Archive of Our Own

Her home smells of incense and oleander, the careful blending of tendrils of smoke and the sweet slide of poison down her throat. Hyuuga Hinata flits through the halls and laughs under her breath, hearing the walls throw back her own joy. A stripe of sunshine as thick as her arm slides over her as she passes a fogged-up window, and the brief touch of heat warms her from the inside out.

Up here, on the top floor, there are thousands of square feet left empty and open for her to do with what she pleases. Just a stone’s throw below, however, the halls fill with the consistent chatter of family, of friends, of strangers seeking respite and sating curiosity. It’s a sharp difference, with only a long, winding staircase to mediate, but Hinata manages it well.

She skids to a stop at the next window, fingertips catching on the alabaster alcove, and inhales gleefully at the sight down below. The courtyard is overrun with people talking and laughing and dancing, the high pitch of flutes and the lilting tones of violins carving their way through the walls to tickle her ears. She grins, her vision quivers, and suddenly she can see every single person traversing through the courtyard, from those just below laughing over the fine flavor of wine in hand, to the young ones just outside the west wing, chasing rabbits.

Eyes bright and heart aflutter, she shifts enough to allow for the lace of her shawl to fall over her shoulder, skimming her tailbone. She’s long since grown used to the weight of the layers of lace, the way that each fits in a different but suitable way to her specific form, and the familiar lightness of touch as the fabric skims over her collarbones. The nearly sheer gold glistens like morning, as bright and soft as the joy in her eyes.

Without a moment’s hesitation, she turns from the window, hair twirling in a wide arc, and takes the stairs two at a time. She can practically hear her sister’s voice in her mind, the amused reprimand of slow down, silly; you’ll hurt yourself.

For the most part, Hinata has always gone slow. The entirety of her kingdom knows this, and finds it a charming if not bewildering characteristic. She has never been the top of her classes, nor a natural born leader such as her fellow royal peers; she has not even yet adapted to the necessity of being utterly realistic, choosing instead to feed a wealth of already developed optimism even further. It’s funny, then, to think about how often those close to her remind her to slow down.

Her mentor always tells her, expression stern but eyes bright, that the only part of her that moves swift and sure without hesitation is her heart. She always blushes at this, regardless that she’s been hearing it from him since she was a little girl, and throws herself into the warmth of his arms. His comfort is a familiar enough respite for her that she can feel the phantom dip of a scar running from cheek to cheek, pressing against her temple, even though it’s been weeks since last she saw him.

Her heart races in her chest, fueled by excitement and the promise of adventure, however brief, and she makes it through the crowded room with not a single lasting interruption. She doesn’t have any official duties this morning, though her evening is a different matter altogether, so she doesn’t hesitate to flit past greetings with anything beyond a smile and a pleasant, “good morning!”

Her father would think her unspeakably rude, but the townspeople simply laugh. What more can they expect from a fanciful girl, only a few years fled from adolescence? Her heart calls for exploration and she is seldom willing to deny it.

Iruka-sensei’s words ring in her ears, authoritative and fond: dear girl, your heart leads you. Journey alongside it, study it, and become a scholar of your own whims and ambitions. Understand your heart and you’ll understand the hearts of others.

It’s no secret, the ease with which she loves. She also knows that her mentor’s words ring true; in studying the things and the people she loves, she has learned more about her kingdom’s people than all of her educational lessons combined. Her teachers might quarrel, given that Iruka-sensei’s ideologies are not entirely shared amongst the faculty, but everyone accepts that there’s no harm in preaching love of self and others from a young age.

And this, more than anything, she has excelled at.

Her kingdom has long since known her as dear heart, and use the endearment more often than not. She thinks, fondly, that she can’t remember the last time that she’s run into someone who actually used her name.

“And where do you think you’re going, Hinata-sama?”

Well, and then there’s him.

Hinata slides to a stop, drapes of lace swishing around her body, and turns over her shoulder with a grin. She breathes excitedly, “Neji-nii-san!”

“Yes,” he replies, bland as oatmeal. He’s in his royal guard uniform, a select assortment of sharp edges and straight lines in shades of winter, making his pale skin appear even fairer. The design does wonders for the strength of his jaw, however, and the sharpness of his eagle’s gaze. “Did you think to run right through the proceedings of your own inauguration into the Counsel?”

Hinata pretends, for his benefit and her amusement, to think about it. She cannot hide her smile, however, and openly beams at his chagrinned face.

“Oh yes,” she says, almost a chirp. “I still intend to.”

Neji’s eyes narrow, his crossed arms flexing slightly as he clenches his fists and then immediately relaxes them. It’s a telltale sign of his exasperation, though it’s nowhere near threatening. A tell, certainly. Nothing more.

“Hinata-sama,” he begins, and she can hear the lecture packed behind it from a mile away. Her smile only slips slightly, her amusement and good mood prevailing over his insistence on sticking to routines.

“The official inauguration is this evening,” she says, reaching up to the veil of gold lace, banded with mother of pearl, tucked gracefully into the chignon that the top half of her hair had been pleated into. She pulls the material over her head and face, and her vision is only hindered slightly by the glistening threads of gold. The hem of her veil touches her bare collarbones and she smirks at the resignation she can already see moving over her cousin’s face. “I have plenty of time.”

“Fine,” he sighs, too easily, flicking a long tendril of hair over his own shoulder. He pushes himself away from the wall and approaches her, reaching out to straighten a kink she’d not felt in her veil. His eyes flicker between hers for a moment, and every harsh line of his expression smoothes into something soft and overtly tender. He rests a hand against her hair, just for a moment, just long enough for him to say, “be safe.”

And then he’s turning away from her, hair swishing in just the same way that she imagines hers does, and in the next moment she’s racing down the hallway and breaching the heavy alabaster doors of her castle. She rushes over the threshold and sunlight steals her vision for the briefest of moments, until she blinks the shadows and shades of reality back through the light.

The world opens up before her, no longer shrouded in creamy white walls tall enough to pierce the clouds in the sky, and she doesn’t hesitate to explore it. She heads straight through her town and then past the shadowed outskirts, right into the Hidden Forest, grinning all the while.

Her heart races in her chest and her feet race to match its rhythm.

She lets her heart lead her.

✧✧✧

Lace, as it seems, is not the most forest friendly of attire, but she’s no amateur explorer. Whereas someone of a less-distinguished class might find the drapery and the length of her gown heavy and debilitating, she has worn gowns her entire life and as such, feels them like a second skin. She doesn’t even snag as she moves through the woods, over fallen logs and around boulder-shrouded defacements.

She hums quietly along with the symphony of birds and wildlife around her, all of them welcoming the day as the sun works steadily towards the center of the sky. Her panting breaths play with the material of her veil, slightly less familiar than her gowns but not distractingly so.

Usually, when she plans to trek through the forest and challenge risky terrain, she doesn’t wear a gown. And even when she does, she usually rides her close friend’s horse, a true white mustang named Akamaru, whom trusts only a chosen few enough to ride him. He usually makes short work of the terrain, and is charming company.

Today, however, she doesn’t have the time or the availability of comfort or companion. She only has until the sun squares up in the lean blue of the sky before she has to make her way back to the castle, clean up the dirt around her ankles, and prepare to be inducted into the most prestigious and powerful source of guidance throughout the shared Hidden kingdoms.

She tries not to think about the clock ticking away her free time on such a fine morning, and is glad for the distraction of the scent of smoke in the air. She lifts her nose to it and feels the heaviness of it cling to her throat. With a single thought of focus, her vision shakes and suddenly she can see through the trees, the alcoves, and the entirety of the forest until her gaze lands on a quaint cottage nestled in-between densely furnished trees.

Curiosity spiking; she works her way towards the home until her feet find purchase on cobblestone rather than dirt and weeds. Her fingertips trail over the bark of the last tree before a clearing opens up around the cottage, the chimney spouting a delicate trail of black smoke into the air. She lifts her nose again to the breeze, even though she already knows she’s tracked the same scent she’d found before.

“Hello?” she calls, before approaching. She doesn’t want to be rude and encroach on someone’s property, though she does find it rather suspicious to have stumbled across a homestead neither she nor her family knows exists. No one answers her call, and the air around the home resonates with empty silence.

It is a home, though, that she can see that clearly enough from the stack of logs nestled against the side of the far wall, the space in the center of the clearing that looks marred by outbursts of flame and weaponry, and what appears to be several hand-made decorations hanging from the cottage’s roof. There’s a quietness here; it brings chills down her spine in a wave, and reminds her of the loneliness born of misunderstandings.

She approaches the home carefully, steps deft and eyes watchful. There is nothing about the area that reads as threatening, but her cursory glance from before had shown her the heat of a single presence, and she expects it to appear sooner rather than later. Her cousin and skills master both would have a coronary if they knew how she refuses to use her Sight without first facing a threat, but lucky for her—and for them, probably—she is frequently alone when this happens. When she goes into battle, she is surrounded by threats, and as such, she uses her Sight without hesitation.

Here, in this tiny clearing so far estranged from civilization and connections, she detects nothing more threatening than loneliness. She does not activate her Sight, but her heart pounds heavily in her chest, cautious and curious. She steps through the dirt charred and defaced, slides her toes along the edges of several lines of ash, and finds herself thinking of teeth and claws and flames.

“Hello?” she calls again, as she approaches the front door. Still, she receives no answer. She inhales and is comforted by the warmth of it seeding through her chest, spreading heat and courage to her fingertips as she reaches for the doorknob. She tests it and finds it loose, unlocked. She pulls away with a frown, turning over her shoulder to survey the rest of the clearing, seeking anything out of the ordinary. She finds nothing of concern, nothing suspicious, and turns back with a gentle rap of her knuckles against the jagged wood.

She receives no answer, and although her honor forbids it, her curiosity silences the better parts of her, and she turns the knob before she can do otherwise. The door creaks open with a groan, sounding eerily similar to an animal’s inquisitive yowl. Her eyes, nearly feral with curiosity, trail over the innards of the cottage with abject wonder.

It looks incredibly…ordinary, to the naked eye; some broken furniture in the corners, a healthily glowing hearth in the back wall, fueled with similarly cut logs as she’d seen outside, and a few tattered rugs along a stone floor. There are countless objects hanging from the ceiling, cut and glistening like glass and metal and gemstone—all of them treasures.

Some of them sing lowly with the breeze, while others twirl carelessly in silence. There are no pictures along the walls or among the wooden furnishings, and only a single strike of color in the form of a red scarf draped over a worn seat next to the fire.

Hinata takes a cautious step inside and ignores the sudden yet quiet hum of warning bells in her mind. Curiosity is a stunning, silencing thing.

She allows her fingertips to run along the stone alcove of the front window, coming back with dust and something dark and frail, like ash. It interests her enough to catch her attention, and once she focuses in on it, she starts noticing more of it around the place.

She finds it along the windows, around the hearth, in the crevices of the furniture, on the knobs of a chestnut dresser, and in the corners of the wood flooring. She wonders about it, chewing on her curiosity and then lifting her thumb to mouth lightly, absentmindedly, at the tip of her thumb. There seems to only be the one room, the front room, and nothing else to it. She moves slowly across it, the hem of her gown picking up ash and dust along the way, and her eyes fix suddenly on the outline of bones lying next to the earth.

She has just enough time to tilt her head and squint at them, her heart starting to race along with the chills striping her spine, when the front door snips closed behind her. She turns in a flurry of lace and silk and guilt, wildly expecting a creature, a predator, a monster, and finds a young man blinking at her instead.

“Oh,” he says, as his eyes trail curiously over her features and completely ignore her hands, raised into the perfect defensive hold. “Hello.”

“Hello,” she says eventually, cautious and low, tilting her head a bit to better see through the lace of her veil. A moment later, she watches as he cautiously lifts his hands and unwraps a bloody bandage from his forehead, only to discard it carelessly by his feet. It reveals a red slash of a scar, one that bisects his left eyebrow, and throbs as though new. It is not the only scar on his face; there are six, deep and jagged, spread out like whiskers over his cheeks. They’re old and set-in, but from the depth of them, she knows that they must have been torturous to endure. What would he have had to go through to get them, so oddly streamline and uniform? What kind of creature inflicts that kind of precise damage upon someone?

Was it even a creature? Or had it been a man?

His every gesture is cautious before her eyes, even as he moves to the other side of the room and retrieves new bandages. He turns his back to her easily, either unafraid or unbothered by her. She doesn’t know whether to be offended or complacent. She chooses to be neither. She watches him work wordlessly, barely breathing, heart racing, and she finds herself avidly intrigued about this man.

But is he just a man? She thinks wildly, wondering at the ash, at the bones, at the stark feeling of isolation so far out here in the woods. A moment later, despite her sudden unease, she remembers her manners and says, “I apologize for intruding.”

The man startles, as if he’d forgotten she was even there, and glances over his shoulder with wide eyes. They’re beautiful, Hinata realizes, as wide and deep as the ocean itself, and perhaps a touch more mysterious. For just a second, a flickering moment of time that comes and goes within the span of a blink, she marvels at the notion that his skin must taste of saltwater, and that his lips might breathe into her every hidden secret of life beneath the sea.

