A/N:Some evolved into Miniature one-shots. Others didn’t. I'm Saving Sasuke and Naruto (and the girls) for something later.

Enjoy

(Why YES, I am procrastinating! And, yeah, if it seems rushed towards the end, it's because it is! I NEED A BETA!)

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Weapons

By: Ian R.

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Hyuuga Neji – Shadows On The Wings Of Butterflies
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Neji is like a butterfly knife sheathed in a tail of ribbons – deadly, beautiful, and able to kill with a simple flick of a wrist or an unseen sleight of the hand. Every movement of his body is a smaller part of a calculated risk made out to be a part of a greater equation. Move here, and his opponent will try to hit there; counter here, and his opponent will try to fight back accordingly. The Hyuuga are trained in this way, and know how to move their bodies in ways that human bodies are not meant to be moved in.

If the same can be said for their minds, no one knows.

“Hello cousin.”

Smiling
“...Good evening, Hinata-chan.”

Faltering

“I...I did not see you at dinner this evening, Neji-san.”
Silence

Neji may be a weapon, but he is also a Hyuuga. This means that he believes himself to be too proper; too perfect; too Hyuuga to do battle with opponents considered beneath him. It also means he does not do battle reacting to his opponent's strategies. He battles within them; battles inside of them. Neji fights paths. Fights ghosts. Fights the things that could happen instead of the things that do. He builds himself around the ideal that Hyuuga have eyes that can see everything, be it the hint of a blade or the hint of a smile.

“May I ask you why you are out so early, Neji-san?”

Contemplating

“Only if I can ask you why your knuckles are bruised, Hinata-chan.”

Smirking

“...Breakfast is ready, Neji.”
Steaming

Neji thinks ahead of himself much like Shikamaru does, yet the difference between he and Neji is that Neji plans around the last letters of the alphabet, not the middle or the first. His attacks are those of a pack hunter without a pack, of a dancer without a partner dancing on a knife-tip-precipice linked arm and arm with his own shadow. Every step Neji takes on the battlefield is a deadly, calculated waltz. An insane grasp into a future that twists and twirls and bursts between his fingertips like a magnesium flash-bang that blinds both him and his opponents as the shadows of a destiny neither he nor any shinobi in the world can refute tie a length of cutting wire called Chance around their necks. Neji never liked Chances; never liked non-linearity. So when Naruto beats the tar out of him during the Chuunin Exam, Neji did not change his pathso much as curve it away from the one he was following.

As a weapon and as a Shinobi, Neji leaves nothing to Chance. Naruto taught him not to, and keeps on beating the same lesson into his skin every time they spar. The Sound-Nin (whatever his name was) helped Neji construct his new path much like Naruto did, but this path became stained with blood and haunted by wolves, so Neji follows the light that Naruto casts on the world instead of the darkness that is his shadow. Because of this, when Neji battles, he does not try to kill his opponents outright, and cripples them instead. When his opponents are Genjutsu users, he goes for their eyes and blinds them. When they are Ninjutsu users, he closes in around their blind spots and tears off their hands. When they are Taijutsu users, he gets in closer than he really should and goes for the neck and not the heart, because the neck is what controls the movements of the body and the heart only defines the movements of the blood that spills.

“...Hinata-chan, have you ever counted more than seven birds in the training exercises?”

Hesitation

“...We...We should really be getting back for lunch Neji-san...”

Anger

“Have you!”

Trepidation

“Only...Only once before today.”

Silent Screaming

Hyuuga are taught how to move their bodies so that blood never touches them. The only reason Neji went for Hinata's heart was not because he wanted her dead, no. Neji wanted Hinata destroyed. She represented everything he was not; everything he could not have. She was given everything Neji had always wanted, and wasted her talents by chasing after a dream she herself could never achieve because she will never be strong enough to support both the weight of Uzumaki and his demon. Hyuuga are trained to be assassins, not warriors. This means that their bodies; their hands; their very way of life is far too fragile to support anything other than themselves.

“...Do you...Do you hate me, Neji-san?”

Quivering Lips

“I...I suppose I deserve it, don't I?”

Twiddling Fingers

“I mean...I mean I am the only thing stopping you from gaining the destiny you want, aren't I?”

Shuddering Shoulders

“If you were, you think I wouldn't have killed you by now?”

Black Sarcasm

“...E-ven if...Even If y-you had k-killed me during the C-chuunin exams, y-you still wouldn't be the r-rightful heir to the l-leadership of the Hyuuga, you know...”

