even with little intel. Naruto, Sakura, and Shikamaru together can adapt to almost anything. Still... this mission wasn’t ideal.”

Sasuke didn’t speak. Her jaw tightened.

Hiashi glanced her way. “This man, this Toneri... if what we suspect is true, then he’s Ōtsutsuki. That would explain the chakra Naruto sensed. The power. Still, why wait until now? Why Hinata? Why Hanabi’s eyes?”

Kakashi nodded thoughtfully. “There may be something symbolic. Or something strategic. If he truly is a descendant of the branch family from the moon, he may believe that Hinata’s lineage matters. The Byakugan Princess...”

“Regardless,” Sasuke said flatly, “he took them. We don’t need to justify it to know it was wrong.”

Just then, the door burst open.

“Gai-sensei! Hokage-sama!” Lee came sprinting in, his green jumpsuit scuffed and his forehead damp with sweat. “You have to see this!”

Kakashi straightened immediately. “What is it?”

Lee practically dragged them to the adjacent observation room, where a large telescope had been rigged to feed images to a monitor. “We’ve been observing the moon’s surface ever since the portal opened. There’s movement, fighting.”

On the screen, the camera zoomed into a blur of silver-grey terrain under a deep sky of endless black. Then, suddenly, it flickered, catching movement.

A flash of orange chakra.

Naruto.

He moved at impossible speeds, a comet of fire and gold clashing against a tall figure cloaked in strange, shifting neon chakra, brighter than any chakra they had seen. The man’s body was humanoid but his presence alien, luminous veins glowing across pale skin.

They collided mid-air—chakra exploding outward in a wave that shimmered even on the grainy footage.

Sakura and Shikamaru weren’t visible. Just Naruto.

Just the battle. 

Only the image of the storm on the moon.

—T~T—

In the observation chamber, the air had grown even heavier.

The screen flickered with raw chakra light, Naruto was fighting like a storm incarnate, weaving Rasenshurikens through space while the man cloaked in neon power matched him blow for blow, his chakra trailing in starlit filaments. They moved above the lunar surface like gods of a forgotten myth, Naruto’s golden glow clashing against a ghostly radiance, shaking even the feed’s stability.

Sasuke stood with her arms folded, silent. Kakashi leaned forward, trying to focus the screen further as the two figures collided again, and the surface of the moon cracked beneath them.

And then… something shifted.

Shikamaru’s voice crackled through the comm-stone placed on the desk.

“Kakashi-sensei. Something’s wrong. There was, there was a shift in gravity—”

The next second, the screen trembled violently, and then a new image bloomed into view, several massive boulders, torn from the lunar crust, hurtling straight toward Earth.

“They’re descending,” Hiashi said, his eyes wide.

“Impact in under five minutes,” another shinobi called from the side. “At least seven large masses—trajectory suggests Land of Fire. One aimed for Konoha!”

“Mobilize defenses!” Kakashi ordered, turning on his heel.

Outside, alarms began to blare.

But even as ninja scrambled across the village, a green blur had already leapt into the sky.

“Lee!” Kakashi breathed.

Rock Lee’s voice boomed as chakra exploded from his body. “Sixth—Gate of— no, Seventh Gate—open!”

His skin flushed red, his muscles bulged, and his eyes glowed with a maddening fire.

He met one of the falling boulders with a devastating upward kick—BOOM!—shattering it midair into a thousand flaming stones. But even that left fragments still large enough to level a district.

Kakashi clenched his fists.

It wasn’t enough.

And then, there was lightning.

Crackling through the sky like the wrath of the storm itself, a single figure blazed upward. The air tore open with a high-pitched screech as Chidori bloomed in Sasuke’s hand. Her eyes, one a blazing crimson Sharingan and the other a ripple of Rinnegan frost, locked onto the core of the descending mass.

She drove forward.

And with a cry of pure focus—

“Chidori Senbon!”

—she pierced through the heart of the largest remaining boulder. A heartbeat passed—then the massive stone fractured from within, exploding into a dust storm of harmless debris.

She landed in a crouch beside Kakashi as the snow-mist drifted around her, her long black gown swaying in the wind, the heels of her shinobi sandals biting softly into the tiled rooftop. With a motion of ease, she pulled on a thick winter coat, fastening it at the front with a casual tug.

Everyone stared—ANBU, Chūnin, even Hiashi.

Sasuke casually brushed some dust off her sleeves.

“If he’s not around,” she said calmly, “then I’m the only one who can protect the village.”

Kakashi sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.

If word got out to the Shinobi Union, that Sasuke Uchiha, an SSS-ranked criminal turned pardoned war hero, who had been explicitly prohibited from taking part in any shinobi action, was out here tearing meteors from the sky?

They’d chew every last strand of his hair.

—T~T—

On the screen, the chaos of the battle abruptly stilled. The silver dust of the shattered moon crust floated like glitter in a slow, ghostly swirl.

Naruto hovered above the surface, glowing golden, his form radiant in the silence after the storm. He wasn’t moving, not fighting, but instead… floating with a strange expression.