She blinks and blushes as the thought passes and the man turns back towards her, finishing off the tying of his bandage. She watches the wound bleed through over a few seconds, and swallows when her eyes return to his and find him hungry. They flash with something that is a secret of a different kind, one that deserves to stay hidden, and suddenly every thought of blue is replaced with red, red, red.

He blinks, and it’s gone. Tucked under the glacial waves of his eyes, and the strange softness edging around them.

“It’s okay,” he says, rubbing a hand over his jaw. His hand falls back to his side and he tilts his head at her in a way that she recognizes, as an experienced tracker, in wild animals.

“Sorry if I’m a little jumpy,” he offers, sounding almost embarrassed. “Been a long time since I’ve had a visitor. Well,” he amends, abashed, “a friendly one.”

“Why is that?” she asks, the words slipping out before she can even think to disband them. She flushes crimson and hopes her veil does enough to hide it. She thinks not, when the man’s lips curl into an amused smile. He does bring a hand back up to rub at his jaw once more, as though to hide his smile, which she thinks might be the extent of his manners. Then again, she isn’t really acting the model of manners at the moment, either.

The man hums in response, and Hinata knows before his next words that he’s not going to answer her.

“Must be the real estate,” he jokes, eyes crinkling at her. “Not the most habitable of areas, if I’m being honest.”

“It’s quiet here,” Hinata admits, only just allowing herself to relax out of her defensive stance.

The man looks contemplative, glancing quickly around his place as if he’s never seen it before today. “Maybe,” he allows.

She lets her hands come to rest at her sides, and she prohibits herself from glancing to the hem of her gown, where the lace is caked in dust and ash from exploring this man’s home while he was away. Yet, as though he had read her mind, his eyes drop to her feet, and the angle of her gown’s tail, long enough to betray her movements. When his eyes come back to hers, they’re laughing at her.

“Seems you might like it here,” he grins. “What do you think?”

Hinata takes the question seriously, even while she hears the humor in his tone. She studies his face for a few seconds, eyes dipping into the grooves of those scars, and then around the room at the tiny personal touches she can pick out. Her heart feels a heavy stone in the ocean of her chest, and she can’t help but feel an inkling of the pain he must’ve felt to get those scars, and to live out here, all alone.

“It’s quiet,” she says again, turning her eyes back to study his reaction. “I admire the nearness of the forest and the river, and the little touches of decoration. This place…it looks well-loved.”

He watches her silently for a long moment, eyes trailing carefully over her features, as though searching for deception. It seems a test, and she’s unsure of whether or not she’s passed, but he shoves his hands into his pockets and shrugs his heavy shoulders. In the sudden way that the shadows in his eyes had cleared earlier, his entire countenance becomes loose and devoid of earlier tension now.

“It’s home,” he answers simply, grinning. And then, unexpectedly, he adds almost carelessly, “It’s all I get to love.”

Hinata does manage to swallow the next round of questions this last remark arises in her, but only because her attention catches again on the stark red of the scarf just over his shoulder. He follows her gaze to it and laughs under his breath, turning back to it as he takes his hands out of his pockets. He lifts the fabric and runs it through his fingers in a way that seems familiar enough for him to have done it unconsciously.

“It’s nice, right?” he says, beaming at the fabric and then at her. The brightness of his eyes startles her, and she nearly chokes on her next inhale. She nods her head, though, and his smiles grows ever more joyous. “It was a gift from a long time ago. Someone…someone had made it for me. It’s my favorite thing.”

Hinata feels breathless with how easily he would admit such a thing to her, a relative stranger, someone that could possibly be a threat. He doesn’t look to regret it, either. In fact, he continues to rub the material carefully through his fingers, smiling down at it with nostalgia born of fond memories. Perhaps he had loved someone; perhaps they had loved him, too.

“It’s beautiful,” she says honestly, eyes trailing over the patchwork of fabric, adorned with patches and mishaps, but ultimately beloved since it’d come from someone he cared for. The care that had obviously been put into it’s making made it even more beautiful, in Hinata’s eyes.

When she glances back up at him, she finds him studying her again, head atilt. There’s a contemplative gleam in his eyes that doesn’t feel threatening, but instead, rather…warm.

“Hey,” he says, as he rests the scarf back over the chair, fingertips gentle with its handling. “What’s your name?”

It shouldn’t feel strange, to be asked something so commonplace. But Hinata still blinks at him, a little startled, because it really has been so long since she has met someone new, someone who doesn’t know her by her face or her prestige before ever being introduced to her. She swallows, and takes three precise steps towards him, hand outstretched.

“Hyuuga,” she whispers, the space left between them deliberate enough for a whisper to suffice, but for him to need to step forward to meet her. “Hyuuga Hinata.”

It seems an eternity of stillness falls between them, while his eyes, wide and wary, trail from her features to her proffered hand. Where before he had visibly rid himself of tension, now every line of him stands out stark and sharp as barbed wire. His shoulders seem even more imposing, wider and stronger, and his jaw becomes something on the outskirts of nightmares. He doesn’t move, not an inch, not a muscle, and Hinata thinks hers isn’t the only heart that’s racing.

Unbidden, Kurenai-sensei’s voice rings in her mind, a daunting reminder:

                                     You can’t just kill a monster.
                                     First, you have to learn its name.
                                     Then, you have to say it.

“Uzumaki,” he says, “My name is Uzumaki Naruto.”

“Uzumaki…Naruto,” she breathes, and her gasp catches in her throat and suddenly all she can smell and see and feel is ash and blood and smoke—there’s smoke like mucous stuck in her throat and ash burning to crisps on her skin and blood, oh, there’s so much blood, it’s on her hands and her face and her throat and it’s not hers and overhead there’s the cacophony of screams and all Hinata can think to do is run.

So she does; she runs, and she doesn’t stop until her knees crash to the ground and it’s white, it’s clean, it’s clear alabaster and she’s home and not—

—Not in the den of the monster that slaughtered the better half of the eastern hemisphere.

✧✧✧

Several weeks pass, and change rushes over Hinata in violent waves. Her new position as both the Queen and a Counsel Member invites countless opportunities for stress and contemplation, both dutiful and fanciful. Her free time lessens and her hours on the clock broaden, and even though every day leaves her feeling exhausted, she’s enjoying herself. Her work feels purposeful.

She misses exploring whenever she wants, and she misses getting to sleep in, but what she misses most of all is her unawareness.

Even when she’s swamped with work, important work, she finds herself thinking about the Monster of the West. She tries to stay angry, to rekindle that initial bone-striking fear she’d felt upon hearing his name and matching it to the history.

And yet.

She remembers his kindness, his self-deprecating humor, and the way that even after he’d seen her in his home, her voice had startled him—like he’d forgotten she was there, like he was so unused to human company that her voice alone had shocked him into breathlessness.

She pictures him sitting alone in his secluded cottage, staring into the flames of the hearth, cheeks rosy and burned, and wonders if he even feels the heat of it. She pictures him standing in the center of his clearing, doing whatever it is that he does that leaves the ground as scarred as his own face, and her heart aches for him.

She has more duties, now. She’s not just the ruler, the final voice, but a member of the Others, someone that takes on individual families and offers advice and guidance. Where before it had been possible to encounter people who didn’t know her, she seldom ventures into her kingdom without being called upon by endearment. It’s not an unsettling change, though it had taken her a while to get used to being asked for advice on the streets. She’d been used to the impersonal but efficient method of letters brought through the Counsel, and then her own select staff, and finally to her.

Now, with her seat on the Counsel, she has more responsibility than just the final word. She has a hand in the most significant of cases, spanning further than just her kingdom in the Hidden Leaves. It’s been a trying task, certainly, but she seems to have taken to it with the same kind of determination she’d always tackled her studies with.

Iruka and Kurenai-sensei have already expressed how proud of her they are.

Even with her successes and her growth and her legendary self-control, she can’t stop thinking about Uzumaki Naruto, the man, the monster. She doesn’t know which category to place him, doesn’t know if he belongs in one or the other, or both, or neither. What is he to her, anyways?

An unanswered question, a stone left unturned.

She hates leaving interesting stones unturned.

This, more than anything else, is what leads her to traveling back through the forest towards that cottage on her only day off. At least, that’s what she tells herself.

She’s dressed for the occasion today, having known ahead of time what she’d be getting herself into and, at the same time, not. She doesn’t usually bring weapons into the forest, nothing beyond her own hands and knowledge, but today she has blades and wires and awareness. The material of her pants and undershirt are light but durable, and her shawl is loose enough to allow her to be flexible.

The veil remains, though it is a different one than the last. This one, made entirely of black lace and edged in minuscule diamonds, gives her some level of courage. She wears gowns more often than not, and the veil is her queenly staple, which sets her apart and is required by law. It’s familiar enough to her that without it, she might feel discomfort.

Walking voluntarily into a monster’s den requires no less than utter preparedness.

Even as she thinks it, some part of her rejects the notion of the young man she’d met in the cottage being a monster. She remembers the tender way he’d touched that red scarf, and the softness of his gaze when she’d called his home beautiful, and the word monster just doesn’t fit.

Hinata makes it a point not to trust anyone outside of her family by blind faith. This, she tells herself, means that she only has half of Uzumaki Naruto’s story, and the half she’s missing is his.

She doesn’t know how she’ll be received, now so many weeks later, after having intruded upon his land and home and fled upon hearing his name. For some reason, as she thinks about her reaction to hearing his name, she recalls the constant kindness she meets when people learn her name. It’s a little off-putting, thinking about the difference in reactions—that her name garners joy and kindness, and his incites revulsion and fear. Does he deserve that kind of reaction, that kind of life?

Does anyone?

By the time Hinata breaches the tree line and stops along the edge of Naruto’s clearing, her heart feels strong and she’s dead set on retrieving an honest retelling of the past.

Yet when she glances up and focuses on her surroundings rather than her thoughts, she’s shocked into stillness by the faint trace of something soft and lulling coming from the other end of the clearing. It curls over and around her, and without even meaning to, she leans towards the music. It’s faint enough that she knows there’s some distance between them, but just audible enough to make her lips part in wonder.

For a moment, she wars with herself. The retellings of the monster from the past don’t match up with the man of today, not the one that Hinata was introduced to, and as such she just isn’t sure—she isn’t sure that he’s a monster, and she doesn’t want to invade his privacy any more than the world already has, by carving him out of it and leaving him abandoned in the middle of the least explored forest known to humankind. Banished.

In the end, she does not activate her Sight. Perhaps it will lead to an injury, maybe even a fatal blow. Maybe it’s ridiculous, ignorant. Maybe she’s silly.

But to her, privacy means something.

Especially when one barely has any left.

So when she walks up to the cottage door, she takes a heaving breath and steels herself as her knuckles meet wood once again, echoing in the same way they had weeks prior. She’s distracted by the music, the lilting notes playing through the woods, but she tries to divert her attention back to the door and the sound of nothingness coming from within. There’s no movement and no response, no answering call to her three-toned inquiry.

She does not check the doorknob this time. She does not even glance into the windows. Instead, she listens to the subtle insistence of her instincts, and follows the music.

It’s not far; tucked in-between the trees and covered in overgrowth she finds a piano sighing under Uzumaki Naruto’s deft fingertips. She doesn’t know if he knows she’s there, and she tries not to make a single sound. She rests against the nearest tree, her temple scratching against the bark, and the music moves through her as soft and sweet as a summertime breeze.

It’s unlike anything she’s ever heard, the way he coaxes the notes from the keys. They have pianos in her kingdom, of course, but no one has ever played them like this. There’s a moment where the pounding of the keys feels like thunder, like the clouds opening up around her, and the following lilt of notes streams through like rain, and Hinata finds herself utterly breathless.

The song dips into a close, notes holding and holding until the silence overwhelms, the calm after a storm, and Naruto’s fingers slide off of the keys to rest on his lap. He doesn’t turn to face her, doesn’t even make a move to acknowledge that he knows she’s there, but his voice is clearer than the notes when he speaks.

“You came back,” he says, and Hinata’s spine snaps straight up, eyes alert and cautious. She waits for him to say something else, anything more, but silence fills the spaces between them and she breathes in courage and exhales fear and comes around the tree she was leaning on.

“I have,” she studies the bowed angle of his back, the messy disarray of his golden hair. His nape flushes pink and it catches her interest as easy as breathing, and it frightens her. “I apologize…for running away.”

Slowly, with measured movements typical of someone being watched, he turns his head to glance at her over his shoulder. Her eyes jump to his forehead and she frowns, because where before a scar had clearly bisected his eyebrow, there was nothing left behind to show for it. Her mind, eternally ravenous for answers, leaps towards the scars on his cheeks and she wants to ask so many questions, like how that scar had healed well enough so as to be nonexistent, and how the scars on his cheeks had not, and how a monster with a life singed in red could possibly make music as beautiful as that.