Quiet Static

“Then who would be the rightful heir to the throne, Hinata-chan? All your siblings are long dead and buried.”

Embittered Hearts

“...C-cousin Hanabi would be the next heir, Neji. She is more Hyuuga than both of us combined.”

Tears Bitten Back

Neji stole everything he had ever learned from those who were his Masters. While Hinata may train herself to the point of exhaustion to prove to everyone that she is worth something; to prove to them that her hands, that her weapons, are not knives or daggers but are swords; Neji trains himself to near-death because he must prove this to himself.

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Nara Shikamaru – Binding Shadows In The Dark
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Shikamaru is not a weapon of any kind, of any time period. He is a well-planned strategy -- a contaminant in the water supply; a knife in the darkness stabbed into the back of the warring tyrant. He is the slaughtering of helpless children so they will not grow up to hate those who killed their fathers and he is cold-hearted, emotionless, robotic efficiency.

He is both binary calculation (1101) and he is the ruthless cunning of the bird that lays its eggs in its enemies nest to kill their offspring and ensure that its children prosper without its help. He is a shadow of a shadow of a shadow -- non-existent to those searching for him but always there in both rumor and action. Men on the battlefield do not see him, but they feel and die by his hand whether it be his shinobi holding the blade that delivers the killing blow or their own treacherous, shadow-bound hands that do the same.

“Do you ever think that, just maybe, we’re wearing the wrong headbands?”

“Chouji, shut up.”

“No man, I’m serious. I mean...Sure Orochimaru is bat-shit insane, but you don’t see his troops killing entire Villages suspected of harboring a Missing-Nin, do you?”

“Orders are orders.”

“These orders are shit and you know it, Shika.”

“Don’t focus on it so hard, Chouji. I mean, we’re shinobi, man, we’re lower than shit and dirt. Just gotta get used to it.”

Nara Shikamaru is the shadow that the warrior's blade cast on the ground in the sunlight. He is the glint of the moon on the silver of steel that blinds the warrior. He is a hidden blade locked tight inside a boot. He is what the berserkers of the world are terrified of and what the blind samurai comes to call his 'eyes'. He is an invisible thing of thought and he is the thing that those in power fear because he is both an ancient ideal and a pitch-black shadow and those things cannot be stopped by swords and arrows.

Shikamaru is a Nothing. A Nobody. A reflection of a shadow. He is the thing that stalks people in their nightmares; faceless and ephemeral until they fall to the ground and turn back to gaze up at the thing that hunts them before waking up in sweating horror. Though his targets plan for every eventuality, they plan for enemies who walk in darkness, and Shikamaru is not one of these things. He does not walk in shadows because shadows are not his comrades. He does not trust the darkness enough to walk by it, so he lives in it, and plans not only in A, and B, and in C; but plans in D through Z as well because shadows are traitorous things that betray their allies without a moments hesitation and he does not suffer traitors gladly.

Sasuke was the one exception to the rule, but Shikamaru tries hard to not think of Konoha's shattered prince and the one thing that binds them together as he lays in bed awake at night and that thing he cannot name crushes down on his chest because the one and only difference between them; between Nara and Uchiha, is that Shikamaru knows enough about himself to realize that he will never be killed by another shinobi's blade. Where Uchiha lives with the constant reminder of death; in the constant fear and jealously of the thing the only person he ever loved denied him, Shikamaru embraces it because he knows he can control it. He will never come close enough to death for it to ever be out of his control.

“We eradicated the village as per orders, Tsunade-sama.”

“Did you find the Missing-Nin?”

“...Yes, unfortunately.”

“...Unfortunately?”

“Yeah. I was hoping we didn’t find him so I could actually agree with Chouji, for once.”

...No, like all Nara, Shikamaru knows that the only knife that will ever slit his throat will be his own, when the darkness he bathes in and which crushes him in his sleep at night finally swallows him whole.

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Rock Lee – Make Yourself
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“One!”

Punch

If asked why he never learned how to wield a single weapon even though he had a weapons master in his Cell, Rock Lee would stare at you quizzically for a moment in utter silence and look at you as if you had just asked him why the sky was blue or the ground was brown. It isn’t that the prospect of learning how to use a sword or summon weapons out of mid-air hasn’t intrigued Lee at one moment or the other, it’s that Lee actually has trained with weapons before and knows enough about them to know that he does not like them in the least.