Then the chakra flared again—brilliant and massive—but this time, not with fury.

With precision.

In enormous, glowing trails of golden energy, the Nine Tails’ chakra tendrils moved methodically across the moon’s surface. Carving…?

Lee leaned in.

“…What the hell?”

A few more strokes and the shape became unmistakable. A glowing outline, a massive, perfectly drawn heart. Inside it, a single word was being written in flowing cursive:

"Uzumaki."

“Did… did he just…” one ANBU murmured.

“…write his own name inside a love heart?” another asked, in disbelief.

Sakura, watching the screen from behind Kakashi’s desk, blinked slowly. “Wait. Where’s Toneri?”

Hiashi frowned, adjusting his robes. “Did he flee? Or was he defeated?”

Kakashi turned to Sasuke, eyebrows raised in disbelief. “Do you know what’s going on?”

Sasuke, however, didn’t bother with words at first. She slowly pushed her long bangs aside with two fingers, tucking them behind her ear with deliberate grace. Her lips quirked, just slightly, into a smirk.

“He’s won,” she said simply, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Her gaze stayed locked on the screen.

They had won.

—T~T—

The courtyard of the Uchiha Clan compound shimmered, the edges of reality briefly bending before the swirling purple portal cracked open once more.

From it, Naruto stepped out first, looking windblown and beaming, his black jacket singed at the sleeves and the red Uzumaki crest on his arm half-charred from battle. Behind him came Sakura and Shikamaru, slightly scuffed but steady. Then…

Hinata emerged, silent, her eyes downcast. She wore a black, elegant dress that looked suspiciously bridal, the fabric flowing and star-stitched, her long hair fluttering with the breeze of the sealing portal behind them.

Hiashi, usually a pillar of stoicism, stood frozen for a full second. Then, defying all expectation, he stepped forward and pulled Hinata into a tight, shaking embrace.

“…Father…” she murmured, voice trembling.

“My daughter,” he said, low and barely audible, but with unhidden relief.

Naruto stretched out his arms with a sheepish grin. “S’keeee! Look! We’re back in one piece!”

Sasuke rolled her eyes but didn’t look away from him. She had waited the entire six hours with her chest clenched.

Kakashi folded his arms, eying the group. “Report.”

Shikamaru groaned, scratching the back of his head. “Troublesome doesn’t even start to describe it. Turns out, the glowing idiot—Toneri—wanted to resurrect the Ōtsutsuki clan. Thought destroying the earth and rebuilding it was a noble mission. Naruto… talked him out of it. Classic talk-no-jutsu bull.”

“I explained!” Naruto said defensively, “That the world had changed, that pain’s not the way, that Neji gave his life to protect freedom—”

“And somehow,” Sakura cut in, waving a sealed scroll, “He willingly gave up Hanabi’s eyes. We’ve got them secured here. He even handed over some extra specimens from his creepy collection.”

Hiashi’s eyes narrowed. “He gave them up? Freely?”

Naruto rubbed his nose. “Well, I might’ve punched some sense into him first. And Sakura... did a lot of glaring.”

“I did more than glare,” Sakura muttered.

Kakashi exhaled. “Fine. But what about Hinata?” He looked at the girl who stood quietly between them all. “What… exactly happened?”

Naruto gave a weak laugh. “She’s… uh… Toneri’s wife now.”

The silence that followed could’ve frozen a volcano.

“…What?!” Hiashi barked, turning to Hinata so fast his robes swished behind him. “You—you married him?! He kidnapped you, Hinata! He stole your sister’s eyes! This is beyond unacceptable!”

Hinata, though pale, lifted her head. Her voice didn’t waver.

“I understand, Father. But I saw him… break. I saw him let go of centuries of hatred. He refused to keep destroying. When he released Hanabi’s eyes, he bowed. He even healed her wounds. I… I felt it. He truly regretted it.”

“Regret doesn’t erase what he did!” Hiashi snapped, his face reddening. “He is not of this world. He’s a threat—”

“He saved me when the moon began to collapse,” she said softly. “He used his body as a shield. He… chose not to be alone.”

Everyone was stunned into silence.

And then—

A second, quieter ripple of space trembled behind them.

From the still-fading portal stepped a man, pale as snow, hair glowing faintly in the dusk light, neon eyes no longer flaring with madness but dimmed to something mournful.

Toneri Ōtsutsuki had arrived.

He gave a small bow. “Hello… Father-in-law.”

Hiashi moved faster than a lightning flash.

CRACK.

Toneri reeled back as Hiashi’s fist connected squarely with his jaw, knocking him clean to the stone path. He landed flat on his back, blinking up at the sky.

“No father-in-law of mine,” Hiashi hissed.

Kakashi, pinching the bridge of his nose, sighed deeply. “So… she’s Hinata Ōtsutsuki now?”

Naruto looked like he’d swallowed a whole tomato. “You know… that sounds way weirder out loud.”

Sasuke snorted, barely hiding her smirk. “Hn. Let’s hope they don’t want to honeymoon on Earth.”

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