Hey there guys, hope you guys enjoyed the first chapter of the rewrite. As I mentioned there will be things that are different in the rewrite compared to the original story over on Fanfiction's site. Here's a list of changes being made:
1. Houjin and Sakura will have an even closer sibling relationship than in the original story, so much so that they'll seem way less like adopted brother and sister and more like the actual thing.
2. Houjin and Hanabi's relationship will be more fleshed out. After reading through the original story abit, I realized that their pairing seemed to be rushed too quickly. Plan is to have them more as friends/rivals with the attraction being on Hanabi's side before it ends up being mutual between them. Houjin is a Saiyan and they're a little slow when it comes to romance, so I'll take that into account.
3. The type of Saiyan Houjin is will be a mixture of Broly from super and more along the lines of Trunks or Vegeta, so he's not dumb. Houjin will be calculating and smart, just maybe not as smart as say Vegeta is.. somewhere in the middle.
4. This is a reincarnation story, so yes he is a version of Goku Black, but he's also a version of Broly from Super so keep that in mind when reading this story. So yes, he WILL have SSJ Rose, the Ikari form, and Broly's LSSJ form at his disposal. But he'll also have a new fan made form that I'll just call SSJ Flame.
5. Yes, Naruto will also have an expanded role as the story progresses. I didn't do a very good job of that in the original story.
6. All of the Naruto characters will be stronger in this story since there will be dbz and super villains present.
7. Yes, Goku Black will still appear in the story just.. not for a little while as he'll be in the Kakashi or Jiraiya type role for Houjin as his mentor.
8. Hinata and Hanabi will experience certain changes to themselves later in the story that you guys can probably already guess lol. It makes for a smoother transition in their overall strength. Not all the naruto female characters will experience changes like Hinata and Hanabi.
9. Yes, Naruto will still have his jutsu's and other shinobi abilities. He'll just have Ki attacks and upgraded martial arts added to his arsenal.
10. The Sakura and Sasuke pairing is still up in the air for now as I haven't decided if I'll go a different route or to keep them together.
Well, anywho, that's enough rambling for now. Onto the story! Disclaimer: I don't own Dragonball z/ Dragon ball Kai/ Dragonball Super/ , Naruto, or any of their characters. I only own the oc's, and the overall plot of this fanmade story, nothing more!
Chapter Two: Teams, and the Weight of Curiosity
The morning after graduation arrived with the particular quality of light that belongs only to days when something is genuinely about to begin.
It was not the soft, forgiving light of an ordinary morning, but something brighter and more insistent - the kind that finds the gaps in curtains and pries at closed eyelids and refuses, categorically, to be ignored. Konoha woke into it in stages, the way a village does: first the bakers and the early vendors, then the shinobi rotating off night watch, and finally, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the newly minted graduates of the Hidden Leaf Ninja Academy.
Among them, the Haruno household produced two.
Sakura came downstairs at a respectable hour, vibrant and pink-haired and carrying the specific kind of barely-contained energy that follows a sleepless night spent imagining futures. Houjin was already at the table, sitting with the unhurried stillness of someone who had been awake for some time and seen no reason to announce it. He had eaten - modestly, by his standards - and was watching the morning light move across the wall with the patient, contemplative expression their father sometimes wore when he was thinking about something he wasn't ready to say yet.
He looked up when Sakura sat down.
"Nervous?" he asked.
"A little," she admitted. "You?"
He considered it honestly. "A little," he agreed. Then, after a beat: "Actually, yes. Quite a bit."
Sakura smiled at that. She appreciated that he never pretended, at least not with her. She reached across the table and took a piece of fruit from his bowl with the casual, pre-emptive confidence of someone who knows the bowl's owner will not object.
He did not object.
They walked to the academy together, as they always did, and parted in the doorway with the easy familiarity of siblings whose routines had shaped themselves around each other over twelve years. Inside, the classroom filled quickly - a room-full of twelve and thirteen-year-olds doing their best to appear calmer than they were, which is to say, not very calm at all. The noise ran high. Iruka arrived and brought it down with the patient authority of a man who has been doing this long enough to not need to raise his voice.