“I was afraid I’d never see you again,” he admits quietly, and she’s surprised again that this doesn’t seem like a difficult thing for him to say. When it comes to his feelings, he seems utterly unselfconscious, and it baffles her. “But to tell ya the truth, I expected worse than you just running away.”

Hinata frowns. “Worse?”

Naruto pauses, and then slowly turns on the stump beneath him, until he can stand and face her. She remembers this, his fluidity of movements, every one of them softer than the next. It’s a cautious choreography of movements, each of which he uses to show that he has no threatening intentions. There’s a genuineness to him that makes Hinata want to trust him, that seems to be working on getting her to trust him, and it makes her steel herself that much more.

He reaches up and knuckles at the scars on his left cheek, in such a way that Hinata can’t tell if it’s deliberate or not. His smile is a wilted flower in a dried out pot when he says, “Definitely worse.”

She studies him, eyebrows dipped to frown, and watches the way he toes at some loose leaves by his feet. He seems to be struggling to look at her this time around, which she thinks she understands. All it had taken to make her flee had been his name. Maybe he thinks that now that she knows it, knows what he is, maybe his gaze might be the next trigger to send her running. She’s not entirely certain it wouldn’t.

She doesn’t realize how long she’d allowed the silence to stretch until he reaches up to rub nervously at the back of his neck, lips pursing at one side as though he’s searching for words. His eyes flicker up to hers and back down to the ground, quicker than hummingbird wings.

Then, he says, “But also, maybe not worse? It sucks being alone.”

His words are all over the place but then, he hasn’t had anyone to talk to in who knows how long, so it makes sense that his thoughts and his words might come out mismatched. Even still, somehow, Hinata understands that his gesture, whether deliberate or not, had hinted at a past of pain—at a history of close-encounters that were worse in that they were violent. His careless mention of his loneliness told her more than she’d ever be able to ask him, most notably that loneliness registers higher on a pain scale than vicious attacks that lead to blood and scars do.

Her heart throbs in her chest, a painful lurch, and she can’t ignore it.

“It does,” she agrees, trying to find the right words to navigate this minefield of questions and triggers between them. He glances up at her again, studying her eyes in that same way she remembers when she’d called his home beautiful—he’s looking for authenticity. She knows when he finds it, because he smiles and it lights his face up like sunrise on a clear morning, warming the deepest parts of her.

“You play beautifully,” she offers, an olive branch of sorts. His smile grows even wider, showing white teeth and sharp edges.

“Thanks!” he chirps, and she doesn’t think it’s just her imagination that he’s puffing his chest up a bit. It almost makes her laugh—almost. “I’ve been practicing for years. Got a lot of time on my hands, after all.”

And then, just like that, with a simple remark hinting at his isolation thrown haphazardly between them, she hurts for him again. He doesn’t seem to be doing it on purpose; Hinata is highly perceptive, and extremely efficient when it comes to reading people. The careless way the words spill out makes it seem like he doesn’t really know what to say at all; that all he knows is all he says, and all he knows is loneliness.

Hinata swallows around the lump in her throat and fishes out a gentle smile for him. She says, “Your hard work clearly shows.”

Naruto beams, and his smile gains some edges when he jokingly asks, “Is that why you came back? Heard my tunes and couldn’t resist?”

It’s fairly innocent, as far as flirting is concerned, but it makes her blush all the same. He laughs when he sees it, and her chest feels tight at the sound of it. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to swallow around the lump forming in her throat, and her temperature is definitely rising. She tries to rein in her control, remind herself that this man is a murderer, a monster, and it doesn’t matter much if he looks innocent, and is entirely too endearing for her to ignore, and so what if his fingers coax sheer magnificence out of a piano—she has to focus.

“Not exactly,” she says, a compromise of sorts. He smirks at her, resting one hand on his cocked hip.

“Not exactly,” he repeats, and his gaze is warm as it trails over her features. “You really are as diplomatic as they say.”

Hinata frowns, confused. “I’m sorry?”

He takes a few steps forward, still so painstakingly cautious, until she’s close enough to smell the traces of smoke on his skin. He leans back against a tree, bringing one foot up to rest against the bark. He tucks his hands in his pockets, an attempt she reads as more of him trying to come off as nonthreatening as possible.

“I didn’t know you, when I found you,” he says, and Hinata wonders over the wording. “But when you introduced yourself, well. It’s impossible not to know who you are, ya know? ‘ve heard a lot of great things about you.”

The tacit recognition that she has heard a lot of terrible things about him, and that he knows this, rests heavily in the air between them until Hinata’s words slice through it.

She frowns, dubious. “How?”

“Rumors.”

This time, she gives him a deliberately unamused look. She tries to pose her next question as politely as she can, without pointing out that it makes no sense for someone living in total seclusion to remain a part of a rumor mill. “How do you hear rumors all the way out here?”

He laughs a little under his breath, eyes shining at her like he knows.

“Oh, they don’t come to me out here. No way.”

“Then?”

This time, his smile is abashed, as though he’s been caught. “Well, sometimes I come to them.”

This, more than anything else thus far, piques Hinata’s curiosity. She raises her brows, eyes wide with interest. She opens her mouth to ask, and doesn’t have to get a word out before he’s already answering.

“Sometimes I need supplies, ya know, not ones I can make or get out here. There’s a small village, just west of here. I wait in the trees until the sun falls, and then I make my way in. Quick and easy. Still, sometimes I manage to hear things.”

Hinata has to actively force her hand to remain at her side and not press against her chest, over her heart. Every bit of him is shrouded in isolation; she doesn’t know how he stands it, how he lives. She imagines being without her family, her friends, and knows that even then, she’d have her community, her kingdom. Without family, or friends, or even strangers to be around—she doesn’t know if she could make it. There’s so much love and support needed for her to thrive, for her to exist as the person she is today, and it breaks her heart that Naruto has gone so long without it. That he continues to live without it.

She needs to know if he’s a monster, because of course, if he is, then he deserves this, right? Her heart wars with this notion, even while her mind rationalizes it. What she realizes, at the very heart of things, is that she doesn’t understand enough. Not yet.

When she refocuses on him, it’s clear that he knows. Sometime while she’d been lost to her musings, shadows have creeped over his expression, turning sunrise into sunset in a few moments. She notices lines under his eyes that she hadn’t noticed before, and a tiredness to the slope of his shoulders she’d somehow missed.

“Time, then?” he asks, before she can get a word out.

Hinata doesn’t pretend to misunderstand. “I’d like to know more about you.”

Naruto’s smile is a frail, delicate thing, but something in his eyes flashes to life.

“That’s the nicest way someone’s asked for my side of things in a long, long time.”

“I need to understand,” she begins, and then, with the heaviness of an undecided opinion weighing in on her last word, she says, “first.”

Before I make a decision.

Naruto lets the words go unspoken between them, and slowly nods his head, just once.

“Alright,” he says. “Follow me.”

“Where?” she asks immediately, as he pushes himself away from the tree. His hands remain in his pockets, and he juts his chin back towards his cottage.

“To the only place that knows my story’s true,” he says, before he turns away from her and walks headlong towards the sun, rising just over his cottage. “Home.”

✧✧✧

As it turns out, Uzumaki Naruto is full of surprises.

He sits with his legs crossed in the giant chair he lays his favorite scarf on and tells her, in explicit detail, about the same history she’s been told her entire life. The same history she’d lived through as a young girl. From what she can tell, he does not embellish or lie, he doesn’t hide from what he has done, and he doesn’t linger on the atrocities caused by his hands.

But he explains to her about the loss of control, of having a monster sealed away inside of him by Touched parents who had too much faith in him and not enough suspicion of a man that was truly evil, and of the way the monster had been coaxed to claw it’s way out of him until he was only a bystander in the back corner of his mind, as his teeth and claws cut through thousands of lives.

He doesn’t explain the pain, or the feeling of being ripped apart from the inside out until he was nothing left but a lingering thought, or how the gaze and words of a madman had manipulated him like a puppet on strings to commit the most infamous atrocity known to humankind. He ties it all up simply; in a tone Hinata recognizes in victim survivors of war—it’s the kind of voice that balances between forgiveness and an unconquerable guilt.

In Hinata’s experience as a Counselor, she most often hears these tones with those who struggle to forgive themselves for committing horrific acts, and fight a continuous losing battle against themselves. Those that go to war hungry, expecting to be fed, and come back starved and weary.

Naruto speaks in this tone when he says, “I can’t explain it. He spoke and the words were in my head, moving my limbs, controlling every part of me. I couldn’t think. I wasn’t. I didn’t exist. I just…wasn’t. So many lives, taken. My parents had too much faith in me.”

And Hinata is left stuck in stillness, in an amalgamation of distressed feelings and pained reactions, of rage at whoever had orchestrated this, the man of rage and greed who could wish such cruelty on the world for having been slighted, and who chose to commit such atrocities with another’s hands. There are rumors about this man’s identity, but they’re just rumors. The man himself had been shrouded in mystery, disappearing before the attack had even ended, protecting himself from the history books by fleeing the field.

Hinata looks over at Naruto, watches the stillness in him as the flames dance in the pools of his eyes, and she knows that the people that were killed in the attacks, and those that had to live on without them, were not the only victims.

She also knows that she is, in fact, the only person alive that believes him.

He doesn’t attempt to persuade her to understand, or to be on his side, or to forgive him. He just tells her what he knows, and it’s loneliness. It’s regret for not being strong enough—she tries, once, to tell him that a child has no chance against a man, let alone someone that powerful, but he silences her with a look that strikes right through to her bones. There’s work to be done, in him, and after having sat with him for hours, listening silently and making connections, she knows now that she wants to be a part of it.

The only problem is that he doesn’t.

She can’t imagine trying to forgive herself, had she been the claws and teeth and power that someone had chosen to steal. She can’t imagine trying to attest her innocence in the event, or trying to make it right with herself. She supposes that this, more than anything else, proves that as yet she is not prepared to handle Uzumaki Naruto’s tragedy.

What she is prepared for, however, is combating his loneliness.

She begins by staying, even hours after he has stopped speaking. She doesn’t say a word; she knows he won’t hear it. She just stays.

Her thoughts race in circles, wild and outrageous, and she thinks she has to tell her family. She has to let them know that they’re wrong, that there’s so much to this story that no one is paying attention to, that so many people just don’t know. There are children, like her sister, that have grown up their entire lives being told the story of the Monster of the West.

They don’t know about the mind control. And those that do? It doesn’t matter, when so many lives were taken. How can she singlehandedly convince her kingdom that the actual Monster of the West had fled the final war, that he was an old man slighted and greedy for power and glory and fame and that he took the lives of thousands by taking over the life of an innocent child? That he was still out there?

She stares into the fire and remembers the smoke, the ash, the blood. She remembers the world falling down around her, the families torn apart by chaos and confusion and fear.

She remembers the screams.

She doesn’t know what to do.

✧✧✧

Hinata’s schedule is packed full every week, but she always has one day off, and she always spends the entirety of it with Naruto. Her family respects her privacy, even though they’re desperate to send a guard after her when she wanders—they learned the hard way how opposed to that she was—so her time spent with Naruto is completely her own.

She still doesn’t know what to do.

Naruto has told her several times now to drop it, to leave it alone, that he’s been living with it long enough to live with it longer still. She fights back against his every excuse until, inevitably, he says, “It’s okay now. I’m not alone anymore—I’ve got you!”

And what can she say to that? It’s true. It’s so devastatingly true, and of course Iruka-sensei has always been right about her heart moving quicker than the rest of her, of course he has. She doesn’t even know when it started, just that whenever she looks at Naruto now she wants to touch him, too. There’s an ache in her that makes her fingers itch to pull him in close, to wrap her arms around him and press her lips to the skin of his neck, where she can feel the rhythm of his pulse.

Sometimes, he’ll play his piano for her when she practices climbing trees. She’s always wanted to be able to scale any kind of tree, to get high enough in the air to see miles and miles out in every direction. The added cadence of his fingers pounding the keys and sending symphonies that sound more like promises than empty noises into the air never fails to make her feel like she’s flying, even when her feet have yet to leave the ground.

Sometimes she hums along with his music, standing nearby and closing her eyes just to listen. Sometimes he laughs, and that’s music, too. She spends so much time with him that she can picture his eyes in perfect, striking detail when hers are closed. She dreams about him looking at her, smiling and laughing and maybe they’re the only two people in the world she creates, and maybe it’s okay.

Maybe it’s more than okay.

Soon enough, however, she starts to feel uncomfortable. It’s clear that she’s falling for him, quickly and joyously, but she doesn’t want to mess this up. There’s so much at stake here, with their newfound friendship. They’ve only known each other for half a year, that’s it, and yet she feels like she can tell him anything, everything, and she knows he can do the same. There’s no hiding from each other.

The gap that had once been between them, the yawning space between a monster’s teeth, barbed and delicate and breakable, had long since dissipated with time spent in one another’s presence.