“Two”

Kick

Steel is too cold. Too emotionless. There is no energy inside the swing of a sword; inside the chop of an axe or the stab of a spear. One cannot become ‘one’ with their weapon, no matter how long they try or how much they train. Weapons are only extensions of the body, not a part of it, and Lee, a budding master of a style focused around destroying boulders with his hands, does not feel comfortable using steel weapons that can break and bend and never heal.

“THREE!”

Right-Jab

Lee is a weapon in the way that a fist can be a punch; in the way that a leg can be a kick and in the way that a body can be shaped and molded out of nothing and into a weapon stronger than steel. He is perseverance. He is dedication. He is coming back after being knocked to the ground side to side and back again. He is everything the strong fear and that the frail emulate -- the survivor, the protector, the shield of the weak and the sword of the righteous.

“FOUR!”

Roundhouse

He is a turnabout. He is a well-thrown left hook in the last round that knocks his opponent flat on his back. He is a back-heel strike in a crowded bar at happy hour that slices through the air and breaks the bones of drunkards without regrets. Lee is a warrior without a blade; without a master except himself, and he finds strength through wounding; strength through spirit; and the pulse that beats beneath his flesh only answers to the call of battle and the thought that nothing in life will change unless he changes it with his own two hands. That is why he does not use weapons, that is why his hands are harder than steel because steel can break, and Lee cannot afford to have his dreams break apart before his eyes.

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Akimichi Chouji – I am a Rock, I am an Island
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Chouji is a weapon called an ambush. He is innocuous. He is innocent. He deceives those who underestimate his worth and does not correct those who know him when they do the same. He is like a rusted knife that still retains an edge. Like the Raijin or the Kusunagi or the iron stick of Goku himself.

Chouji is a weapon that may look like it is nothing but that can utterly annihilate all that stand before it with little to no effort. He knows this, and hides his power well – not complaining that the other two members of his cell do not battle but instead only capture his opponents and set them up so he can knock them down and stain his clothes just a little bit more red than the color of the barbecue sauce he loves to drench his ribs in.

No one asks why Chouji goes for months without eating meat, but many know why. It is his job. His mission. The one thing he is better at than Naruto, than Lee, than any of the Genin 9. Chouji is the only one who can stay behind in battle and make sure nothing passes him. He is like a wall of fire; like a pit of spears. The enemy does not recognize the threat that he is until several of them are already dead and there is no time left to diffuse the situation before he turns them into more than red stains on the ground. When Shikamaru asks who will be the rear-guard during the mission to bring back Sasuke, Chouji was the first to offer because Chouji knows he is the only shinobi out of all the Genin aside from Naruto who would give his life to protect his friends. He knows this not because it has happened before; no, he just realizes that every single one of his friends is far too driven by their own dream to give theirs up for everyone else.

Shikamaru would try to find back-up, maybe even try to regroup with the other members of his team. He wouldn’t stay behind to die.

Neji would keep on fighting until either he and his opponent were dead. Nothing aside from Neji would ever stop Neji, that much Chouji knew.

Kiba would run because Kiba is a dog, and any dog that finds a dog with bigger teeth than it runs away with its tail between its legs.

But Naruto? Chouji isn’t even sure that Naruto can die.

The only thing keeping Chouji from being anything else; from being a true shinobi and not a 'just-in-case'; not one-third of a trinity or a rearguard, is Chouji himself; and Chouji is just fine with that as long as those he loves survive to attend his funeral when it is found that he cannot protect them any longer.

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Sabaku no Kankuro – Garotte, Not Buster Sword
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Kankuro is a dagger, plain and simple. He is not powerful enough to be anything else and is simply not psychotic enough to try to match the strength of his siblings blow for blow and round for round. He has different skills and different abilities, and is the only one in his family that has a kill count not in the triple digits yet. Where his Father would be Kazekage, where Gaara would follow suite and Temari next, Kankuro would be the ANBU general underneath them, and he is fine with that.

Kankuro is different from Temari and Gaara because Kankuro is quiet. He is not brash. He is not murderous. Though he is blood-tired to both his siblings, he is not related to them. Too many things stand out between them, whether it be the physical difference in the color of their hair or the mental ability for patience that Kankuro has, Temari forsook, and Gaara outright ignores. Where his brother and sister are swift to decide their courses of actions, Kankuro is only swift in executing them. He can read between the lines when Temari only skims past and Gaara completely disregards them, and he can bring himself to admit defeat when Temari proudly stands tall and Gaara secedes to no one.