Sakura slid into her seat, which happened to be in the same row as Sasuke Uchiha, which she noted with a private, triumphant satisfaction she did her best to keep off her face. Across the room, she could see Ino clocking the same thing and arriving at the same unhappy arithmetic. Sakura permitted herself one small, sideways smile. Nobody needed to announce a score for it to exist.
Houjin took a seat toward the back, where he always sat - not from any impulse toward self-pity, but simply because he had long since learned to give people room before expecting them to close the distance on their own. The seat beside him stayed empty. Around him, the room arranged itself into its familiar clusters and Houjin sat at the center of none of them, quiet and apparently unbothered, watching the ceiling with a composed expression that only Sakura knew how to read correctly.
She looked over at him once. He caught her eye and gave her the smallest shake of his head.
Don't.
She turned back around and said nothing.
Iruka moved through the team assignments with methodical efficiency, ticking off names and numbers with the rhythmic confidence of a man who has rehearsed the order several times and knows better than to deviate from it. Teams one through five resolved themselves without incident. Then came Team Six.
"Kasumi Uzumaki." The blonde girl with Naruto's cheekbones and a good deal more composure than her brother sat forward. "Kizuna Inuzuka." A dark-haired boy with the clan's traditional markings and the particular stillness of someone who decides things internally and announces them only when convenient opened his eyes briefly, then closed them again. "Hanabi Hyuga."
The younger Hyuga sister absorbed the news without visible reaction, though her eyes moved immediately - briefly, calculatingly - toward the back of the room.
Iruka paused with the precise theatrical timing of a man who has taught long enough to know when a pause will land.
"Given that this year's graduating class presents us with an uneven number of students," he explained, with the measured tone of someone defusing a minor bureaucratic irregularity, "some teams will carry four members rather than the traditional three. Team Six is one such team." He looked down at the scroll in his hands. "Houjin Haruno."
The silence that followed was not hostile. It was more the particular silence of a room full of young people recalibrating expectations all at once - the sound of twelve-year-olds discovering that the universe does not always sort itself the way they anticipated.
At the back of the room, Houjin absorbed this information with a slight tilt of his head. Team Six. He turned the name over quietly, then looked up to find Hanabi Hyuga already looking at him with an expression that gave nothing away.
Interesting, he thought.
She appeared to be thinking something similar.
Across the room, Kasumi's composure cracked just enough to allow one short, private pump of her fist before she reassembled herself. In the front row, Kizuna's expression did not change, but something behind his dark eyes did - a small, careful noting of the assignment, filed away.
Iruka continued. "Team Seven: Naruto Uzumaki - "
Naruto shot upright.
" - Sakura Haruno - "
Sakura sank.
" - and Sasuke Uchiha."
The room responded predictably: Sasuke absorbed his placement with Olympian indifference, Sakura's mood underwent a rapid revision upward, and Naruto's expression cycled through disappointment, resignation, and then a redirected curiosity aimed at the black-haired newcomer Iruka was about to address.
" - Eleryc Nara will join Team Seven as a reserve member, at his own request."
The room erupted.
Iruka weathered it. He was, by this point, very good at weathering things.
The subsequent teams arranged themselves without further seismic events, and the room gradually dispersed into the particular excited-nervous energy of people who now have somewhere specific to be. Iruka watched his students go with the quiet satisfaction of a man who has just, for the thirteenth time, handed a group of children a future he hopes they'll be careful with.
The rooftop training ground was wind-swept and empty when Hanabi arrived, as it always was when she arrived anywhere. She had been raised to regard lateness as a form of disrespect, and had subsequently spent much of her young life waiting for people who had been raised without the same lesson.
She settled into a composed, unhurried posture and turned her face toward the breeze.
Houjin arrived approximately ninety seconds later.
He took in the empty rooftop with a slightly surprised expression, then his eyes found her and the surprise adjusted itself into something more measured.
"Huh," he said. "Thought I'd be first."
"You were almost second-to-last," Hanabi replied.
"Almost." He moved to a spot with a reasonable view of the approach routes and sat down without further ceremony. He seemed, she noted, genuinely comfortable with the quiet - not performing ease, but actually possessing it, which was rarer than it should have been.