But this is important for him—she is important for him. This, at least, she can acknowledge. But her feelings for him push their bond past friendship, in her eyes, and what if he doesn’t feel the same? What if all he ever wanted was a companion, and he’d been so desperate for one that he’d take anybody he could find that was willing to stay?

Is it sad of her to be okay with that? She hadn’t realized that she felt lonely, too. Not in the way that he had—there’s nothing to compare to the seclusion he’s experienced—but in a way that goes beyond missing friends or family or community. She remembers feeling tendrils of it walking down the street and seeing couples pressed close, holding hands and laughing to one another. She’d lived her entire life without experiencing any of that, and once she realizes it, it makes her feel—strange.

For a couple weeks somewhere in the midst of their time together, she started acting ridiculous and Naruto began to worry, she couldn’t help thinking there might be something wrong with her. She couldn’t explain it to him, it was so embarrassing, and she tried to explain it to Hanabi, but her sister shut down that line of self-conscious thinking immediately. It was helpful, and Hinata went back to being mostly normal—enough so that Naruto reverted back to normal, too, if a little more generally concerned about her than usual.

After that, she recognized that it was simple: she wanted Naruto in a way that she had never wanted anyone in her life, and she wasn’t sure he felt the same.

She values their friendship more than any potential fling that could wreck the closeness between them. Their bond is a delicate one, still, and she doesn’t want to do anything to shake it. She cares too much about him to do anything risky enough to hurt him, especially since she’d looked for signs of reciprocation and hadn’t found any.

She is not careless; she is watchful of her every move when they’re together.

This, she thinks, more than anything else, is why she sometimes catches Naruto gazing at her in a way that she cannot explain. It reminds her of the mornings when she was still a young girl, when Neji would take her to the lake and they’d wet their ankles as the sun kissed the sky good morning. It reminds her of every moment she woke up and found Hanabi snuggled against her side, making tired excuses of having been cold, even though her wing of the castle is the first greeted by the sun.

She can’t explain it, and she thinks she knows it, but.

She doubts, and so she tucks it away somewhere safe and secure and wholly hers, and she lets it settle.

✧✧✧

“Tell me one more time,” Hinata pants, crouched low and stiff, trying to hold all of her weight on one foot while curled in on herself. Dirt pushes between her toes, and her ankle strains. “What is this good for?”

Naruto laughs, easy and low. He’s holding the same position as her, with far less of the strain. And complaining. He turns to her with eyes gleaming like wildfire, bright and catching.

“Just breathe,” he says, smiling. “This works. Believe it!”

Hinata grumbles under her breath and tries not to fall face-first into the dirt again. Beige was an awful choice for her clothing today, but how was she supposed to predict that Naruto would have her holding poses in the middle of his land? Her baby toe touches a patch of dirt that’s more black than brown, and it crumbles on contact.

Ash.

She breathes, deep through her nose and fully from her mouth, and breathes again.

She hears the telltale rustling of fabric and nearly thanks Naruto out loud, knowing that he’s moving them out of this held position. She straightens as slowly as he’d shown her earlier in the morning, with his hands on her waist, easing her through it. She flushes at the memory, and straightens to her full height without a single pop in her spine. She feels loose, and calm, and—

“Centered,” Naruto says, as though reading her thoughts. “I do this to remain centered. To focus. To be…calm.”

“You seem plenty calm to me,” Hinata remarks, raising a critical brow in his direction. She can’t argue with these results, though. She feels incredibly refreshed; even her heart seems to be beating easier, pumping blood smoother, delicately flushed with heat in her chest.

Naruto’s gaze, at once flushed and browbeaten, drops immediately to his feet. Hinata recognizes this reaction, now. She’s spent months by his side, accumulating time and experience with him as a stranger, then a person, then a friend.

He only responds this way when she’s stumbled upon one of his mysterious hang-ups; something that he refuses to explain, and she doesn’t feel comfortable enough to pursue. There’s something about the way his head immediately bows, baring the nape of his neck, frail and vulnerable in a way so conflicting with the strength of his nature. She may not know the exact reason for this reaction, whenever she stumbles upon it, but she recognizes clearly the way his skin colors in different shades of shame.

She doesn’t expect him to say anything—usually when this happens, he doesn’t—but she can admit to herself that Naruto has always been partial to the unexpected.

He scuffs his toes against the dirt, flicking a rock aside, and slowly glances up to meet her wondering eyes. The blush reaches up to the tips of his ears and he looks ragged, and tired. He opens his mouth to speak and her sharp gaze just barely manages to catch the way his lips tremble.

“I haven’t always been,” he starts, before hesitating.

“Calm,” he finishes heavily, dropping his eyes back to his feet. He tucks his hands into his pockets, shuffling nervously, and she can feel the unease coiled tightly around him. She moves quickly, almost thoughtlessly, to diffuse it.

She approaches him warily, ever mindful of his past—of history—and asks, “Do you do this every day?”

It takes him a moment to swallow, to glance back up at her worryingly, before nodding his head. She gives him a moment longer, just to himself, and he sighs with a shrug of his shoulders. The next time his eyes find hers, they’re brighter, shadows no longer lingering in the corners, threatening to swallow him whole.

“Yup. Every day.”

“I like it,” she says, and he laughs. Immediately indignant, she turns away from him with a playful flip of her hair, hiding the way she purses her lips, trying to prevent a smile from growing.

“You hate it,” he jokes, but he comes closer to her, close enough that she can feel him hovering over her. Chills rise up on her nape and trail down her spine like phantom fingers, and she wonders if he knows he does this. Sometimes when he’s close like this, her heart picks up speed, adrenaline coursing, a frightened response preparing her legs to flee. She wonders if he knows he causes this.

Sometimes, when he stands over her, she hears the distinct fluttering of her heart—and suddenly it sounds so weak, so frantic, like prey, like fear—and she remembers that people call him monster.

She refuses to let these thoughts rise to the surface; he’s far more perceptive than she’d once given him credit.

“I like some of it,” she amends, turning over her shoulder to smirk at him. He returns the look and somehow manages to look smug, as though he’d been expecting this reaction of her. Without hesitation, he reaches forward and tucks some of her hair behind her ear, fingertips trailing along her skin, light as butterfly wings.

And then, in the next moment, he’s moving away. He stretches his shoulders and Hinata’s mind goes from blank to crammed with inappropriate images, all stemming from her attraction to the bulk of him. It isn’t difficult to imagine that he is powerful; not with the stocky way he holds himself, with most of his weight in his chest, in his shoulders. She’s seen him lift things no mortal man should be able to lift, and then throw them with an ease that startles her.

She struggles to piece together the different shades of Uzumaki Naruto.

Sometimes she sees the Naruto that’s wild and strong and ashamed, mysterious and tragic in the shadows effortlessly encroaching on the light inside of him. Other times, she experiences the Naruto that’s playful and jubilant and every shade of sunrise, with smiles brighter than the promise of tomorrow, and laughter that seems to come from his soul. And then there’s the Naruto that plays piano with loose fingers, who sings along to his own music with a husky voice, and who forces himself to hold positions of focus for hours just to keep himself calm.

“Coming?” Naruto calls, already standing in the doorway to his cottage. Hinata startles, turning towards him immediately, a fluttering moth to his effervescent flame. She moves towards him immediately, on autopilot, still caught on trying to figure him out. There’s so much she had never expected about him, could have never known, if she had not stumbled upon him months ago. She’d have never gotten the full story, not one that’s true and whole and real, and she’d have never gotten to grow alongside Naruto. 

She never would’ve seen the determined set of his shoulders when a task is ahead of him, or the brightness of his eyes when he makes a promise. She never would’ve known the music of his laughter and the gentleness of his smile, or the way his hands upon her skin felt like every favorite memory in the past being reborn in the present.

She would’ve missed him; missed learning that he’s more than his wild strength and crippling shame, more than the shifting slides of his playfulness and his sincerity. She could have missed his passion for living, despite the world calling for his death.

He’s a little of all of those things, and so much more, and Hinata loves him.

She stumbles in her steps while crossing the threshold of his home, her mind going silent except for the single, resounding echo of one word: oh.

She loves him.

The door creaks shut behind her, and the lock snarls into place.

✧✧✧

The first time she feels afraid of Naruto since having met him, they’re playing in a river.

The day begins innocuously. There’s a beautiful sunrise to greet her journey through the forest, and she finds a companion in the shy sable fox that shadows her until Naruto’s tree line. She loses track of him afterwards, though she catches glimpses of glowing eyes between the trees when she approaches Naruto’s home.

Besides a few new hanging ornaments on the edge of his roof, Hinata thinks nothing about his home or his land has changed. She does not see the trail of ash lined like a fuse to the edge of the clearing, fresh and deep and still heated, and later she’ll wonder why there had been no sign to prepare her. She’ll wonder how she could’ve missed it.

When he answers the door, his smile sifts through her with molten heat, and she doesn’t question how easy it is for him to undermine her defenses.

They walk side-by-side to the river, Naruto’s voice a constant beside her, and she allows herself to relax. Her sharp gaze catches stray details of the forest as they head towards the musical chime of the river; the forest comes alive under her eyes.

Bees flutter from flower to flower, the soft humming of their wings coupled with the call of birds higher up soothing tensions in Hinata she hadn’t even known were there. The soil beneath her feet moves, every now and again, with small creatures slithering and leaping past. She trails her fingertips over the bark of a nearby tree and comes away with sap, which she easily wipes away on her pant leg. Her fingers remain sticky, and Naruto takes a moment to pause in his storytelling—he’d had a run-in with a bear a few days prior—to laugh at her.

“Should’ve known better,” he sings superciliously, skipping ahead until he can turn and walk backwards in front of her. His hands, as always, are tucked away deep in his pockets. He grins at her and the look goes right through her, makes it hard to breathe. She very nearly lifts a hand to her throat, but deviates to tuck some of her hair behind her ear.

The veil doesn’t impede her movements, though she wonders if it’ll survive the water she plans to swim in. She isn’t certain it’s quite made for that.

“I don’t mind,” she lies, inconspicuously wiping her hand on her pant leg again when he turns back to face forward. “I like to interact with nature.”

“You can,” and here Naruto pauses, snorting to himself, “interact with nature without coming away sticky-handed, ya know.”

Hinata sniffs, loud enough for him to hear her over his shoulder. She’s about to add something rather impolite when they catch sight of the first sign of the water, utterly exposed to the sunlight and glistening nearly transparent. Hinata approaches the edge curiously, gazing down deeper than she’d expected for such a body of water, and finds that she can see the life of animals and flora both.

She points with a noise somewhere between a gasp and a laugh, before turning over her shoulder to find Naruto gazing at her.

“Look!” she says excitedly, pointing at the waterbed while bouncing a little on her feet. “Watercress.”

“Yeah,” Naruto says, and he sounds a beat away from laughing at her. She doesn’t mind; Hanabi thinks her fascination with flora rather amusing, too. “Have you never been here before?”

Hinata flushes, deliberately not looking at him. “Maybe a few times.”

“Was it not here before?”

“It was,” she admits. “But it hadn’t grown much, yet. Nothing like this.”

Naruto hums, and Hinata crouches to touch the surface. She ignores her distorted reflection and traces absentminded sigils on the water’s surface, before the sound of ruffled clothing distracts her. When she turns over her shoulder and finds Naruto undressing, her cheeks move swiftly from sunrise pinks to sunset reds. He doesn’t even seem to mind that she’s looking, or that it’s obvious that she’s looking.

His bare shoulders are something of a situation for Hinata—they have been since he’d explained to her that training always felt more comfortable if he did it shirtless. She never complained, barely protested, mostly because she hadn’t been able to get a word out regardless. Any vague notion of protest got caught in the knot of her throat until she buried it back down with a heavy swallow and a slight shake of her head.

She watches as he strips his pants off and trips over his pant legs, crashing down to the ground with a curse. It startles a laugh out of her, one she brings a hand up to cover, but too late. He glares halfheartedly over at her before laughing himself, then kicks the pants away at long last.

And then he’s in nothing but his undergarments and he’s approaching the river and Hinata had planned to get her feet wet but she hadn’t planned on swimming but then it’s too late, and he’s submerged. She’s expecting it, but it still baffles her when he resurfaces and instantly gives her a mischievous look and a threatening curl of his dominant hand.

She has about enough time to lift a finger threateningly in response before he’s splashing her, the water so cold it hits her like needles.

“Naruto-kun!” she squeaks, already shivering. “Honestly.”

“Too easy,” he mocks, before diving back under.

Hinata takes a moment to survey her clothes, all of which hang heavily on her frame now that they’re soaking wet. It’s easy to know what she wants to do, but because she rarely does anything the easy way, she stops to think about the consequences.

Swimming in the river in nothing but her undergarments means that Naruto will see more of her than anyone outside of her family ever has. It also means that she’ll be close to him, equally as underdressed, and that she’ll have to work even harder to force herself not to touch him. Their friendship is still a new and delicate thing, one she has no intention of breaking.

As such, it makes her want to sit on the riverbed and let her feet sink into the water, until her ankles and her calves are wet. It makes her think the smarter choice would be to remain clothed, to remain mostly dry, and to remain as far from Naruto and his physicality as she can.