He is like a shade in the death of the night while his brother and sister are tidal waves of destruction on the battlefield, and though they may be asked to kill thousands of the nameless, Kankuro is only asked to kill importance; Kankuro is only asked to kill people with names. This is the only reason why he does not mind when he cleans out his puppets while Temari and Gaara clean their fans and clothes (respectively) because the blood he washes out of every nook and cranny has a name attached to it, not a number, and though Gaara and Temari might hate his smug little smile, Kankuro feels as if he outshines them both.

As the middle child, it is this that is his glory, and he will never forget it.

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Aburame Shino -- Choke
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Shino is an anthrax; is the little death you do not see coming but that gets you in the end anyway. He smothers his enemies, he does not stab or scratch or bite at them. He chokes them. He gets inside the lungs and underneath the skin and it is impossible to get away from him unless he deems it a necessary part of his plan that you do so. Shino differs from Shikamaru in that, where Shikamaru plans his battles based on the chaos of probability, Shino battles based on the thought that if he cannot defeat you, if he cannot subdue you, he will destroy everything you are down to the very last atom. Shino plans and lives in absolutes; be it the absolute power of the destruction bugs; the absolute love of his teammates; or the absolute certainty that he is not human.

It is that single-mindedness, that cold, sociopathic rational that keeps Shino believing that he is a human with thoughts and dreams and hopes and not a host-body for the most destructive hive of insects in the known world. It is that sole thought that keeps the Aburame clan from experiencing its own massacre every night that Shino is alive.

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Inuzaka Kiba – Brothers In Arms
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Dogs roam in packs because dogs are tied to each other by lineage and scent and blood-of-my-blood flesh-of-me-flesh love of family. If Kiba were to be a weapon, Kiba would be a nunchaku -- solid, reliable, always carrying the weight of another side on his back. Unlike other shinobi, many of the Inuzaka are the same type of weapon, and this, moreso than anything else, keeps them strong. Though they are wild; though they are insane; the Inuzaka are each tied to their family members and their weapons tighter than the Hyuuga are to their hands, the Aburame to their parasites, and the Uchiha to their eyes.

Akamaru may be Kiba's weapon, but Kiba is as much Akamaru's weapon, owner, and brother as the pup is to him and to every other animal in the Inuzaka compound. They are both dangerous to both themselves and to their enemies and they are dangerous to all those around them not because nunchaku are powerful weapons; no, it is because nunchaku, when they land blows, hurt twice. Kiba attacks not as one being, but as two, and when the tie that binds both ends of the nunchaku is broken, he is useless and rendered blind, deaf, and dumb like an invalid attacking his opponent without the use of an entire arm.

This is why he was so afraid when Akamaru was hospitalized. He knows without the pup he would be normal, and being normal scares the shit out of Kiba.

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Haku – Artificial Resplendence
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There is no doubt that Haku is a weapon made real, but he is also so much more. He is like the Masamune; not a weapon, but a myth. He is the deadly beauty of meticulousness forged by innocence; is fine, assassin's grace tempered by the flames of hatred but not stained by its ashes. He is the perfect sword. The perfect soldier. The perfect doll.

He is without equal.

Though hated and despised all of his life because of it, Haku is pure; like naturally made glass or diamonds. He is uncaring; untouched, though he would fight and die and break in half for his wielder to keep him safe.

Haku is like the Masamune not because it is a weapon, but because it stands for what weapons can and cannot be. Haku is a dream. Haku is an ideal. He lives by his creed. Dies by his creed. He has nothing to prove. Nothing to live for other than his master and nothing to think or say or do or breathe that is not wholly devoted to that which made him who he was.

When it came time to chose between life or death; between self-worth and the will of his master, Haku chose death because he is like a finely crafted work of art set on natural display, and nature abhors perfection. His death was the death of a butterfly hung to display smashed against the ground -- tragic, but ultimately beautiful in that the butterfly was finally set free.

Though no one openly mourns Haku’s death, Inari and Tsunami come to visit his grave every day of November. When they do, they leave a single white rose, speak a few words or think them, and then, leave. It is the most anyone has ever cared for Haku aside from Zabuza, and it is the most anyone ever will. The Masamune vanished from the world and became a myth. Haku will vanish from the world and become a whisper in the sands of time.

It seems appropriate, almost.

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Hoshigake Kisame -- Bloodwater
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Sharks are known as natures top predators, though they can be killed by humans and by sleep.

