Angels without Wings

Chapter 28

Author here: I've done my best to edit the story, just cleaning it up a bit, and I hope that'll make up for me uploading for so long. I'm not gonna lie; the updates are coming slow, extremely slow, but they are coming! Life's just being stressful, and, I admit, I'm trying my hand at writing my own stories, originals, though that won't show up anywhere till I've gotten a lot further, if it ever will. Anyway, enjoy the chapter! And have a great day/night! Oh, and please pretend that I didn't write this and edit the whole story at 5, almost 6, in the morning; actually I think it was about 3 am, when I finished most of it, but I'm not sure and I'm not convinced that it makes it any better. <3

The change was surprisingly quick, from one day to the other people stated looking at us differently; it didn't take long to find out why; Pale eyes had, apparently, been angered a lot, when he was scolded by the Hokage, and decided to blame me.

Apparently, he hadn't been allowed to actually hurt me and had been scolded, when it came out that he had; his revenge, it seemed, was to spread lies about me and Yuuto, lies that the counsel, which Pinky's mother was in, only fueled further. Hinata tried to help, but it only resulted in her being alienated by her family, she started to tag along with us most of the time and insisted, when Yuuto asked, that she'd come with us, when and if we left. The brood had taken to hang around us as well, though he was usually quiet and kept a certain distance from us; he had never joined us in training, but Hinata had. She was a gentle one, but with Whitey's help we'd managed to train her too and she'd gotten a lot stronger.

I never expected our group to grow this much, it had only been me and Yuuto for so long, and now there were two more that would come with us, one that might stalk us and then Whitey; what would he do, if we left?

I shook it off, not wanting to think about it; Whitey had been near constantly angry lately, never leaving us out of his sight anymore, and I didn't want to know why. I didn't want to confirm, that he too was starting to believe the rumors.

It was a terrible thing to let people in; it hurt...

They were blaming me for everything, everything that went wrong was somehow my fault. There was talk about taking Yuuto from me, imprisoning me and making Naruto into a weapon; as the mistrust got worse, I made sure to have my bag packed at all times, ready to leave at a moment's notice. And my little group copied me, even the brood, without me having to say anything; Whitey either didn't notice or chose not to comment on it.

The exam was coming up and the day before it would start, Pinky had a mental meltdown; she had heard all the rumors and couldn't handle it; she was screaming for no reason, threatening, and throwing things. Whitey had to remove her, that night he told us that she'd been removed from our team and replaced by Hinata; it was clear, that they had Hinata placed on our team to slow us down. Unfortunately for them, we'd trained with Hinata and she was able to follow along better than Pinky ever did, not to mention she actually bothered with trying to help us, when we needed it.

We met up early with Hinata and the brood; Naruto had stayed with us since the attack. And we walked to the examination room together, easily passing by some half-hearted genjutsu with both Hinata and the brood on our team. We were one of the first teams to enter the room and found ourselves a secure place to wait for it to begin, with a view of all the exits. We had to wait for a while, but Naruto, Yuuto and Hinata seemed to be entertaining themselves just fine. When, finally, people started to arrive, I wasn't surprised to see Hinata's old team looking very unhappy with their new teammate, who was talking their ears off.

Once all of the students, I'd seen in the academy, had arrived, they started speaking loudly amongst each other, not noticing the heavy atmosphere in the room. It wasn't till they were approached by a silver haired teen, that they noticed; my team and I hadn't joined them and had remained just far enough away that they didn't seem to have noticed us.