Kasumi and Kizuna arrived together a few minutes later, mid-conversation. Kasumi was gesturing with her hands in a way that suggested she was making an important point; Kizuna appeared to be listening, which, Hanabi had already begun to observe, was more than many people received from him. They found seats and the conversation continued at a lower volume, occasionally pulling Houjin in when Kasumi turned toward him with a question or observation.
Hanabi watched, and she did something else as well.
It was subtle - barely even a thought, more a practiced reflex - and she did it quickly and quietly, the way you check on something when you're not ready for anyone to know you're checking. The Byakugan saw what ordinary eyes could not, and what it showed her made her inwardly very still.
His energy was not chakra.
It wore the shape of chakra the way a river wears the shape of its banks, conforming to the vessel while remaining fundamentally itself. It was a different thing entirely: vast and deep and layered, with a brightness at its surface that gave way, the further she looked, to something considerably darker. Not malevolent - not in any way she could articulate cleanly - but vast in the way that the ocean is vast, and with the same implicit reminder that most of what it contained was not visible from the surface.
She withdrew the dojutsu before he could notice.
He noticed.
"Is there something on my face?" Houjin asked.
She looked at him with carefully constructed neutrality. "What?"
"You keep staring at me." He wasn't accusing, just puzzled. "I thought maybe I missed a spot shaving or something."
"You're thirteen," Hanabi said. "You don't shave."
"You're right, I don't." A small pause. "So why are you staring?"
"You're interesting," she said, which was true, and which committed her to nothing. "That's all."
He appeared to find this answer marginally unsatisfying but not worth pursuing further. He turned back toward Kasumi, who had begun a new sentence.
Hanabi looked at her own hands for a moment, then back at him.
More than I initially thought, she decided.
Yugao Uzuki arrived without announcement, as was the habit of people who had spent years in the Anbu and had not entirely shed those instincts. One moment the rooftop held four students; the next, it held five. She stood at its center with the composed, assessing expression of a woman who had seen a great deal and was now performing a quick, professional inventory of what she had been given to work with.
She had long purple hair pulled back from a face that was sharp and watchful, dressed in the black-and-grey armor of the Anbu over standard shinobi blacks, a katana riding easily between her shoulder blades. She had the specific stillness of someone who is never quite off-duty.
"So," she said, "you're what I've been assigned."
It was not precisely a compliment, but it was not an insult either - more the measured opening remark of someone reserving judgment until they had better information.
"Why don't we start with introductions? Name, age, what you like, what you don't, hobbies, and what you're hoping to do with this." She gestured vaguely at the headbands they were all wearing. "Don't leave out the last part."
Kasumi went first, which required very little prompting. She had the slightly forward-leaning energy of someone who has had things to say for a long time and genuinely appreciates a venue.
Her name, she said, was Kasumi Uzumaki, twelve years old. She liked spending time with her brother and her friends. She disliked - and here her voice developed a particular precision, the kind that belongs to someone who has thought about a thing until they understand exactly how they feel about it - the way the village had made a practice of praising her while directing its scorn at Naruto, as though the circumstances they shared were somehow hers to be proud of and his to be ashamed of. Neither of them had chosen any of it. That disparity was something she intended to change.
Her goal, she said, was to become someone people could rely on. Someone present, when presence was needed.
Yugao nodded once, slowly, in the manner of someone mentally filing information they intend to act on later.
Kizuna went next, more economically. He spoke the way he did most things: directly, without warmth or excess. His name was Kizuna Inuzuka, thirteen years old. He liked food and training. He disliked the presumption of those who had inherited their abilities and assumed the rest of the world would simply accommodate the gap. His goal was to demonstrate that effort, applied rigorously and without excuses, could surpass what genetics alone had handed someone. He said this without self-pity and without particular drama, as though stating a practical objective rather than a grievance.
Yugao's expression shifted by approximately two degrees in the direction of approval.