Kisame watches Itachi sleep, thinking if he could ever kill the man who was not a man but a monster; a predator. Though he himself is a shark, and a shark, no matter the species, are wary of other top predators, Itachi scares him. The teen is unnatural.

He can sleep.

Kisame is the exact opposite from all those around him, especially those who are powerful. He is like the Muramasa -- violent; unwieldy; unable to distinguish battle from life and life from battle and he is stained redder than the blood on his blade could every be.

His techniques differ markedly from his Mist brethren in that they are both self-made and wholly, unequally brutal. He does not kill, he massacres. He grinds bodies into the dust until there is nothing left but a fine red paste. Though Itachi may be the master of his ninjutsu; of his mind, Kisame is master of his body, and knows that unlike Itachi's eyes, the Samehada will never fail him. Maybe that was why they were pair together, maybe it was because they were the most powerful at the time.

He does no know. He does not care. Nature abhors a perfect predator, so Kisame hides himself behind Itachi in smoke and mirrors and fools his opponents eyes. He is the subservient one. The weaker one.

Where shinobi are supposed fool the eyes, Kisame tears them out with his teeth and swallows them whole. Everyone is blind to Kisame, and it is this, and only this, that Uchiha Itachi admires in him.

It is why Kisame is Itachi's 'eyes'.

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Jiraiya – Apollo
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Jiraiya is like an arrow shot out of a bow. From birth, possibilities were stretched out before him, almost infinitely. So many, in fact, that the things he wanted in life, to paint and to protect pretty princesses, often intertangled and intercrossed and warped from two goals into one.

He learned to draw at five. Learned to kill at ten. Learned to fuck at fifteen. In the ninja academy, he doodled on his scrolls instead of learned his jutsu. At home, he slept on the ceiling and painted on the floor with chakra. Out in the city, he mocked the Hokage openly and on the battlefield, he destroyed his opponents with jutsu they had never seen. It is said that when the Sannin was young, his family and sensei were confused on whether he wanted to be a great artist, a great shinobi, or just an arrogant loud-mouth shooting for the Third Hokage's newest gray hair.

Many would be surprised by Jiraiya, though that was neither then or there.

Unlike an arrow, Jiraiya picked his own path. He left the Village when it had nothing more to offer him; he turned down the position of Fifth Hokage because Sarutobi still had one last hair that wasn't gray; and, because he could not have his pretty princess, he settled on the ones in his mind, and the ones who could pretend, and built a small empire of pornography because of it. The world may be worse off for it, but perverts all over the world are silently happier because of it, and though his sensei never lived to see his student give him one final gray hair, Jiraiya made sure to promise that he would give the thing that was Orochimaru at least one.

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Orochimaru -- Venomous
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Orochimaru is like a poison, and the only thing that can be said of poison is that it stagnates and loses potency with age.

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Uchiha Itachi – Memory Blank
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Though the Sharingan records every nuance of his opponent's movements, Itachi's mind does not. It is only a temporary advantage he has over Kakashi when he first fights him, because the false-Sharingan user was both surprised and off-guard at the sight of the second-to-last surviving Uchiha.

Now, he cannot remember the patterns of Kakashi's movements because they are just not there anymore. Like his vision, like his Sharingan, like his status in place in the Akatsuki, Uchiha Itachi is only as good, only as temporarily powerful-as the opponent he is facing.

Itachi is a rusted katana over the fireplace. He shines. He glows. He is very, very beautiful, but he is of little use, now. Though he is stained with blood; though he has taken countless lives, his edge is dulled and will never sharpen because he killed everyone who could ever give him a challenge.

This is why Orochimaru was afraid of him. It is why Kisame and the other Akatsuki members will never defeat him, and it is why Itachi does not fear of his brother ever killing him but is utterly terrified of Uzumaki Naruto more than death itself because if Itachi is only as strong as the enemy he is battling, then how strong will he be when he fights that which can never be killed?

Wasted possibilities scare Itachi. Infinite strength terrifies him.

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Sabaku No Gaara – Stability, The Absence Of
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Gaara is like a Zanbatou. Too powerful. Too unwieldy when not used correctly. He is a weapon made to destroy, never to injure. Every nuance of his shinobi training is driven to one thing, and that thing is death. It is then morbidly ironic, in a way, that he tattooed 'love' onto his head, for both his name, his tattoo, and his very existence as a weapon are things that Gaara has grown to hate with every atom of his being.

He and Naruto are liked cracked mirror-reflections of each other, and the glass tends to cut very, very deep.

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Finis