It’s the smarter bet, and the safer one, but it’s not the one she wants.

Perhaps she’s putting too much stock in her self-control, or maybe she just doesn’t care enough, but she steels herself for the icy bite of the water, and forgets entirely about the heat she’ll be able to feel coming off of Naruto’s skin the closer they get to each other.

She purses her lips, ignoring the heat in her cheeks, and decides that this, at least, she can have.

By the time Naruto resurfaces once again, she’s standing on the riverside in her underwear and her veil, carefully folding her clothes in a pile. She ignores his audible exclamation of surprise, glad that her back is turned to him, and sets her pile down a safe distance from the water. She pats it once for good measure and takes a deep breath.

“I can feel you staring,” she calls over her shoulder, smiling a little. When she finally turns to face him, blushing every shade she has in her arsenal, he’s grinning at her.

“Did you expect anything less?” he calls, so incredibly cocksure.

“Perhaps a little tact,” she says, laying on the sass. He blows a raspberry, hands tracing the surface of the water as he continues to gaze at her. He even tilts his head, that same strangely animalistic gesture.

“Oh, come on,” he finally laughs, lips curling into a smirk. “You know me better than that.”

This concession, as well as the ease with which he puts it forward, floors her. She approaches the riverbed, her skin prickling at his continued stare, and slips into the water in one seamless move. She doesn’t look at him again until she’s stopped shivering, her body finally acclimated to the swift shift in temperature. She’s grateful for the heat of today and for the absence of canopy to interrupt the sunlight from above them.

Naruto swims closer to her and she catches his eye, notices the curiosity in his stare. He comes to stand beside her, the water lapping at his navel, and reaches out to thread the edge of her veil between his fingers. His mouth parts, tongue tracing the edge of his teeth, and Hinata feels chills wholly unrelated to the water’s temperature race down her spine.

“Hey, Hinata,” he asks, his voice suddenly so much quieter. It’s such a change from how they’d been calling out to each other just moments ago that suddenly she starts noticing their surroundings, almost as if some part of her expects danger, but without knowing from which direction it will come. There’s no way for Hinata to have known, in this moment, that the danger wouldn’t come from anywhere but in front of her, where her eyes are consistently pinned.

She traces over the bemused line of Naruto’s quirked lips, before leaping to study the brightness of his eyes.

He says, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” she breathes, squinting askance at the hidden understanding of his expression. She’s so held by the flare in his eyes that she doesn’t even feel embarrassed at the tone of her response, or the way it makes his smile grow. He’s still touching her veil and it feels intimate—it feels like he’s touching skin.

“You always wear a veil,” he licks his lips and Hinata’s eyes follow the movement, hypnotized. “Can I ask why?”

This is a question she’s been asked so many times in her life that the answer is second nature to give. She knows it in the same way that she knows her place in her kingdom, in the same way that she knows her cousin is in love with her weapons trainer.

And yet.

It catches on her lips for how innocuous the question is—she’d expected it, eventually, is surprised even that it’s only just come now, after so many months spent together. She had expected something more, something far more difficult to divulge, and for some reason, because it’s this and it’s so easy, it unsettles her.

She wonders, just for a moment, why she feels threatened.

“It’s proof of my birthright,” she answers mechanically. “It’s a symbol of my position as…as royalty.”

She hesitates instinctively, never one to boast of her status. She doesn’t feel uncomfortable discussing it with others, but it’s not exactly her favorite topic of discussion. With Naruto, however, it feels a little more contrite than with others. The fact that he is an exile living on the outskirts of civilizations, none of which will accept him, makes for this topic to feel a little strained on her side of things.

Deep down, she knows this slight discomfort stems from knowing that she’s in a position of power. She can and has been trying to use her position to integrate the mere idea of Naruto rejoining society, with near constant failure. It’s this failure that adds tension to her shoulders and a line of strain in her neck, and dissuades her from broaching the topic with Naruto, ever.

Naruto’s eyes focus on her face instead of the veil shrouding her, and he frowns, eyebrows pulling downward in something like irritation.

“Proof,” he mouths to himself, almost dubiously. “It’s a symbol?”

“Yes.”

“I think I get it,” he adds, after a pause. He looks on at her and says, “There’s power in hiding.”

He doesn’t have to say anything more for her to understand that there’s an underlying message he’s trying to get across to her. His feelings on the past are a thing of mystery to her, sharply contrasted with his actual real-life knowledge of the past and his connection to it. Somewhere between the lines of these words, he’s telling her something significant.

She thinks she understands it, but the more she plays with the words in her head, the more she starts to believe that maybe she doesn’t understand it at all. After the attacks, he had been banished to the outskirts of his own home to keep people safe. Was he saying that there is power in being forced into seclusion, away from all other human beings?

That’s wrong, she thinks. Something, or maybe everything about that, is wrong. She doesn’t understand, can’t fathom the message he’s trying to send to her without actually saying it. This feels strikingly similar to her daily challenges with Nara Shikaku, her acumen instructor, in that she can’t completely grasp what she’s being told, and feels frustrated by it.

“At times,” she finally agrees, dipping her chin. “My veil is a mechanism of hiding my face from those outside of my family. I won’t be able to remove it until I oversee every branch in my family.”

“The more power you have, the closer you are to being able to stop hiding.”

“Yes.”

Naruto doesn’t speak again for several long moments, and Hinata’s awareness of their surroundings flexes. She feels the water coursing slowly around them, tugging gently at her legs, watercress tickling her ankles. The trees move lightly in the breeze, trunks groaning, branches creaking, leaves twittering. The shadow of a large bird flashes over Naruto’s face and for a moment too quick for her to be certain of, she thinks she sees red through the shadows.

Naruto breathes through his teeth and lets his hand fall back to his side, regaining her attention just in time for him to say, “I can’t understand that.”

Something about his voice makes her hackles rise defensively.

A thin spread of her ire, like a wave’s crest, flares forward in her voice. “I don’t understand why not.”

Naruto’s words are a whip of sudden contempt, not aggressive but upsetting all the same. “You wouldn’t.”

“Oh?” she says, taking a step away from him with a frown. She suddenly feels her state of undress, her bareness and vulnerability, and wishes that she still had her clothes on, anything to put space between them. She watches with dismay as his lips curl into something of a self-deprecating smirk, one that lashes out and finds only Naruto to cut into.

Predators bare their teeth to threaten other animals. Hinata knows this; she knows the significance and the danger of an animal’s mouth, and what they do with it.

And yet, even still, it somehow still surprises her that a smile could have teeth, too.

“The more I hide, the less powerful I am.”

Hinata frowns. “You’re hiding? Weren’t you…exiled?”

Naruto laughs and it sounds foreign. It’s sudden enough to shatter the tension in the air between them for just a moment, before it rebuilds itself into something even more high-strung and dangerous.

“Exiled?” he repeats, tilting his head at her wonderingly. Hinata feels the urge to take another step away from him, her heart racing in her chest so much so that she can feel it pulsing in her shoulder blades. She refuses to retreat further, reminding herself that this is Naruto, and that even between friends, some conversations are difficult and scary. “I guess you could call it that.”

Hinata glares, frustrated. “Naruto-kun, I don’t understand.”

His eyes flash, gleaming when the sunlight hits the surface in just the right way and reflects off his irises. “Can you still call it exile if you do it to yourself?”

Hinata’s heart stutters, a sudden one-two that freezes in her chest before the pace returns to normal.

She can’t help the quiver in her voice when she asks, “You exiled yourself?”

“It was that or destroy the world.”

The anger and the pain of his expression turn over to something like acceptance, like resignation, and—pain, she thinks suddenly, that’s what had blurred the edges of his expression earlier, making it impossible for her to gauge his feelings. It shrouds his expression into planes of shadows, barbed and sharp-edged, and Hinata recognizes now that Naruto has a veil of his own.

It’s not made of lace, or silk, or thread—it’s shadows of a past ripped from him to leave scars of pain he refuses to do anything with but hide, and it breaks her heart.

It was that or let the world destroy me.

She hears the words she knows he won’t say, and she flinches.

He lifts one of his hands across his chest to grasp his bicep, and his openly defensive body language tells Hinata more than his words ever could about his current state of mind.

Hinata wants to say that wasn’t you, it wasn’t, but she knows already the response that will garner. She knows his poignant denial of being able to excuse himself, the sharp shake of his head to stop that line of conversation before it can even begin. So instead, she whispers, “Naruto-kun.”

His hands shake; he doesn’t hear her.

“There is this…darkness in me,” he whispers, dropping his gaze away from her, as though he can’t bear to even look at her. The pain in his voice is close to the surface, close enough that she thinks maybe he’s been struggling with this today, especially. Maybe it’s been there, just under the surface, riding him hard before she’d even showed up on his doorstep.

His lip quivers and his pain crashes through her and leaves shards behind, poking into every soft part of her, a shipwreck of shame and regret. “It’s powerful. It’s still powerful. You think you know what it can do.”

He hesitates, chews on his lip for a moment of indecision as she watches, stricken, as he relives the atrocities a madman had forced his hands to commit. She doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t know how to help him, and it startles her into stillness. His eyes leap back up to hers, wide and fractured.

“You think you know what I can do,” he breathes, and something on the edge of his expression is a warning, a threat; she feels the heat of it. “You don’t.”

“Naruto-kun,” she calls lowly, her chest heavy and laden with remorse, but he slices a hand through the air and it has the same effect as his sharp reproach whenever she tries to comfort him about the past. She doesn’t even know what she might’ve said, otherwise; all she can think is his name, in every tone of sorrow.

He remains silent for long enough that Hinata forces herself to take a step closer to him, to regain the ground she’d taken from them. He barely seems to notice. His eyes trace the blurred image of his reflection in the surface of the water, and the way he looks at himself breaks her heart anew. She wants to tell him you’re not a monster, you never were, you aren’t responsible for what that man forced you to do.

She wants to remind him of the gentle person that sings and plays the piano for small creatures in the forest, when he doesn’t realize Hinata’s there. She wants to remind him of the person who welcomed her into his home, even after it’d been clear that she’d broken in. She wants to remind him of the person she’d fallen in love with, with eyes like star fire, lit bright with the carefree mirth of being alive.

Words, for the first time in a long time, fail her.

Naruto finds his first. “My will isn’t weak. Not…anymore. When I hide, the power in me is at its lowest. That’s why I can’t understand your culture.”

He glances up at her, finally, finally, and his eyes implore her to understand.

“I can’t understand it. The more power you have, the closer you are to being able to stop hiding.” He reiterates, voice stronger than it had been before. “The more power I have, the more I need to hide.”

And suddenly, said like that, Hinata understands. She had been caught on thinking that his power, certainly vast, would increase with exposure, which is true. But it’s not a simple matter of what’s what that is important, here, but rather a matter of what needs to be done with the amount of power available. Hinata’s power grows while she’s symbolically hidden, and Naruto’s lessens.

Her power upon exposure will be the highest it will ever reach.

Naruto, as if reading her thoughts, nods.

“Exposure has never made me anything but insurmountable.”

The stretches of their power run side-by-side, parallels contorted by depth; hers a mere wire to his unfathomable cable. She had thought them comparable, simply because they both are strongest when out in the open.

As she understands it, now, there is no comparison to the power of the Kyuubi.

The more power you have, the closer you are to being able to stop hiding.

Naruto will never allow himself to do anything but hide.

A self-imposed exile—she never would’ve guessed.

She says the only thing that needs to be said, and which she knows with certainty is true: “I’m so sorry.”

Naruto blinks slowly, and even though he’s still holding himself carefully together, he nods his head at her.

Now that she understands it better, understands him better, the words come easier from him. “The only way that I know how to tame it is to be alone.”

“You have me,” she refutes instantly, and she puts steel behind the words, locks them into place. Naruto looks to subvert it, seeks weaknesses in her tone and her expression, and she watches the fond smile rise over his lips when he realizes she’s showing none. “Non-negotiable.”

“Not your smartest idea,” he says, but he accepts it. She acknowledges his statement by keeping her iron will intact, rearing up in front of him in the same kind of indomitable way he must recognize in his own will. His hand drops back down to his side and Hinata counts it as a victory.

After a beat, she finally approaches him, coming to stop when their toes touch under the water. She lifts a hand to trace the three scars of his cheek without hesitation, even when he flinches.

“Maybe there is darkness in you, and maybe it’s strong,” she says carefully, watching his eyes. They jump to hers immediately, his spine as stiff as a bowstring. “But it’s not your only strength, and it’s not you.”

She’s close enough to see the way he wars with these words in the turbulence of his eyes, flashing and flickering, but she keeps her fingertips against his skin, her palm a comforting warmth she wants him to lean into. It takes some time before he seems to believe her, before he does lean against her, lifting his hand to press hers against his cheek even more. He closes his eyes, and for a moment they just stand there, waist deep in the river, comforting each other with a simple touch.

His eyes are still closed when he whispers, “Thanks, Hinata.”