Hanabi presented herself with the particular crispness of someone who has spent years being evaluated and has learned to do most of the evaluator's work for them. She was Hanabi Hyuga, twelve years old, heiress to the Hyuga clan, trained since she could walk in the techniques that would define both her purpose and her limitations. She paused, then added, with the careful honesty of someone deciding to be slightly more truthful than protocol required: she liked spending time with her sister, Hinata, and she liked pressing flowers in the off-hours when no one was timing her or measuring her, and she intended someday to use whatever influence she managed to accumulate to dismantle the parts of the Hyuga clan's tradition that had made her sister's life quietly unbearable for as long as Hanabi could remember.
She said this last part levelly and without apology.
Yugao looked at her for a slightly longer moment than she had looked at the others.
Then she looked at Houjin.
He'd been listening from his spot with the attentive patience of someone who is comfortable not being the center of things. He met her gaze when it landed on him and sat up slightly, more out of respect for her attention than any attempt at formality.
"Houjin Haruno," he said. "Thirteen." He paused, then seemed to decide on the direct approach. "I like food. I like a real fight - not to hurt anyone, just..." he searched for the word. "The kind where you find out what you're made of, I suppose." He glanced at his hands briefly. "I don't like being called things. Demon. Freak. Monkey." He said the words plainly, without visible distress, in the tone of someone naming an annoyance rather than nursing a wound. "I don't think those words are accurate, and I think the people who use them are generally trying to make themselves feel something at someone else's expense, which I find - " he paused again, "- tiresome."
No one spoke for a moment.
"I don't have many friends," he continued, with the same uncomplicated honesty. "Most people keep their distance for reasons I don't entirely understand yet. My hobbies are training and spending time with my family, because they're the ones who show up." A beat. "As for what I want to do with this - " and here something shifted in his expression, something that had been settled and considered and was not recently arrived at - "I want to become as strong as I'm capable of becoming. I want to surpass what anyone thinks is possible. I want to surpass the Sage of Six Paths."
The name fell into the silence and lay there.
Yugao raised an eyebrow. "You understand what you're claiming there."
"I do."
"And you're not saying it to impress anyone."
"I'm not trying to impress anyone," he said. "I'm describing a goal. Whether it's achievable, I don't know yet. But I'd rather aim at something impossible and fall short than aim at something easy and arrive."
Yugao studied him for a moment with the expression of someone running a very fast, very quiet internal calculation.
"All right," she said finally. "Rest up. Training Ground Six, tomorrow at dawn. All four of you." The ghost of something that might eventually become a smile crossed her face. "I'd suggest skipping breakfast."
She vanished in a scatter of leaves, as people trained by the Anbu tend to do when the dramatic option is available.
The others left by degrees. Kasumi and Kizuna departed still talking, voices fading toward the stairs. Hanabi stayed where she was for a moment longer than was strictly necessary, occupying the particular stillness of someone doing something that requires not appearing to do it.
Houjin had already started toward the far stairwell when she spoke.
"Haruno."
He stopped. Turned.
She looked at him the way she'd been looking at him since the morning - that same assessing, slightly narrowed attention that wasn't quite unfriendly but had not yet decided what it was. "What you said earlier. About aiming at the impossible."
"Yeah?"
"Do you actually believe that? Or is it something you say?"
He considered the question with the same seriousness with which it had been asked.
"I believe it," he said. "I'm not sure I'll get there. But I believe it's worth trying." He tilted his head slightly. "Does that distinction matter to you?"
Hanabi thought about it. "It matters quite a lot, actually," she said.
He nodded once, and left.
She remained on the rooftop for another minute, watching the training grounds below, where other teams were beginning their first awkward conversations and their first careful assessments of each other.
He believes it, she thought. That's the interesting part.
She turned and descended the stairs toward home.
That evening, the Haruno household ate together, as it always did.
Mebuki's cooking filled the space with warmth and the specific comfort of a meal made for people who know each other well enough to eat without performing anything. Houjin ate with the controlled restraint of someone managing a substantial impulse on behalf of good manners, which his mother observed with the satisfied expression of a woman who has won a long-running domestic campaign.
"You cleaned up properly this time," she said.
