This is what it takes to love a hero.
6.
Hinata is six. There is a hand outstretched before her in challenge but she doesn't take it, she just bumps her fingertips furiously together as if trying to create a spark. And every second she is silent aches terribly because she knows she has something to prove and it feels like she's eternally coming up short, and what would her father say? What would her father say? She tries to evoke his stern, forbidding voice because she just can't find her own. But she stammers. She wants to start over, but she's taken too long and now they're laughing. They're all laughing at her.
The very sound of it strikes her like something wild and alien. She's never heard such freedom before, she's never heard snickers and giggles and chuckles and cackles bouncing off the walls and humming in the air. The stately walls of the Hyuga compound are too clean, the air too frigid, fits of uncontrollable laughter are considered vulgar and a measure of poor breeding. But then she spots Neji-nii-san standing off stonily to one side, watching her with his hooded white eyes and his lip curled in disdain, and Hinata can tell he's silently laughing at her the most of all.
Her eyes prickle as she stares shamefully at her feet, and Hinata thinks to herself it's because they're weak, they haven't a powerful byakugan, they can't even fight back the tears that are coming. She turns her face away from her classmates before they can see her cry.
''See? I told you she wasn't going to come play,'' Ami sneers triumphantly, ''those Hyuga think they're just too good to mingle, all high and mighty, they are.''
Hinata feels her cheeks burning beneath the wetness of her tears and she wants nothing more than to shout that it's not true, not at all, that in fact she's so unlike her family that she's been punished her whole life for it, for not being strong and confident and unflappable and cold, and would Ami please take a trip to the Hyuga compound and somehow convince her father of how she is such a perfect Hyuga?
Hinata wants to be a perfect Hyuga because it's all she knows, it's what she's been taught to be her whole life. What confuses her the most is this inexplicable longing to step out from the clan boundaries and reach out to everyone, even when they laugh at her and walk away and she's left standing alone in the sidelines. And as a Hyuga she should be thinking she's above them, she should be thinking she doesn't need them, she should be standing aside with her head held high... but she doesn't feel superior, she feels lonely. She wishes she were brave enough to run up to them now, say let's go and laugh along and hold hands and play in the sun together. Instead she's puffy and red from crying, miserably tearstained, quietly wilting in the shadows.
Suddenly dawn breaks over the playground, dressed in orange, radiating warmth, with eyes like shards of a broken sky and hair like a golden halo and a smile like the sun and a dream announced like heaven. Believe it, Naruto shouts, and Hinata does, because he goes up to everyone and says let's go even as they glare and laughs even though they frown at him and reaches for hands even as they recoil and though he is shunned by them to the shadows, he has an infinitely brighter star shining inside his heart. And though he fails, he isn't afraid to try.
She likes him because he is everything she is not. She loves him because in his open-hearted dedication to those who reject him she sees something of herself.
12.
Hinata is twelve. She stands before her own blood, her own cousin whose agile hands are elegantly laced with flaring patterns of chakra exquisitely intricate in their deadliness, and in his eyes she sees the hatred and in his hands she is broken. And it might well be true what he says, that she is scared and victory is far beyond reach, but since when logic has featured in the blood feuds of their ancestors? It's a timeless spectacle of pride and servitude enacted across generations and in it they're like two peas in a rotten pod called clan. He wants to hurt her until she breaks and she wants to prove she can pick up her own pieces, because if she does then she'll begin to love herself even in failure.
And walking right into the fire to rise again from the ashes is harder than you think, but harder than you think is a beautiful thing. It boils in her blood and rises in her chest, it grants her wings and elevates her to the sun, and who cares if the pain burns when she's so close to the light? Naruto is cheering her on, Naruto is saying her name and it feels like a blessing from above. She stands up for herself and fights. It is by daring to be hurt that she knows she will not let herself be mistreated.
Dauntlessly, Hinata rises up to the challenge. Stubbornly, she gives it her all until her knees threaten to cave in and her arms sag lifelessly and she can taste it in her tongue as it spills forth from her mouth in scarlet torrents, the blood Neji thirsts for, the blood that binds them together even as it sets them apart. It is by that very same blood that a certain knuckle-headed ninja swears to fight for her. Neji-nii-san, Hinata thinks a little sadly as she aches on the brink of death, I only ever wanted to be your family. And she pities her cousin already, because who cares if he has fate on his side when she has Naruto?
And Hinata knows with absolute certainty that one day Naruto-kun will be everybody's hero, but he gives himself out so very freely that she begins to think he can be just a little bit hers too.
16.
Hinata is sixteen. They see a broken demon container standing in the path of a god, perhaps in vain; she sees the love of her life sacrificing himself. Hinata loves Naruto because he is brave and brash and knuckleheaded and too damn heroic for his own good, and she really wouldn't have him any other way, so she guesses there are certain heart-stopping thrills one must naturally suffer in loving him. Standing in the sidelines is not one of them, and though she does not know exactly what she can do to help, if at all, she knows she is ready to stand in front of one of those awful black spears and shield him with her body to the last of her strength. She knows that if she has to watch Naruto fall in battle, all rational thought will flee her, all semblance of mercy will vanish from her blackened heart and blindly she'll charge against Pein screaming in unforgiving grief and avenging fury, so it's either she dies for a living Naruto or she dies over a dead one.