It’s easy to find the word to respond with, this time. “Always.”

And then, when she expects him to revert back to his playful nature, he surprises her by sharing what must have been one of his numerous well-kept secrets.

“I’ve never known a single person in this world that hasn’t wanted to kill me.” Hinata blinks her eyes open and wonders when she’d closed them, only to find him gazing down at her, soft and searching. And then, so softly she barely hears the words, he confesses, “I want so badly to trust you.”

This admission, more than anything else, more than the truth of his past and the emotional retelling of his experience with it, shows Hinata just how cruel Naruto’s life has been. It curls through her like smoke, thick and heavy enough to choke on.

Naruto has known her for almost a year, has heard so many of her secrets and now shared so many of his own, and even still, he does not trust her. Instantly she wonders how many people have come after him, searching for the monster of the tales, intending on killing him. She wonders if any of them found him, pretended to be his friend—in the early days, when he was so starved of companionship, his trust would’ve been easier to come by, she knows this inherently, without question. How many people betrayed that trust? How many people used his loneliness to get the upper hand and try to take his life?

Hinata does not blame him for being this way. She does not fault him for not trusting her; she thinks about how she would feel and act in his position, if she would trust her, and the answer she comes up with is enough to forgive him completely.

She doesn’t think she would trust anyone.

So instead of pleading or promising or using words to try to persuade him, she takes a page from his book and speaks through touch. Her hands wind around his neck and she has to step onto the tips of her toes to manage it, and even then, he has to sag lower for her to manage to hug him completely. She presses her nose to his throat and closes her eyes, uncaring that his arms don’t come around her, that she can feel the tension in him and knows he’s suspicious. She simply holds him to her, wanting him to feel the steady pulse of her heart beneath her skin, to know that it sings for him in the same way he sings for others—with nothing but love.

Time, she thinks, listening to the steady thump-thump of his pulse beneath her ear.

Time will tell.

✧✧✧

Hinata is in the middle of a Counsel meeting when the ground begins to shake.

They have precautions for earthquakes, but there’s something about this event that speaks of something else, of something worse. They follow through with protocol anyways, until a messenger arrives just outside the doorways, red-faced and out of breath.

“An attack,” he gasps, and Hinata can see the bone-deep fear in his stricken expression. “Just off the eastern border!”

Something like awareness nudges at Hinata, but it falls away as she works instead on ensuring everyone’s safety. There had been a family present for the meeting, and she doesn’t turn towards the sudden booming call from the east until she’s certain that they are all well and safe. Ko finds her quickly and ushers her towards her castle, slowing his pace only slightly to accommodate her struggling to jog in her gown. She hadn’t planned on running anything but a meeting today, but she was raised a warrior, so she’s prepared when she realizes they’re sending a squad toward the chaos.

The gown slips off easily enough to reveal her pantsuit beneath, and she quickly slips into the armor stashed in the training grounds next to her castle. Ko warns her about the destruction, nagging and nitpicking about her weak spots before his eyes jump over her shoulder to stare into the sky with wide-eyed terror.

She turns around and her eyes catch instantly on the cause: a sudden plume of smoke, charcoal black and edged in scarlet, rising furiously into the sky. A disjointed rage of what she had first thought to be thunder cracks across the sky, shaking the very foundation under their feet. She forces herself to turn away from it, away from the bleeding sky, and that nudge comes back a little more aggressively. She bats at it, leaping up and onto her horse with reins in hand.

She turns over her shoulder and surveys her squadron, a small but fierce group of four to accompany her to the edge of her land, where it breaks off into free zones. She makes quick work of checking in with them, ensuring their preparedness and gathering what information they have on the disturbance, before they’re headed off towards the tree line at full gallop.

Her horse is experienced in traveling swiftly and freely through the dense, muddled forestry, so it makes sense when she begins to pull away. Her squadron’s horses are less accustomed, because they probably don’t use them for exploration as she does, but no matter. They keep formation with her out in the lead, and it’s only when she hears the river off to her right that that nudge of awareness becomes incontestable.

They’re heading towards Naruto.

Be safe, she thinks anxiously, wishing that Naruto could hear it.

And then she thinks: be you, and she hopes that he can’t.

She fights to maintain her crystalline self-control, jostling in time with her horse as they leap over a fallen tree with ease. The plume reaches out overhead, far more imposing the closer she gets, and it takes her breath away. What kind of explosion could cause something so massive? What kind of chaos was she heading towards?

Words materialize insistently and bounce repeatedly throughout her mind, a mantra that stays with her even as she peels away from her unit and heads directly for Naruto’s land.

I have to hurry.

Her horse works hard; she makes it to Naruto with several minutes to spare before her squadron can be expected to arrive.

What she finds makes her glad for it.

She’d passed his cottage along the way—or at least, what was left of it. The clearing had been edged in flames; the trees blasted outwards and obsidian, bare of life, his home now a pile of ash and singed stone. His piano survived, somehow, with little more than fringe burns along the legs, a single trail of ash along the keys.

She finds herself a stone’s throw from his place, in a clearing she doesn’t recognize. And she wouldn’t. She has no way of recognizing it because until this afternoon, only so many minutes ago, it had not been.

It’s a blast zone, large enough to fill nearly half of her kingdom. Nothing within the fringed circle exists but air filled with falling ash and the thickness of smoke. Nothing within the circle lives, except.

Except.

“Naruto-kun!” she screams, loud enough to rub her vocal chords raw. Her heart lurches as she leaps from the saddle, eyes prickling and tearing from the smoke, from the ash, from the sight in front of her.

Naruto is not Naruto, not in any way that she has ever known him. There’s a man standing in front of him, clutching what remains of his arm, and Hinata barely sees him. It should probably frighten her, that her eyes remain trained on Naruto rather than someone who’s injured.

It should frighten her, but her eyes are caught on stories she’s heard ever since she was a little girl, of a monster with nine tails and eyes of flame, jowls pried open and dripping, hungry. Something depthless and dark and flickering like flames forms from its gaping jaws, singing everything close enough into instant death. The smoke curls thickly around it, and throws it in shifting shades of veiled and exposed, clinging to the cords of muscle lining its mountainous body, but unable to conceal the impenetrable glare of its unblinking eyes.

The man turns at her voice, and it’s enough to make her look at him, to tear her eyes away from the monster in the midst of the explosion. Her gaze slips away to find the man staring at her with eyes scarlet bright and spinning, spinning, and she only has a moment where recognition reigns over fear, before the monster roars and the earth shakes anew. The pit of darkness is a shooting star over the earth, there one second and gone the next, with only the cacophony of resulting chaos arising from the shattered earth. The man dodges it almost easily, and Hinata doesn’t know what part of this she finds more baffling, or terrifying.

The man’s gaze snaps back to it and if she had been anyone but a Hyuuga, she’d have thought he’d disappeared. But her eyes are special, too, and she tracks his incredible speed with some challenge, watching in shock as his hands trail through different signs before he, too, becomes the basis for a monstrous explosion.

It’s powerful enough to knock her several feet away, landing harshly on her tailbone, ears ringing. It barely scratches the Kyuubi.

Hinata pushes herself up and finds the monster looking not at his adversary, but at her. Fear zips down her spine and undoes her, makes every line of her quake.

The man is a blur on the outskirts of Hinata’s enhanced vision, setting some sort of trap, but she can’t tear her eyes away from the beast. She can see inside of him, can see the lines of his energy honed and condensed into something darker than shadows and more volatile than poison, and right there in the center of it all, she can see Naruto.

The Kyuubi lifts up from its haunches and screams, and some shaken part of her thinks it sounds a little like Naruto, before Hinata refocuses on the monster instead of the man. Something the stranger had done had taken a chunk out of the Kyuubi’s waist, and Hinata only has a moment to gasp and worry about what this is doing to Naruto before the fox’s body regenerates right before her eyes. She sees it happening at the cellular level, recognizes that what she’s seeing is instantaneous healing, but she can’t fathom it.

The rate of re-growth, the efficiency of its physiology, and the perfect nature of its healing, these are all realities that are outside of her ability to understand. She simply watches it heal itself until there’s nothing to weaken it, and this time, when it screams, she can only hear a monster’s rage.

When it moves, when it strikes, Hinata finally understands what Naruto had been trying to tell her on that day so many weeks ago.

Exposure has never made me anything but insurmountable.

The Kyuubi moves too quickly for her enhanced vision to track. This, too, is something she cannot comprehend. A creature of that size should not be able to move at this speed, and yet this is real, this is real, and she’s watching it with eyes that don’t make mistakes.

For a moment, the Kyuubi and the man seem to be on par in speed, dancing around each other while the Kyuubi’s tails slam down periodically to smash craters into the earth, shaking the ground enough that Hinata raises off of it in painful lurches. And then, in the next moment, all motion stops and Hinata’s eyes widen at the sight of the man clutched in the monster’s hand, absurdly silent as he struggles to free himself.

Her mind instinctively understands what’s going to happen before her body does; her lips part around a single word, prepared to scream, but it’s too late, it’s too late, and all she has is the word in her mind that she wasn’t quick enough to scream.

Stop!

And the Kyuubi bites down, jaws locked, severing the man in two.

Hinata looks away, the image still vibrant in her eyes. Her heart flutters in her chest and she can’t quite find a steady way to breathe. Tears slide down her cheeks, the monster roaring in the background. She doesn’t listen to see if it sounds victorious, or if the rage is just continuing to build. She blocks it out as best as she can, hearing the cacophony of chaos in her own mind, the mantra of how could this happen, what should I do, what can I do, and the afterthought of wondering when her squadron would get here, and what would be done.

They’re still a ways behind, at least, but she can’t imagine them letting the monster go freely once they discover it—they’re far too selfless for that. If this creature roams free, innocent lives will be lost. They will not allow it.

As it seems, though, she needn’t have worried about them arriving to find a monster. She hears a resounding snap and a force of explosive wind races over the land, pushing her several more feet backwards. It’s the same sound she imagines she’d hear if another universe opened before her, new and unknown stars and planets opening up in front of her eyes, almost within reach.

She lifts her head and all she can see, now, is Naruto’s unmoving body veiled almost completely in the dense smoke of his own creation. It’s enough to spur her into action, to get her to push back to her feet and run to him. She doesn’t forget the monster, or the way it had held Naruto captive within its heart of darkness, but this is Naruto, the man she knows, the man she loves, and she will not leave him there to die.

The closer she gets to him, the harder it is to breathe. She wonders if he’s even breathing at all, amidst all of this smoke, trying so desperately to wrap itself around her throat and cut off any chance of breathing. When she finally gets to him, she drops heavily to her knees and feels the shock of the movement throughout her entire skeleton. She sees the inner workings of his energy, knows that he’s alive, but even still she waits for his chest to rise, then fall.

“Oh,” she whispers brokenly, reaching out to wipe away at the ash on his cheeks, edged into his scars. The heat of his skin burns her, has her drawing her fingers away with a hiss. “Naruto-kun. I’m so sorry.”

It takes visible effort for him to blink his eyes open, the soft blue of them a sharp contrast to the charcoal of smoke enveloping them. The smoke prickles at her eyes, makes her tears flow more fluidly, but Naruto seems almost immune. It takes even more effort for him to focus on her, to see her, and when he does—when he realizes that it’s her, realizes what she’s seen, only then do tears well in his eyes. She watches shame curl through his expression, bowing his lips into a broken sob, even though he’s too exhausted to even complete it.

“I’m sorry,” he chokes, his voice gravel crushed underfoot. “I tried, I promise.”

“I know,” Hinata breathes, and strokes his hair away from his face, fingers coming away charred from the fire of his skin. She ignores the pain, continues to comfort him, and knows without him having to explain that this is a battle he had lost, even if he’s the one still living. New tears form, racing along the groove of his tear ducts, and his eyes slide shut as he fades into unconsciousness. Hinata leans forward and rests her forehead against his, gasping lowly when the heat of his skin sears through her veil and burns her forehead, too.

It takes her several long moments to come up with a plan. When she leans away from him, the raw mess of her forehead is clearly visible through the burnt away hole of her veil, and her eyes are laced with steel.

She turns towards the tree line with her eyes burning—from smoke, from the Sight, from pain—and she moves away from Naruto and towards her rapidly approaching squadron. Naruto is already healing; her squad is here.

And she is not going to let them hurt him.

✧✧✧

It’s not easy.

She manages to turn her squad around, to send them each back with specific messages for specific people, and she lies.

“Two shinobi,” she says, voice steady. “Stronger than I’ve ever seen. Lost in the battle.”

Her squadron questions her, skeptical, eyeing the dissipating plume overhead warily. But the words come easily, when she reminds herself that this is to protect Naruto, and they trust that she’s doing what’s right.

It’s even more difficult to lie to her family, especially with the proof of her burnt veil and the dead skin peeling on her forehead to reveal what will certainly be a wicked scar. The best lies are based in truths, so she tells them about the clash, the explosion, the waves of heat coming off of the battle. She tells them about getting too close, only to be blasted back, and how the flames devoured everything they could.