Houjin, in a plain red shirt and gray sweatpants, his hair still slightly damp from the shower and for once behaving in a way that could be described as ordinary, looked at her with mild alarm.
"I always clean up properly," he said.
"You clean up adequately," Mebuki said. "Tonight you cleaned up properly. There's a difference." She tilted her head with the precise, affectionate wickedness of a mother who enjoys her children's embarrassment as a hobby. "If your sister approves of you looking like this, I can only imagine the impression you'd make if you kept it up."
"Mom."
Kizashi intervened, which he did at regular intervals in this particular game, and had gotten quite skilled at. "Let's not torment the boy before his first real day of training tomorrow," he said pleasantly. "There'll be time for that later."
"There's always time for that," Mebuki agreed, with an air of complete reasonableness that committed her to nothing.
Houjin looked across the table at Sakura, who was eating with the studied innocence of someone who has decided this isn't her fight.
He pointed at her.
She looked at the ceiling.
Dinner finished and the plates were cleared, and then - in the unhurried, inevitable way that families circle toward the conversations they have been circling toward for months - they moved to the living room. Kizashi sat with the slightly weighted expression of a man who has been carrying something and has decided tonight is the night to set it down.
Houjin sat across from him. Sakura settled beside her mother, uncertain why uncertainty was appropriate but feeling it nonetheless.
"There's something you've been meaning to tell me," Houjin said. It wasn't a question.
"Yes," Kizashi said. "There's something we've been meaning to tell both of you."
Mebuki spoke first, gently and directly, in the way she always spoke when she had decided that plain honesty was the kindest option available. Sakura's expression moved through surprise, recalibration, and something more complicated as her mother explained what she and Kizashi had found, twelve years ago, in the smoking crater at the edge of the forest. The object that fell from the sky. The small child inside it.
Sakura looked at her brother.
Houjin reached for the fur pelt at his waist and removed it.
His tail - warm brown and unmistakably, undeniably real - uncurled from where it had been coiled and settled into quiet existence, a fact sitting in the lamplight of the family living room.
"Nii-san has a tail," Sakura said, with a precision of diction that suggested she was repeating the words specifically to test whether they would change upon second hearing.
They did not change.
Her brother re-wrapped the pelt, leaving a deliberate gap for the tail to rest, and looked at her with an expression that was attentive and patient and waiting.
"It still doesn't change what you are to me," he said quietly. "We're not related by blood. That's true. But you're still my sister. That's also true. And in my experience, the second thing matters considerably more than the first."
Sakura looked at him for a long moment.
Then she smiled - not the bright, performed smile she sometimes wore in public, but the smaller, warmer one that she had never entirely learned to hide. "Nii-san," she said.
He smiled back.
Their parents watched this in the way parents watch things they've spent years hoping for.
Kizashi then addressed what he had not yet addressed - the detail that had kept him awake, in his own quiet way, for twelve years.
"There's one more thing," he said. "And I need you both to understand it."
He explained it carefully - the power Houjin carried within him, vast and dormant and tethered, in ways Kizashi did not entirely understand, to the boy's emotions. He described the training they'd done over the years, the reasons behind the rules Houjin had grown up treating as simply the way things were. The full moon. The tail. The reason for restraint.
"If you were to lose control," Kizashi said, "I'm not certain anyone here could stop what comes out."
Houjin absorbed this with the stillness of someone adding a piece to a picture they have been assembling for a long time.
Sakura, whose face had been cycling through expressions throughout, settled eventually on the particular determination of someone who has just been told something frightening and has decided to make it their business. "Then I'll just have to make sure he stays calm," she said.
Her parents chuckled.
She puffed her cheeks slightly. "I mean it."
"We know you do," Mebuki said. "That's why we're chuckling."
The evening wound down the way good evenings do, by degrees, the conversation softening toward comfortable silence and the comfortable silence softening toward sleep. By the time the lights went off in the Haruno household, something had shifted in the architecture of it - not structurally, not visibly, but in the way a room feels different after a window has been opened and the air has moved through it.
The same, and less enclosed.
Morning came fast, as mornings always do when you'd rather they didn't.