It might be a selfish decision to declare her feelings, it might not be what Naruto called for, it might not be the help he needs, but the truth is that she has loved him ten years three months sixteen days eleven hours and now more than ever. She has loved him slurping his ramen like a savage, she has loved him farting on Kiba's face, she has loved him bloody, she has loved him smiling, she has loved him reviled as a monster, she has loved him proclaiming his nindo, she has loved him deadlast and she'll love him Hokage because he taught her how to dream. And if everybody has a dream, this is her dream, her own, just to do for love what she would have been too weak, too shy to do otherwise. And this a joyful truth she cannot take sealed to the grave, it's a truth that consumes her world and powers her every motion, and she wants to scream it to the most remote corners of the earth, because there doesn't need to be any more pain in this world, there needs to be more love.
She never wants Naruto to doubt it. She loves him, loves him on the ground stricken through with black spikes as his body threatens to give in without his will having given up. Though if he emerges victorious the cheering crowd will carry him away from her in their arms and she'll love him from afar, and if he fails she will naturally love him in the ruins of Konoha, weeping over the graves of the fallen or in heaven or hell or another lifetime.
This is what is takes to love a hero: he doesn't need to save her in the end to be loved.
18.
Hinata is eighteen. It's the anniversary of Hyuuga Neji's death and Naruto knew he would find her like this.
She kneels silently by the memorial stone, brushing the tips of her fingers gently across his name, and the delicate veins surrounding her eyes pulsate as she gazes far and beyond into the vastness of the sky and counts the free birds flying overhead, high in the clean blue air, one by one. Naruto stands with tears in his eyes as he recounts aloud the various instances of missions filed under impossible from which leaf ninja have returned safe, sound and triumphant under his command, denying fate. Silently, he tells Neji all about how he is so lucky to have her. And it awes him everyday, it never ceases to amaze him that he has Hinata's acknowledgement without having to fight and shout and run after it, that what he would have fought so hard to reach has been there all along, and he's almost scared she'll up and leave because he hasn't earned her, not with promises, not with triumphs in battle, not with the betterment of his ninja skills, like he has earned Sakura and the villagers and that bastard Sasuke being on his side.
He's been stringing her along for quite a while, he's left her out to dry while taking her for granted, even as he clumsily attempted to figure out why his heart beats like a wild vaguely enigmatic beast to the slow compass of her smile. But her love is kind and her love is patient, and he rests easy in it, even as he wonders since when her eyes can be a feeling and her voice can be a color and her name can be both an impossible question and the only answer. Since when his dream can be a person?
Two years after Hyuga Hinata confesses her love before gods and mortals, the slow knucklehead that is Uzumaki Naruto discovers that his heart has been jailing something that much more indomitable than the Ninetails. He discovers that, just like the cycle of hatred feeds itself, love begets love, and nowadays he lives for her. Tomorrow, he kisses her with the sun, and his mouth burns brighter.
20.
Hinata is twenty. They are wed on a sunny spring morning under the falling blossoms. The first time Naruto attempts his vows, he thinks they can never be enough; the second time he tries, he wants to repeat them every day for as long as he lives; when he does speak, every single word he says is made heavenly by her smile. She bumps their fingertips together, one, two, three, four, five, and counts what cannot be counted and sees what only blindness can show, for as the promise of heaven above becomes one with this everlasting moment, love is in the air.
30.
Hinata is thirty. They have built a life together. She has made a home for him in the curve of her smile and the warmth of her hands. She has spun their children out of sunshine and flowers, bright laughing angels in a world at peace. This is their happily ever after. This is the dinner table, empty. This is the dark house, and the quiet way he enters, as if he does not want her to wake, to see him. This is the plate gone cold, untouched. This is a man who has the world on his shoulders sitting down, resting his head, and letting those shoulders sag.
Hinata leans against the doorframe, studying him. Her eyes sweep across the tired lines of his shoulders as he sits, elbows laid on the table, his head clutched in his hands. He has noticed her, but he does not turn. He is summoning a smile to face her with.
She steps forward, easy as breathing, and wraps her arms around his chest, resting her chin on the curve of his neck, cheeks pressed together.
"He is angry at me." It comes out in a rush of breath.
"He's a child," she whispers, soothingly, "He loves you very much."
"He told me - "
"He loves you. Very much." She whispers, firmly. She frames the curve of his face with a hand, turning him gently to face her. The mantle of the Hokage is still wrapped around his shoulders, and she removes it in a swift motion, tosses it out in a crumpled heap on the table. "As do I," she says, pressing a warm kiss to his temple.
"You don't have to be a hero at home, Naruto. You can be tired. You can be lost. You can let me make you a cup of instant ramen." You can be fallible. You can be wrong. You can be human. I love you. I love you.
In his eyes are the ghosts of a thousand hands, clinging to him; a thousand voices, asking him; a thousand smiles, thanking him; a thousand lives, saved. He understands now, the weight of his dream. To be acknowledged is to be wanted is to be needed is to give and give and give until he has little of himself left to spare. He is selfless, but he is sorry. Not for himself, but for her, for their children, for the boy who wishes his father was all his.
She knows he would tear himself apart to leave a piece at home if he could.
This is what it takes to love a hero: do not be selfish.
"Rest, Naruto. You could use some sleep." He opens his mouth to protest, to say he is not tired. She weaves her hands into his hair and sings him a lullaby.
31.
The morning's first light falling through the spaces in the tangled sheets between them. A story of the old days, the bright summer edge of laughter.
"I thought that was why you fell in love with me," he says, with a playful grin, puffing up his chest. "Because of my triumphant heroics, you know."
"I fell in love with you when you were a little boy in the playground, and you smiled. Because you inspired me not to give up, Naruto. And I haven't. I'm here, with you. And you inspire me every day."
This is what is takes to love a hero: he doesn't need to save her in the end to be loved. Just smile that smile that makes her heart soar.