It’s easier, then, to make up the heated stone, jagged and swift, that nicks her forehead straight off of the explosion. Neji’s eyes are sharper than the rest, though Hanabi’s are a close second, and she knows she’s going to have to tell them the truth.

They don’t even let her make it completely into her room, and they don’t respond well to the truth.

“How long?” Neji whispers, and there’s a foreboding layer of promise in his voice, strung low and sharp, a tripwire the truth pressed up against. Hanabi bites off a curse, and ignores the look Hinata sends her way for it.

“About a year, now.”

“A year,” he hisses, and the betrayal that flashes beyond his expression hurts worse than the incessant stinging of her forehead, and the bruise growing on her tailbone, and the realization that with them, she never should’ve lied.

It will take Hanabi months to grow comfortable enough with the idea of her and Naruto being friends, and years for Neji. Their acceptance will come slowly, but their support is soon to follow.

She cannot return to Naruto until a month later, even though it pains her, makes her mind race at night and leaves her sleepless and exhausted the following mornings. She has nightmares, too; flashing red eyes in landscapes of shadows, smoke swirling around her, against her, inside of her, choking and suffocating and heavy. Sometimes, when she wakes up sweating and gasping, fear-stricken and terrified, it takes about as long for her heart to settle into a healthy pace as it does for her to stop hearing that ear-shattering scream, inhuman and unholy.

She’d be lying if she didn’t admit that some nights, its difficult to separate the monster from the man.

Hinata soothes the worries and the fears of her kingdom as best as she can, without being complacent or untruthful. The only secret is the greatest secret: that one of the shinobi had not been human, had not been anything but what history remembered, a ledger soaked in red.

By the time she, her family, and the Counsel manage to settle things down within their kingdom—and quell any rumors of chaos spreading from neighboring empires—she finds herself at long last trekking through the forest, anxiety making her hands shake. She’s unsure of what she’s going to find. She doesn’t even know if Naruto will be there, if he’ll be okay, if he’ll welcome her. Will he remember her?

What happens to him when the monster inside of him takes over?

She breaks through the trees, silent footsteps and breaths to match, and finds Naruto crouched amidst the rubble of his home, rebuilding what had been lost.

She watches him for several moments, tucked away behind the ashen bark of the nearest tree, vines draping down to tickle her nape. He looks just the same as she remembers, before—before, but she notices a difference in him immediately.

The silence.

No humming, no singing. No words.

For someone so partial to music and so naturally melodious, it’s a striking change. It unsettles her, incites a deep ache to build in her gut.

He moves carefully amongst the rubble, stepping over jagged planks of wood, eyes jumping from stone to unturned stone. His shoulders bow, and Hinata understands.

She has a kingdom of responsibility on her shoulders, thousands of people and their welfare, each and every one of them hers to take care of, to protect, to defend.

Naruto’s shoulders slump under the weight of a kingdom lost—one much smaller than hers, but just as significant, just as integral to his being. She watches him crouch beside a rough slate of stone, watches him run his fingertips over the flat of it, a gesture so blatantly articulated in remembrance that tears well in her eyes.

He remains crouched there for some time, right in the middle of the chaos, surrounded by his home torn asunder.

It’s a reminder of what happened, and of the questions she still has. What had caused this? Why had he…changed? Was it an issue of control, or an issue of coercion? Was there a difference?

It takes her far too long to remember the scarf; a sudden passing thought of wonder, of curiosity—what would Naruto search for most keenly in the event of his life going up in flames? That’s when she remembers—the scarlet stain of the thread, the way he’d gently fingered the material, a gesture geared more towards comfort and routine than necessity, though there was that, too.

Her heart has a little give in it, but it’s the thought that Naruto may have lost that scarf to the flames that shatters what’s left of her resolve.

She moves out of the shadows, into the light, and Naruto knows her immediately.

“You came back,” he says, without taking his eyes from the rubble. The quiet surprise in his voice shakes her.

Hinata nods anyways, brows pursed in concern.

“Naruto-kun,” she says in lieu of answering, and only just manages to prevent herself from apologizing again. There are only so many times a person can hear I’m sorry from someone who can do nothing to change a terrible situation, and still have it feel meaningful. So she asks something equally as redundant, but far more pressing. “Are you okay?”

He’s silent for what feels like ages, fingers running through the layers of dirt covering his crumbled home. She watches his fingertip stick on a sharp edge, sees the sharp scarlet of blood bead and drip to the ground, and his breath doesn’t even change.

“Ya know, this place wasn’t here. When I came.”

Hinata moves warily, delicately, through the remains of his home, careful not to step on anything but dirt. Even still, she can see stone powder on the ground, where pieces of the cottage had been incinerated; added to the dust, added to the earth. She stops just beside him, slowly crouching to mirror his position, and barely breathes.

Naruto doesn’t look at her.

“It was just a clearing back then. I was twelve, when I…left. I thought for a while about living in a tree or something, because I was just a kid, ya know? I didn’t know shit about building. For a year, I tested different stuff out. Trees, rocks, the dirt. Finally, I just thought, to hell with it. I’ve got all the time in the world, right? I can learn how to build.”

Naruto lifts the slab of stone up with ease, flipping it over to show the single ornament hanging on the underside, now exposed in the sunlight. It’s a bell, hanging from what’s clearly a hand-made cord of vine. It’s cracked and covered in soot, dulling it’s shine, but Naruto looks at it like its every good thing he’s ever known in the world, and for a moment, Hinata can’t breathe.

“This little village just east of here, we have an agreement. I told you a little about them a long time ago. They let me get some supplies at night, when everyone’s asleep. They don’t make me pay for them with cash, either, which is awesome. As it turns out, I’m really good with my hands. I make them weapons from wood and stone. Spears and bows and things.

It took me, like, years to figure out how to build anything worth sleeping under. Storms are rough, and winter was the worst when I didn’t have anything to block the wind. But eventually I got it. Took me five years to build this cottage, and a couple more to furnish it. The furniture was all mine. My designs.”

Hinata studies his expression, the flickering of his eyes, not wet with tears but somehow dull, as though sorrow had wrung him out to dry. Her eyes flicker to his left hand, clenched in a fist and tucked by his side, as if to hide something. Naruto inhales, a mighty heave of breath, and his shoulders sag even further, but this time he turns to her, and his expression is resigned.

“I can rebuild this place.” He says self-assuredly. “It’s just going to take time.”

She studies his expression, eyes jumping from feature to feature, before she nods her head supportively. She swallows, gaze turning outward to the scattered remains of what she can barely make out of his fireplace, and several yards over her shoulder, his small table. The trees edging the clearing can barely be called trees anymore; they’ve been overtaken with death, like a fungus clinging to their bark and branches. Everything is coarse and black and crumbling.

Yet, Hinata takes in the destruction around her with new eyes, geared for duty. Instead of seeing the broken pieces as lost memories and broken effort, she sees the potential for growth, for change. Her voice is steady albeit low when she finally asks, “What all have you found that can be salvaged?”

Naruto hesitates, if only for a moment, and she notices that clenched fist tucked up against his side once more. This time, he sees her stare, and he exhales shakily. When he brings the fist out in front of him, in the open where both of them can watch his fingers—clasped tight enough to break—unfurl around a single torn shred of bright red fabric, Hinata’s heart lurches painfully against her ribs.

Oh no, she thinks brokenly, and maybe she’d uttered it aloud, because Naruto smiles and it’s the most broken expression she’s ever seen. He tries, so hard, to pretend to be okay. She watches every ounce of him rebuild, layer-by-layer, brick by brick, in steel.

“This,” he says, and this is the Naruto that she fell in love with. This, he says, is what he has salvaged—this tattered shred of fabric from his most prized possession, tiny enough to fit in the palm of his hand, just a piece of a whole that had meant the world to him, and he doesn’t mull over the loss of the scarf for a second. He’s simply glad to have a piece of it left for posterity.

His strength reflects onto her, and she dips her head in a nod, accepting. She mirrors him, and doesn’t dwell on the past, on the pain of what surrounds them, but rather moves forward.

“Naruto-kun,” she poses, and this is important to her, “Can I help you with this?”

She doesn’t know what she expects. For him to turn her down, for him to accept her help without question, for him to simply ask what she means. He does none of these things, and she’s not even certain if some part of her had expected the path he chooses instead.

He stands up and tucks the fabric deep into his pocket, still enclosed in his fist. Then, he moves a few steps away from her, crouching again to overturn another massive slab of stone. He tilts his head at the revealed side of it, almost curiously, and says conversationally, “Hey, so, how’d you do it?”

And Hinata knows, instantly, what he means. She swallows the heaviness in her throat and straightens to her full height, too. She knows she looks defensive, and it’s because she is, but she’s ready for this argument, if that’s what it becomes.

“I lied,” she explains, utterly honest with him. “I reported the incident, but I left a few things out.”

“A few things,” he says, to himself. He bobs his head, tucking both hands into his pockets. He tilts his head back and looks up into the sky, and she can just barely see the way his eyes trail from cloud to cloud, heavy-lidded and tired.

“Ah, Hinata,” he says to the sky, eyes slipping closed for only a moment. When he turns over his shoulder, eyes meeting hers, every line of him is cut sharp in shame. “I’m sorry.”

She flinches, and he takes it as the unintentional answer it is.

“It’s been hard for you, then.” He nods to himself, accepting the guilt of it. “Shit, I’m so sorry.”

She doesn’t say, it’s okay, because it isn’t, but it’s not his fault, either. So instead, she asks, “What happened, Naruto-kun?”

The sunlight bounds over them, warming and calming against the slight chill in the air. Every line of light seems to stick to Naruto, to reflect back even brighter than it came. His hair is longer than she remembers, and she remembers it being long. It’s silly to think about, now, in the midst of this situation, but she likes it.

Naruto closes his eyes again, letting the sun wash over his features.

“What always happens,” he whispers, and she watches the way his throat works through the words. “They found me.”

“So someone came after you,” Hinata pieces together, frowning. Naruto hums in answer, and Hinata’s frown grows deeper. “And so you agreed to fight them? It was self-defense?”

“At first,” he agrees quietly, balancing for a moment on the balls of his feet. “He’s gotten stronger, though. I have, too. But it just wasn’t enough.”

“He?” she asks, one brow rising. “Who is he?”

“They,” he corrects, opening his eyes to glance back over at her, gauging her expression. “They’re all Uchiha, and they always come.”

“The Uchiha clan,” Hinata breathes, and recognition slams into her, her memory of that man’s pinwheel eyes, painted in stark shades of scarlet. “I thought they were under peace treaty?”

“They are, probably.” And here, Naruto grins, amused and self-deprecating. “I’m not really up to date on my treaties.”

Hinata flushes, embarrassed at her misstep. “Oh, right.”

“I’m assuming they are,” he goes on easily, sighing. “But I’m assuming I’m kinda an outlier.”

“Perhaps,” Hinata mutters to herself, even while she privately disagrees. She lifts a hand to rub irritably at her forehead, feeling the beginning of an ache building there.

The Uchiha empire is her closest neighbor and her strongest ally; she knows their treaties as well as her own. She can’t recall a single clause or stipulation regarding the Kyuubi or Naruto himself, and she’d gone over those treaties for months, practically using her Sight just to get the information to stick with permanence.

All she can think is that Uchiha Izuna isn’t the kind of person who would pull such a high-level deception on an ally—but then, it hadn’t been Izuna at all, had it?

Madara.

“Naruto-kun,” she starts, hesitant. Then, with more confidence due to the gravity of the topic, she continues sternly, “Do you know of Uchiha Madara?”

It starts as a ripple down his spine, aggressive enough that Hinata leaps backwards and wonders at the same time how Naruto is still in one piece, and not ripped apart in the same way his home had been. When he turns back to her, his eyes are blood red and burning, and this time it isn’t a trick of the sunlight or a figment of her imagination. Her eyes leap to the sudden exposure of claws; inches long and sharper than blades, and back up to find protruding canines slicing the skin under his lips.

“Madara,” he hisses, and its Naruto’s voice but it’s not Naruto. He throws his shoulders back and seems taller, larger, more monstrous in human form than she’s ever seen him before. She can see the fox trying to shed human skin, ripping at Naruto’s seams, every crack of his weakness—so prevalent so soon after the destruction of all that he’d known—and she decides right then that she is not going to allow it.

“Don’t!” Hinata calls, immediately falling back into a defensive stance, unwilling to flee, even in the face of what must certainly be the first step of the monster taking Naruto’s control. It’s instantaneous, after that; he hears her voice, notices her militant stance, and the rage burns out of him with wisps of smoke churning out of his skin. She can see Naruto through the cracks of his own broken expression, fighting to get to the surface. He deflates, falling to his knees, lifting his hands to his ears as if he could press the beast back down with physical force.

By the time she can hear anything outside of the beating of her pulse in her ears, she catches Naruto’s repeated anthem, low enough to barely even be heard, a whiplash trail of I’m not the monster they think I am, I’m not the monster they think I am.