Houjin was at the table early. Sakura came downstairs looking as though sleep had given her only partial cooperation, rubbing her eyes with the systematic determination of someone who intends to be functional regardless.
She sat down and did not eat.
Houjin watched her with mild concern. "You alright?"
"Kakashi-sensei's orders," she said, with a nervous laugh that didn't quite land. "He said we're better off not having breakfast before this morning's training."
A beat of silence.
From the kitchen doorway, both Haruno parents sweatdropped simultaneously and with great precision.
"That's very Kakashi of him," Kizashi said mildly, in the tone of someone who has known this man for years and has long since exhausted his surprise.
Mebuki just shook her head.
The two siblings rose together, collected their things, and headed out into the morning in companionable quiet - Houjin taking the long strides of someone who has somewhere to be, Sakura matching him step for step with the competitive determination she brought to everything. They walked together until the paths diverged.
"Later, Nii-san," Sakura said, and hugged him - quickly, warmly, without the self-consciousness she sometimes performed in public.
He returned it, and patted her head once with the careful affection of someone who has been doing that since she was small enough for it to make more spatial sense.
"Do your best today," he said. "I mean it."
She pulled back, nodded, and ran.
He watched her go for a moment - small and pink-haired and running flat-out toward something she'd wanted for as long as she could remember - and felt the particular warmth of someone who is genuinely rooting for another person's happiness.
Then he turned and ran in the opposite direction, toward Training Ground Six, and whatever Yugao Uzuki had decided they needed to discover about themselves before the week was out.
Hanabi was already there.
Of course she was.
She stood at the edge of the training ground with her arms at her sides and her back straight and her expression doing the thing it did when she was thinking carefully about something she hadn't decided to share yet. The morning light picked out the dark sheen of her hair and the white of her eyes, and she looked, to Houjin's assessment, like someone who had probably been standing there for at least twenty minutes and was not going to mention it.
"Morning," he said.
"You're third," she said.
"I'm second," he said. "Kasumi and Kizuna aren't here yet."
She glanced past him at the empty path, recalculated, and did not comment.
They stood in silence that was not uncomfortable. The training ground caught the early light and the birds were doing what birds do at this hour, and somewhere in the middle distance Kasumi and Kizuna appeared together, Kasumi talking and Kizuna listening with the focused attention that seemed to be his most reliable social contribution.
Hanabi activated her Byakugan.
She did it quickly and with practiced subtlety, keeping her attention outwardly forward so that nothing in her posture would flag what she was doing. She was not proud of the impulse, but she had decided in the night that it was simply something she needed to understand, and the distinction between what one needed and what one was comfortable admitting to needing was one she had learned to work around.
The energy within him was exactly as she had seen it before.
Vast. That was still the only word for it. Vast, and layered, and belonging to a category she did not yet have the vocabulary for. At its edges, where ordinary chakra would glow steady and measurable, his energy moved - not wildly, not dangerously, but with the organic, unhurried motion of something that had never been told it needed to stay still.
And beneath it, deeper than she had looked before, she caught a glimpse of something that made her pull back.
Not malevolence. She was careful about that word. But weight. The feeling of standing at the edge of a depth that does not have a bottom you can find, and being made briefly, viscerally aware of the fact.
She closed the dojutsu.
"Is there something on my face?" Houjin asked, without looking at her.
"You're imagining things," she said.
"I was imagining things yesterday too," he observed. "I'm starting to think my imagination is notably consistent."
"You're interesting," she said. "I've said so before."
"Interesting enough to stare at for extended periods?"
"Apparently."
A brief pause.
"All right," he said, with a faint, uncomplicated amusement that did not push further.
Kasumi arrived at a run, slightly breathless, with Kizuna a measured half-step behind her. And then Yugao appeared from nowhere, the way she did, and Team Six arranged itself into the loose formation of four young people who are not yet a unit but are beginning to determine whether they could be.
There was a great deal of morning left. There was, Hanabi thought, a great deal of everything left.
She looked at Houjin sideways, once, and filed the image away beside the question she had not yet found the edges of.
One way or another, she would.
End of Chapter Two
Next Time- Chapter III: Hanabi's Growing Suspicions