Hinata swallows heavily and approaches him in several quick strides, crouching to his level and putting her hands to his cheeks. It’s a testament to how much she cares for him, how deeply his pain and suffering gets to her, that she doesn’t even flinch at the contact, even when the last time she’d touched him had left her scarred.

She says with unerring authority, “You’re not the monster they think you are.”

And slowly, slowly, Naruto stops shaking. He brings his hands away from his ears and opens his eyes, looks into her eyes and breathes.

His words fall out of him in rapid bursts, his breath tripping over every syllable.

“It’s him, it’s him, he’s the one, the monster who—”

“Okay,” she soothes, voice low and soft, even as her brain pieces everything together and she finally, finally understands. Uchiha Madara had been the one to take Naruto’s control, the one to unleash the monster on innocent people, to orchestrate the slaughter. Even so many years later, and just his name is enough to rattle the beast inside, to rock Naruto’s honed control, and that is equal parts frightening and saddening.

She doesn’t know what this new information means for her, or for him. She doesn’t know what she can do, now, so many years later. But if Uchiha Madara is still trying to control the Kyuubi, nothing good is going to come out of it. She had thought the time for war far behind them; perhaps she had been mistaken.

“Okay,” she breathes, and this time it’s more for herself than for Naruto.

Her thumbs stroke over his cheekbones repeatedly, a calming rhythm.

“Say it one more time,” she encourages, never once looking away. This is important, the most important mutual thing between them so far, and she is not going to let it fall short. She sees him, all of him, and she loves him.

Always.

He says, “I’m not the monster they think I am.”

And she responds, “Good. Now stand up, Naruto-kun.”

And he does, with her to support him. She can see, before he even speaks, the apology shaping itself on his lips. She presses a finger to them, and for the first time since she’d arrived in his clearing today, he seems to notice the scar obscured behind her veil. It distracts him enough to forget what had just happened, his eyes going wide and shocked, regret curling his lips into a silent howl.

He reaches up, almost hesitantly, waiting to see if he’s allowed to move her veil. He isn’t, not officially, but what they’ve been through makes them more than just friends, and she accepts it. She wants it, this intimacy between them, this allowance of crossing each other’s most calamitous lines.

He lifts the veil away from her face and it leaves her breathless, the way his fingers tuck it so carefully over her hair, trailing along the shells of her ears. His fingers come forward, visibly shaking, and just barely touch the still-healing skin of her forehead, where the clear sign of a burn scar remains. She’s close enough now to hear the way his breath leaves him, heavy and tight, nearly a gasp.

“I did this?” he asks, but it’s clear by his tone that he thinks he already knows. So she reaches up before he can jerk his hand away, lets her fingers wrap around his wrist, and shakes her head.

She says, “I did this. Knowingly.”

“You wouldn’t,” he sneers, jerking his hand away from her, taking a quick step back, and then several more. He clicks his tongue, and it breaks her heart how easily he reflects his own rage internally. It’s so easy for him to hate himself. “You couldn’t.”

“I touched your hair, your forehead; I knew your skin was hot.” She explains promptly, chin elevated in challenge. “I knew before I ever touched you that it was going to leave a mark.”

This, more than anything else, seems to ruin him. He looks at her in abject disbelief, mouth open to respond but unable to come up with anything substantial. Words leave him, and his speechlessness is his only weapon against her admission. She wonders if he knows that she doesn’t just mean the scar.

“Hinata,” he rasps, shaking his head. “Why? For me—why?”

This, Hinata thinks, is not how she had imagined this moment.

But then, what good is love when it’s concealed? Maybe this is her, taking a page out of Naruto’s book of spontaneity. Maybe this is her being strong for herself, and only herself, for once. Maybe this is the beginning of a new kind of strength, one borne of love and affection, of selflessness and compassion, of feeling thankful to have Naruto in her life, to love and to care for.

Every ounce of her tension falls to the wayside; her eyes twin pools of honest acceptance, gleaming with joy.

It’s easy, when she says with honest and utmost simplicity, “Because I love you.”

Part of her expects his recurring distrust to resurface, and she’s prepared for it. She is not prepared for him to deflate on the spot, to sag against her, arms coming around her to pull her in close, to hold them together. His skin doesn’t burn, doesn’t hurt. She’s never felt safer than in this moment, in his arms.

It takes her a moment to realize that he’s crying against her, that his body is shaking and there are tears soaking into her collar. Her veil is still upturned, her face exposed, and she thinks about the time they’d talked about power, and hiding, and exposure.

She thinks, what if all along my power was this: love.

And, well, it feels right to finally be exposed.

✧✧✧

It takes months for them to work together to rebuild Naruto’s cottage. He doesn’t want it to be the same exact layout, something about nostalgia burning at the back of his throat, and his acceptance of change.

“Besides,” he mutters, nervously ruffling the back of his hair. “You’re gonna be staying with me more, now, right?”

Hinata doesn’t even hesitate. “I’m certainly going to try.”

“Right, right,” Naruto smiles, and this one she knows is genuine. “You’re a busy lady.”

“Not too busy to see you whenever I can, though.” It’s more honest than she’s used to being, but he brings this kind of selfless sincerity out of her quite naturally. She blushes, looking away when he laughs.

The cottage is new, and different, but in so many ways, it’s the same. He’s already made several new ornaments, bells and other things that jingle and chime. Hinata brought him a few things from her kingdom, trinkets and goodies she thought he might like, and he hung every one of them without question.

The stone, the wood, and the tiles for the roof all came from her kingdom, though Naruto grumbled a bit about accepting anything from her when he could do it all himself. It was a short amount of grumbling, though, Hinata remembers amusedly.

By the time spring rolls around, and flowers bloom on the outskirts of Naruto’s land, everything starts to come alive. Not the immediate growth around his clearing, though, that still remains a stark reminder of chaos just under the surface. But other things, more present and more important for now, begin to rise. Her kingdom thrives, Naruto rebuilds, and she joins in to help whenever she is able.

Things are good, in most places, and not, in others.

She has issued a watch on the Uchiha kingdom, with strict orders to intercept stragglers and escort them directly to her upon entrance into her land. It’s rare to find any of them around, really, but she gets a few young members that squirm in her inquiring seat, offering up easy information that doesn’t threaten the peace between their kingdoms—and that makes it worth it.

She doesn’t hear much about Madara, after that, but she’s watchful, and she prepares. She assigns perimeter control units in specific posts, and all of them are still far enough away to give Naruto privacy. He refuses to come to her kingdom, even when she insists, and refused even more fervently when she’d mentioned the possibility of having a guard near his home.

“They won’t see me like you do,” he’d explained, playfully chagrined. “They’re not sweet like you.”

She’d frowned, only barely affronted for the sake of her people. “How would you know?”

“Because you’re the sweetest,” he’d responded instantly, brazen with his open admiration of her. “And besides, I’m okay now, remember? I’ve got you.”

“You’ve got me,” she’d agreed, only just barely blushing. He’d moved up to her, then, brushing back her veil with practiced familiarity. His fingertips trailed over her cheekbones, around the soft curve of her jaw, before gently grasping her chin. He lifted her face, just enough for her to see his eyes, shining with happiness and amusement, before he leaned down and pressed their lips together, the softest of touches.

It had not been their first kiss, but he’d slipped his tongue in to trace the edges of her teeth, and that—that had been a first.

Hinata refuses to acknowledge her present blush, and the way that Naruto’s looking over at her like he knows. That had been weeks ago; there’s no way he knows. There’s no way.

She’s gotten proficient at understanding the meanings of his different looks, mostly because he’s exceptionally fond of gazing at her. Once he’d realized this, however, he’d changed tactics. She should’ve known he’d get playfully competitive, should’ve expected that he’d start holding her from behind, hands on her hips, chin tucked against her throat, humming like a great purring cat. This way, she knows, she can’t see his eyes, can’t decipher his emotions as easily. It’s a kind of teasing, blatantly so.

He doesn’t mind showing her his feelings. In fact, she would go so far as to say that he loves to show her his feelings, flaunting them and projecting them at every turn.

She learns that he’s exhausting, but in the most delicious and beautiful and joyous of ways, and he learns that she’s sneakily affectionate, in the most subversive and meticulous of ways. They learn to grow together.

It takes time, but once he starts to focus on living, and not just existing to fight off the monster locked in his head, his joy overflows in golden waves as timeless as the sun. He holds her without holding back, afraid of hurting her. He touches her without fearing that she’ll flinch, or flee. He looks at her and knows she sees him, the person, the man, and not only the monster locked inside, caged by control.

He’s honest with her, doesn’t withhold the important things.

This is how she comes to know that the man she’d seen the Kyuubi fight had not actually been killed. Disbelief is her first reaction, skepticism a close second. Naruto knows it, too, and laughs under his breath as he dips forward and presses a fond kiss to her cheek.

“Substitution jutsu,” he explains, gaze soft. “An Uchiha wouldn’t come to such an easy end. They’re stubborn bastards.”

Hinata thinks easy end? And just, does not question it. He clearly has more experience with them in battle than she does, and that’s not a mine she feels like tripping today. So instead, she just trusts him with open wonder, saying, “I thought that the Kyuubi had killed him. I saw it happen.”

Naruto’s eyes gleam brightly, the way they always do when Hinata separates the monster from the man, and he shakes his head ruefully.

“The log was in the big guy’s claws. He crushed it to splinters, and…the Uchiha fled.”

His brief hesitation does not go unnoticed, and not for the first time. It makes her think that he knows which Uchiha his attacker had been, knows him by name, knows him personally, and if that’s a secret he wants to keep from her, that’s okay, too.

Hesitantly, she offers, “I’m glad, Naruto-kun.”

He laughs, so beautifully carefree. “Me too, believe it.”

They stand close together, sides touching as they survey their most recent endeavor. The clearing that had taken the worst of the attack and been opened up in the Hidden Forest had become one of their first tasks on an unspoken to-do list they shared, right after Naruto’s cottage. Hinata had brought over as many seeds as she could carry over several week’s time, and together they’d sunk their fingers into the earth and planned to help stem new life together. The tiniest of petals have already begun to push through the surface, but the explosion had been vast, and they have a lot of work left to do.

They’re glad for it, though. It’s something that’s theirs, wholly and entirely. They share it like a secret between them, making the clearing more theirs than the forest’s, and it feels like starting anew.

Naruto reaches for her hand, fingers sliding together as he turns them both towards the trees. She knows instantly where they’re headed, smiling when his piano comes into view. She settles in against him, legs pressed together on the newfound log he’d gone searching for, one that accommodates the both of them. His fingers slide over the keys, clearing them of dust, and then they flicker and dance and music rises in to the air around them, soothing the kinks in Hinata’s energy, in her soul.

He starts to sing, low and deep, and Hinata’s eyes fall to the shock of red material wrapped loosely around his throat, a gift she’d worked on for months before finally gathering the courage to present it to him. It’s the first scarf she’s ever knit, and it shows; all the same, he wears it constantly, running the edges of it through his fingers in just the same way as he had with the lost one.

He’d finally told her about his scarf, about how his mom had made it for him when she was pregnant; how his dad had chosen the color, and his mom the thread. They’d died young, just after he was born, and for a while, he couldn’t quite find the words to talk about them. He barely knew them, after all, but time spaced his thoughts out, soothed his discomfort, and eventually, he found the words.

The scarf had been the only thing he had left of them.

Hinata rests her head against his shoulder, uncaring of how it jostles her. She closes her eyes and hears birds over his voice, higher pitched and playful, and the distant echo of primates calling forth. She nuzzles into the scarf, the tip of her nose touching his skin.

There’s so much left for her to worry about, to plan for, to prepare for, but in this moment everything feels perfect, in that nothing is perfect at all. Struggles and pain are unavoidable, but they get through them together, she and her family, her people, and she and Naruto all. They’ll get through the hard times with one another’s support. She believes it, wholeheartedly.

Her family will come around, and she’ll introduce them to Naruto, show them the home that they built together, and the home they became for each other, too.

Her initial plan had been to re-write history, even if it became disastrous, if it brought her and her family in danger from the Uchiha clan, and from those that didn’t believe her. But it was Naruto’s story to tell, and he was unflinchingly opposed to throwing the world into any more chaos for his sake.

It was his story, and she respects his choice regarding it.

It’s this exact selflessness, this willingness to sacrifice himself to the betterment of others, of strangers, to his own demise, that frustrates her.

But it’s not her story to correct. It’s not.

So she does what Naruto has always taught her, through actions and examples: she moves on.

And she does so beside him, hand-in-hand, two hearts very nearly beating as one, strung along in a tapestry of his music, punctuated by the beats, blended into a new rhythm.

This, more than anything else throughout the time she’s spent with Naruto thus far, she understands: that there is nothing in the world that Naruto loves more than not being alone.

He turns to her and leans down to kiss her, humming a tune against her lips, his voice a steady thrum when he says, “I love you.”

And Hinata thinks perhaps there is something that he loves more than not being alone—something more specific.

Well, someone.